Eight years ago, I first opened on my smartphone electronic cards.
And how do you think that I first of all began to search there?
Of course, your house.
And I was just annoyed that not only did I not find my home,
and my entire homeland Belarus was represented on maps by two roads:
Ring around the capital and the main road.
On such a map you can not even get from the capital to the second largest city in the country.
In fact, even then there were excellent detailed maps of Belarus
and many other countries.
And about this time I got acquainted with the OpenStreetMap community.
This is a community that makes a free map of the world.
Free, first, because this data
can be completely free – freely – used even for commercial purposes.
Free is also because, in some countries
amateur cartography, unlicensed,
is a criminal offense.
And this does not stop community volunteers
from developing the project.
And also free, because you, too, are free
join the OpenStreetMap and add something to the card.
But you ask: well, but if anyone can go to the map
and add anything there, then how to deal with vandalism,
with jokers who add to the card it is not known what?
Is there such a thing? And is it possible to trust such a card?
Here Linus’ law comes to our aid, formulated
even when developing the Linux operating system:
“When enough eyes are looking,
all the bugs come out. “
This means that when many people look at the map,
all errors there sooner or later are and can be corrected.
And very often, just like in Wikipedia,
on OpenStreetMap maps
more relevant and more reliable due to the fact that the whole community
checks the information there.
Oh well.
The maps were excellent, but I immediately faced another problem.
They were not very convenient to use, because the card, it is usually needed
in a journey, for example, and very often there is no Internet.
Accordingly, you can not access the site and see the map.
And I thought: but it would be great if you could
card to download directly to your smartphone and, even if there is no Internet,
so that you can build a route by car or on foot,
Look at the GPS, where you are and what’s around you.
I’m a programmer myself, and I decided: I will assemble my programmers,
and we will write such an interface to make these excellent data
accessible to ordinary people.
And so appeared MAPS.ME.
We initially started to do the project for ourselves,
then for our compatriots, but we were surprised to find out,
that the cards are becoming popular all over the world:
in South America, in Africa, in Australia, in Asia.
People everywhere use them.
We even found out with surprise at some point,
that we have the most users from where would you think?
From the Philippines!
A country that is on our globe is located on the back of us,
where none of us was and probably will never even be,
and we do not know the local culture and customs.
We thought: why did it happen?
Why was our country represented on the map by two roads?
Well, it’s clear why.
Because making a global map is very expensive.
Because it is necessary for companies to make up pieces of different countries,
buy data, compile a global map.
And our country, it is on the list of priorities
was somewhere low.
And it turned out that there are more such countries on the list of priorities,
than the developed countries, and more people live there.
And the OpenStreetMap community literally helps
people from developing countries put their country on the map of the world.
And it is important to understand that for many people
it’s not just that they have tourists there are not lost.
This is an opportunity for ambulance or rescue services to drive through.
This is an opportunity to start working for taxi services or delivery services,
who also need maps.
And still there are funny cases.
Once our user sent us a photo.
He went on a tourist trip to an uninhabited island.
And now he lands on the island, opens the map.
And what do you think he saw there?
He saw a perfectly marked map of the uninhabited island.
And, in spite of the fact that nobody lives there from people,
there live many animals, and they trampled the paths.
And these trails were also marked on the map,
because someone else, the OpenStreetMap community volunteer,
came to this island much earlier and put all these data on the map.
That is, here he, when he came there, took care of all those people,
which will fall on this uninhabited island afterwards.
And I want you to take care of all those people too,
which then turn out to be where you are.
And for this you do not need to go to an uninhabited island.
Enough, when you go to your parents, put their house on the map.
Or to put on the map your dacha, your holiday village and pond nearby,
so that your friends can next time quickly find your way to your party,
but not the way it was last time.
And sometimes it even happens that in general the very existence of a card
can save human lives.
I recently saw a video where Syrian refugees tell,
how they literally walk from Syria to Europe.
And it is very important for them to have a working card,
To avoid dangerous concentrations of people to them to find a lodging for the night,
even to find where it is possible to pass the border unnoticed.
They say thanks to MAPS.ME that thanks to you we can
get to Europe and save their lives.
But I want to say that yes, the role of MAPS.ME in this was significant,
but much more in this community OpenStreetMap
and those volunteers who did a gigantic job,
to add all this data to the card.
And that this card would help in any situation, when it is needed,
You need to do even more gigantic work.
And so we began to think, but in general, what can be done,
so that this work can be done.
Well, first of all, of course, we made our cards free.
Secondly, we turned to the owner of the rights to our product,
to the company Mail.Ru, and they agreed,
Despite the fact that they bought our project for their own money,
they laid out this project, its source code, in open access,
under the same license as the OpenStreetMap,
so that anyone could use the code MAPS.ME
for commercial and non-commercial use.
And we believe that even if the competitor MAPS.ME appears,
the entire OpenStreetMap community will only move forward from this.
And we thought that’s what. Look.
There are some tasks that are very, very expensive and very complex
even for the richest companies in the world.
And they can be decided by the community of volunteers.
But there are even more ambitious and ambitious tasks,
which even the community of volunteers can not solve.
And we thought that these tasks can be solved by a community of volunteers
plus all card users combined.
And we added the OpenStreetMap map editor directly to the MAPS.ME application,
so if you do not have cartographic skills,
if you are not a fan of putting something on the map,
so it was very, very simple to add your favorite cafe to the map.
And you will do this service to the owner of the cafe,
because more tourists will come and leave more money there.
Or you can add to the map, for example, a pharmacy.
And then someone who needs a medicine will be able to find it.
And if the pharmacy is already on the map, you can add a pharmacy working time,
so that a person can understand, it is generally open now or not,
or a phone number so that he can call and find out,
and whether there is a necessary medicine in this pharmacy.
One of my friends maps just for fun.
He puts transformer boxes around the world on a map.
(Laugh)
And maybe this is not very useful, but it’s very fun,
like collecting something,
only not something physical in the real world,
but collecting something on the map.
So, please, right after this speech
open the OpenStreetMap site or even just MAPS.ME
and put your favorite places on the map.
And then you will take care of someone in the future and make someone’s life a little easier.
And someone will take care of you and make your life a little easier.
(Applause)
”
Be First to Comment