TPM on Open Source Map

When political reporters cover mapping news, you know it is getting big. Talking Points Memo sent a reporter to the Open Source Map conference in Portland, OR and reported back to their rather large non-mapping audience that this was the next big thing. This is an effort to map the entire world through crowdsourcing, not leave it to the experts. Reporter Carl Franzen quotes on of those experts:

“Mapmakers were always these people who were very lauded,” said Eric Wolf, a geographer with the United States Geological Survey (USGS), in a presentation at the State of the Map USA conference in Portland on Saturday. “We make fantastic drawings about these people, we name companies after them, we put them on stamps.”

But now that OSM is trying to democratize mapping, will it remain a noble and honorable profession? Or be reduced to something that anyone can do themselves? You can look at the official materials online and decide for yourself,