Boldly map what no one has mapped before …

While reading blog posts about the “Nigeran Conference on Free an Open Software”, which was held back in March in the city of Kano, I stumbled over the following quote by Jonathan Riddell:

I also gave a talk on Open Street Map which I expected to be a fun aside from the main free software topic but was picked up by everyone there as being a must-do project for Kano which currently has no maps at all (Google maps shows this city of 9 million people as a crossroads in the desert).

Now, while according to the Wikipedia article on Kano, the city has “just” about 3.8 million inhabitants, it is still a bit of a shame that there appears to be so little commercial interest in creating or publishing freely accessible maps. I mean, come on, that’s a metropolis! It’s got almost half as many people in it as my entire home country!

From a slightly more optimistic perspective, situations like this could really be a way for the OpenStreetMap project to prove its worth even to people who don’t care about the idea of free-as-in-freedom knowledge. Because as nice as it is to have liberally licensed maps covering just about any corner of every major city in Europe, the prospect of having projects like OSM create maps for regions that have no easily available maps at all is an entirely different cup of tea.

After reading jriddell’s post, I wanted to have a look at the current situation regarding Kano myself (and I also wanted to have a peek at whether the OSMing of the city has already begun). Here’s what I found (starting with a satellite image for reference):

Kano as seen on Google Maps’ satellite view

Kano on Google Maps

Kano on OpenStreetMap

Unfortunately, even the OSM version is still pretty sparse. I checked other mapping services like Yahoo! Maps and Microsoft’s Live Search Maps, but they all show a similarly sad picture – probably due to the likely case that they all get their data from the same sources –, so I didn’t even bother to upload screenshots.

I’m still really excited about the idea that people all around the world might be able to create the best street map ever made, especially with regards to areas where there appears to be little commercial incentive to do so. With a lot of motivated people and the necessary access to technology OSM might one day be void of empty spots.