The OpenStreetMap, what's possible when geographic information is shared?
Nate Olson interviews Steve Coast via email May 12-21, 2007
Steve Coast is a London-based programmer at the helm of OpenStreetMap (OSM), one of the Web's premier collaborative mapping projects. OpenStreetMap is billed as "a free editable map of the whole world... made by people like you." Anyone can use a GPS device to map his or her home neighborhood, upload it to OSM, and see the data included in the main user interface. The results are available for re-use under a Creative Commons license--a key selling point of OSM, which Steve created largely as an alternative to the kind of restriction-laden geodata used by Google Maps and similar applications.
Nate Olson: Do you consider "crowdsourcing" to be a distinct phenomenon? If so, how do you see it evolving over the next 1-2 years?
Steve Coast: Most definitely, and hopefully it's going to turn some business models upside down. I think of it more broadly than just building commons a la OpenStreetMap or Wikipedia. If you consider zopa.com (the peer money-lending site) as crowdsourcing, then you can start to see some really powerful things happening. They give savers with little capital access to high interest rates, and [also give] borrowers access to better-than-average [repayment] rates while doing interesting social stuff on the side. All while removing this big "bank" concept. You could think of Skype and Joost similarly--no need for expensive cable distribution networks when you force your users to do the bandwidth for you (they're both p2p apps).
