I've had the bug for a long time, but havn't been able to actively gather proper information in a loong time, now with my new phone that might change.........

Maybe the Tanzanian community can look into the Brazilian lend-a-gps model, where an organization is the owner of the gps units, and allows users fitting a predefined criteria use the unit for a pre-determined period of time. I think there is some information about it on the wiki, but as far as I know, only in Portuguese.

I wish my "geountagged photos" where as good as your example. I usually end up with a photo I cannot read end of other on, either I forget where, or there are no usable untagged information to extract.

So what should I write in this monthly newsletter?

"Sorry, but the only active member in the area have not been able to contribute the last month due to high worklpad, keep up the good work."

This is almost true and doesn't look very motivating or informative to me.

I have talked to others in the Brazilian comunity, and it looks like there is not much general interest to take part in comunities exept for a hard-core group, there are people who regularly tries to advertize the project via speaches, work groups, contacting people contributing in various areas and such, and in most cases people doesn't even respond on our mails. It seems like many people just enters to have a look than goes somewhere else, and it doesn't seem like we are able to contact them in any ways.

There are a good deal more people reading the Brazilian mailing list than the active group writing there, but it seems like the people following the mailing lists at least are contributing to the project.

I would like more people to contribute to the project, I am not able to add all amenities in southern Espírito Santo (area the size of England) all by myself, and getting active people in this region will largly help, but a person just creating an account, than never to return, and neither responds any attempts to contact them on email is not goimg to help the project.

Interesting/offensive place names, should that be sensured? Will it be fair to the few houndred people living in Hell to erase that name off the map? Hell have a train station with regular services, and there are an international airport next to Hell. I guess there are thousand more examples like this, I am unfortienately not able to give you a link, but guess a nominatim search would give you many interesting results.

Pfizer and drug stores have actually more to gain on maintaining their own data in the database than spamming on the dairy. Besides, if somebody moves one node in order to advertice for Viagra, than it is easy to revert his changset when removing the actual spam as well. If he only does the edit in order to make the spam appear on the web page, than the edit is obviously spam as well. If we reduce another 99% spam this way, than this double action to remove the spam is still a 98% reduction in work load.

99.9% of the spammers are some sort of bots, meaning that they would only get the requirement if the author of the bot intervenes or writes the bot specifically for OSM. There are ways of making that kind of requirements more transparrent, i.e. You can still make the blog entry but it will be hidden to other users until after your map edit, etc. Web page admins need to look into this.

Se voce achar as dados para importar outros cidades Brasileiras, entra em contato comigo, eu que e responsavle do importacao do Vitoria, e poder avisar voce em como fazer e como nao fazer o importacao.

My focus now is to translate as much as possible, but yes, I would need to do rounds of updating also, but that will come later.

Yeah, that is also an option.
I usually use google/reader for my feeds, gives me a good opertunity to organize them and allows me to catch up after being offline for a while. It is necessary since I travel the entire planet, as well as often work from locations with slow or limited internet access

It is probably easier (and more readable) to get extracts from surveylance cameras in the visinity of the accident, thna a sattelite image. Most sattelite images are of type 1-2 meters per pixle, and therefor unusable for extracting specific information, also exposure times are often long, so a moving vehicle might only appear as a line if at all.

Off the shelf GPS units tend to be more stable on the possition (better accuracy) when moving at constant speeds, so a bicycle trip to map roads is probably much better than to walk. Also averaging several tracks helps a lot. But be aware of urban canyons!

Bem vindo ao OSM, Brasil precicar sou ajuda

An example for us all, Google have been much better at advertising GMM, which lacks coverage, both in area and tags, so enlightening people about the better alternative in a friendly manner is probably both good for relations with other projects, recruiting more mappers, and not to mention allowing for more products to use our map.
I will for sure try to do something similar of I ever end up at a GMM information camp.

I had a tendency of ending up in emacs, since pico and nano insisted on breaking the lines where I didn't want it to.

Yeah I know all the bacronyms for emacs and lisp.

Since I have seen nothing about how to do formating, I did a wild chance on using standard HTML tags. Back in the "old" days I used to hand craft entire web sites....

Bookmarked, will download and test before next import takes place. Finalizing Vitoria import now.

This improvement looks good, both visually and technically. Hope that the RoR part is just as slick so we can have this up and running soon. It will be a great benefit for us who are trying to maintain large areas.

The problem with marine tagging is that two sites (freitonne and OSeaM) uses different tagging schematics. There are a proposal though to unify the tagging schemes for marine tags. I think the OSeaM crew have a special editor at hand for editing marine features, though I am not sure of the status of this editor. There are also a set of precompiled presets you can activate in JOSM that allows for some marine mapping.