When I look at our map here in Germany, I see at lot of astonishing spots where a lot of detail is available. On the other hand, there are still many white spots.

So I tried to estimate how many contributing members our project needs in Germany to get a good 100% coverage in the foreseeable future.
Germany has a size of 357021 km^2 and about 82 million inhabitants (from baby to old people).
Now let's assume that somebody can map 20 km^2 i.e. an area of 4 by 5 km without dedicating all his spare time and the rest of his life to mapping. ;-) It may be less in big cities and more in rural areas with only small villages, so I think this evens out. (4 by 5 km sounds reasonable to me. I'm involved in a larger area, more like 8 by 10 km, but didn't and don't have to do everything there myself, luckily.)
This means we need about 18000 people mapping for OSM in Germany or 0,02% of the total population.
The OSM statistics for today say there are currently 28613 users in total.
I don't know, doesn't sound like too many people are needed, but can we reach enough who are both motivated to take the work of mapping AND can handle the technology, i.e. using some GPS capturing device, uploading to the PC, using the editors?
What do you think?

A few days ago, I failed as an OSMer.
I mean, what's our only ;-) purpose in life? To provide our fellow citizens with map data so they can find their destinations.
I was biking in my neighbour town Bernhausen to fill in some missing street names. It was already dark and getting colder, but hey, that shouldn't keep anybody from mapping. ;-)
I was standing on the side of the street with my bike, writing down some street names, when a car pulled beside me. I could tell from the license plate that they were not from the region.
They asked me where a certain street was. And I couldn't tell them! I could tell them that it was not in this part of the town, but that didn't help much. When they said that a certain school was nearby, I could give them instructions how to get there, though.
So maybe I only failed half. ;-)
No need to say that the street they were asking for is now in OSM. :-)

I decided to write something in my diary every now and then because I don't want to think one day "Hmm, when was my first edit? When did I finish my home town? When have I last been to ...? Can't remember!"
(I know, you probably never really finish mapping any place. ;-) )

As far as I can tell, I made my first edit on January 22, 2008.
Although this is less than 4 weeks ago, it already seems very long to me as I think I've already mapped quite a bit of ground.
I'm primarily taking care of a part of Filderstadt which is south of the Stuttgart airport in Germany. There are some other people around me mapping as well.
Luckily, we have Yahoo maps of this area which really makes work much easier although there have already been changes here and there, naturally, since these images were taken (which was in 2005 or even 2004).