I’ve been thinking for a while about writing about the importance of opendata, but is with the advertising given to Google Map Maker when I really understood the urgency of the matter.
Can you imagine a country with so poor geographic data that even the government doesn’t known which cities and towns do they have? How could they invest on roads, literacy, drinking water or even know that there are people who live there? How could they collect taxes or… count votes in elections!? Can you imagine that a battalion of soldiers use maps that are wrong and establish a base in the nearest country? An absurdity that happened recently on the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica , which almost causes an international conflict.