Last july I, my friend Arlindo Pereira e 12 others volunteers from "emerging" countries where choosen by the "Scolarship Program" to attend the State of the Map, OSM main conference [1]. This was a unique integration opportunity for us - A profound source of inspiration.

But the program didn´t stop there. To help the participants take a more decisive role on their countries osm advancement, funding was provided for "follow up activities". After some discussion between ourselves on the brazilian mailling list we concluded that the best use for this money was to fund the start of a GPS lending program like the one started by the OSM foundation last year [2].

So, we plan to distribute between 10 and 15 "dataloggers" for applicants on the whole country this year. Our main objective is to advance the quality of the country road network data and to enable editing on the many medium cities that presently doesn´t have high-res sattelite imagery available. The rules and candidates evaluation criteria are in http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Pt-br:Programa_GPS-Brazil (in portuguese). We intend to announce the first approved candidates next april 15.

We would like to thanks the Open Society Institute for funding for the project, the OSM foundation and specially Mikel Maron, member of the OSMF board for his dedication to these innitiatives. A big thanks to the members of the "Talk-BR" list and to Vitor George that will be helping us on this project organization.

Good Mapping!

[1] http://2009.stateofthemap.org/2009/06/22/osi-scholarships/
[2] http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/GPStogo