48 Hour Update

We’ve had an excellent first two days! Good discussions on Reddit, lots of valuable questions by email and on GitHub, and some unexpected coverage on Hacker News. We now have 121 registered users, who have marked 256 cameras.

This is a good moment to clarify some things:

Can I download the raw map data?

Yes. It is available at /rawdata, and is linked to near the top of the site.

Is the database proprietary?

Absolutely not. This is public information, and we have released it under the Creative Commons CC0 Universal license, making it as close to public domain as we can legally get.

Is the data stored in OpenStreetMap?

No. We use OpenStreetMap to get all of our geographic information, but we do not store our camera data as part of OSM. This is to protect the integrity of OpenStreetMap: If someone scripts interaction with Where are the Eyes and posts cameras everywhere we don’t want to blanket OSM in incorrect data. It is much easier to roll back malicious changes while the camera data is under our direct control.

Will you be sharing your camera data with OpenStreetMap?

Of course! We would be thrilled to get the existing cameras from OSM added to Where are the Eyes, and to add our camera data to their map. OpenStreetMap is a fantastic project, and we hope both can grow from each other. We are only concerned with fully integrating the two maps, and are happy to synchronize the data between them periodically.

Thank you all for your support. The feedback we have received has been overwhelmingly positive. If you are asking “how can I help?” then please tell others about this project! The more people that use Where are the Eyes, the better a tool it becomes.

Posted 10/25/16