When we started to hear stories about OSMers in far flung corners of the world begging and borrowing equipment in order to help OpenStreetMap, the OSM Foundation wondered what it could do to help.

Well, after a protracted gestation period we are pleased to announce the GPStogo scheme. Its quite simple. We collect small donations from our supporters in wealthy countries, use the money to buy GPS receivers, and loan them to enthusiastic but poorly equipped OSMers in developing countries.

There’s full details of the scheme on the brand new OSM Foundation web-site.

We already have some promises of donations and a (short) list of worthy recipients, so the pumps are primed.

Our initial goal is to purchase one GPS receiver a month and ship it out to whoever is next on our list of qualified loan applicants.

All we are asking is for OSMers to donate a fiver a month to support this scheme. You’ll get lots of kudos and have the satisfaction of seeing map data appearing in some of the more distant corners of the planet. Sign up here.

And if you are a GPS-less budding OSMer in a developing country then please get in touch, we need to know what you need to be able to go out mapping. Let us know here.