- Author
- Matthew Somerville
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Along with our parent charity mySociety, SocietyWorks is now formally sponsoring OpenStreetMap and MetaCPAN – two key external pieces of digital infrastructure that help us to run our services.
We use OpenStreetMap data in a number of ways, including background mapping on sites such as MapIt, or as an optional layer on FixMyStreet. Meanwhile, MetaCPAN is the Perl package manager that hosts all the third party Perl packages we use in FixMyStreet, WriteToThem, and more.
Why is sponsorship important?
Like many technology providers, we rely on a number of external dependencies in order to run our services. It’s been a long-held goal to be able to support such infrastructure, and give back to the technology and community on which we rely.
XKCD has this famous comic which I’m sure many of you have seen before:
As the Explain XKCD page on the above comic says, “The current model of libraries and open-source development […] relies heavily on the free and continued dedication of unpaid hobbyists”, and has some interesting discussion and examples. There’s a lot of history behind how things have arrived here, and a number of people and organisations looking to try and improve the situation, and hopefully our contribution is part of that.
So yes, supporting digital infrastructure upon which you depend is a good idea, and I’m really pleased we are able to give back to OpenStreetMap and MetaCPAN.