It was the sad duty today for Andy Robinson and I to pay tribute to Mike’s contribution to OpenStreetMap at his memorial service, for Mike died on 28th April 2014, aged 78.
Mike was a stalwart of the local OSM community and had mapped large swathes of the Black Country and North Birmingham. He was a regular attendee at our social meetings and although his mobility was limited he did his share of walking streets to gather data in surveys when we had our mini-mapping parties. Sometimes Mike might have to catch 3 buses to get to an event, but he’d always be there. Mike compensated for his limited surveycoverage on the ground by spending hundreds of fruitful hours armchair mapping from aerial imagery and Ordnance Survey OpenData.
If you’d like to see just how significant Mike’s contributions were, a summary can be found here
Those of you attended SotM 2013 at Aston University in September 2013 may well remember Mike in his orange volunteer T-shirt (a much prized item of apparel according to his daughter Julie). He might well have issued you your delegate credentials, and if you bought a spare T-shirt you will almost certainly have bought it from Mike.
Our personal condolences from local mappa-mercia OSMers and organisational condolences from the wider OpenStreetMap community go to Mike’s children John and Julie and to his wider family and circle of friends.
Wherever Mike is now I’m sure he’s trying to map it!
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