A couple of us in town are doing an activity that we are enjoying: The Mozilla Location Service. If you have an Android, you can install the MozStumbler app, and just run it while you walk, bike, or drive around. It records wifi access points, cell towers, and GPS satellite signals. Google has already done such a thing. The goal of this project is to have the data open and public.
The stated goal is:
The Mozilla Location Service is a research project to investigate crowdsourced mapping of wireless networks (WiFi access points, cell towers, etc.) around the world. Mobile devices and desktop computers commonly use this information to figure out their location when GPS satellites are not accessible.
There are few high-quality sources for this kind of geolocation data currently open to the public. The Mozilla Location Service aims to address this issue by aiming to provide an open service to provide location data.
The fun part for us is that there are few people doing it in this area, so the locations we map are very striking on the map. If you want to assign a nickname to yourself, you can track your ranking on the Leaderboard.
We are getting Greensboro, North Carolina, nailed down quite well. Not all data on this part of the map is ours, but most of it is. This project works anywhere in the world (see the map). The requirements to upload are Android and access to data.
