Slow Ways – a network of walking routes connecting Great Britain

1. Create navigation app using OpenStreetMaps

2. Add the new routes as red

3. Let user choose a route to walk (warn if he chooses a red one)

4. At the end ask user a few questions (how hard, how pretty, are there shops on the road, how dangerous)

5. Update the route metadata in the App

6. When there's enough data change the color to green and remove warnings

You could even add average speed and sell ads to local pubs/museums/etc.

In my experience of walking on dartmoor most people are intelligent enough to realise that they build prisons on moors for a reason, so have maps.

In the US if the federal government makes something then the tax payer has paid for it and it is therefore there for the tax payer to use. So pretty pictures from NASA and the zip code database and even weather observations/predictions are all there for the taking.

In the UK the tax payer has paid for Ordnance Survey already but you have to pay for the maps and get fully extorted to use them in your own publications. There was a time when photocopying an OS map in the library for a planning application was fraught with difficulty.

That is why the Google people were clever with Street View - they built their own maps and are not beholden to OS.

So it is not as if the government goes out of its way to furnish the UK population with the best maps it can. It hoards the map data. It is tantamount to victim blaming to berate those caught on the dales during bad weather with no map other than that which came with the dead battery on their phone.

The OS work for the crown and not the people. If Slow Ways had gone OpenStreetMap you can bet the landing page would have the map around your British house with routes highlighted.