Developer Locations

Many people have expressed interest in information on the location of Debian developers. We therefore decided to add, as part of the developer database a field where developers can specify their world coordinates.

The map below was generated from an anonymized list of developer coordinates using the program xplanet.

World Map

If you are a developer and would like to add your coordinates to your database entry, log in to the Debian Developers' Database and modify your entry. If you don't know the coordinates of your hometown, You should be able to find it from one of the following locations:

Coordinates of places all around the world, with exact maps for USA, Canada and most of Europe: http://www.multimap.com/
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names: http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/tgn/
Good starting point: http://www.ckdhr.com/dns-loc/finding.html
GPS locations for airports: http://www.airnav.com/
By zip code (US only): http://www.geocode.com/eagle.html-ssi
Australian database: http://www.ga.gov.au/map/names/
Canadian database: http://GeoNames.NRCan.gc.ca/
Get your coordinates and horoscope too: http://www.astro.com/cgi/aq.cgi?lang=e

The format for coordinates is one of the following:

Decimal Degrees: The format is +-DDD.DDDDDDDDDDDDDDD. This is the format programs like xearth use and the format that many positioning web sites use. However typically the precision is limited to 4 or 5 decimals.
Degrees Minutes (DGM): The format is +-DDDMM.MMMMMMMMMMMMM. It is not an arithmetic type, but a packed representation of two separate units, degrees and minutes. This output is common from some types of hand held GPS units and from NMEA format GPS messages.
Degrees Minutes Seconds (DGMS): The format is +-DDDMMSS.SSSSSSSSSSS. Like DGM, it is not an arithmetic type but a packed representation of three separate units: degrees, minutes and seconds. This output is typically derived from web sites that give 3 values for each position. For instance 34:50:12.24523 North might be the position given, in DGMS it would be +0345012.24523.

For Latitude + is North, for Longitude + is East. It is important to specify enough leading zeros to dis-ambiguate the format that is being used if your position is less than 2 degrees from a zero point.