It’s not exactly viral, but the Lima mapping party is becoming contagious and its co-ordination rapidly out of my hands. It seems that there is already a vibrant open-source community in Peru, albeit a virtual one which as yet remains below radar….or some kind of detection. It seems too that some of these guys have done OpenStreetMap activities in Peru, but they were not aware of some of the staple features of OSM like the wiki, the country profile and the mailing lists. I think this says two things; one, OSM is still a largely Anglo-US-European project and two, that despite the ease of hyperlinks and electronic tags, facilitated by wikis, there is still room for word-of-mouth…that there needs to be some kind of gesture or spark which generates events. The OSM party in Lima has become that gesture.