Over time we have looked into different map development schedules. We first attempted about two years ago to prioritise producing a Basic version of all 12 volumes as a high priority to be completed within months. That however has been re-examined a few times. We have looked at different compromises between getting the maps finished as quickly as possible, and spending as much effort as we can on getting everything into them that we think should be documented, especially old historical content.

Our most recent thoughts have been on a multi stage development of each volume, with a Basic stage completed as quickly as possible, and a more in depth revision completed later. However this has never been easy to achieve in practice. We have, accordingly, pretty much settled down to our current schedule proposal as below.

We now propose that only one step be made on completing all volumes, which is to as full a level as we consider reasonably practicable. This means each volume will take months to complete rather than weeks. There are various reasons why we have examined different schedule proposals in the past. However, we now feel that because of the significant amount of resources which have to be duplicated across revisions, and given the scarcity of our resources such as time in general, we are going to go with one stage of development for all volumes.

This isn’t intended in any way to push the schedule for Volume 1 out, it just means we are not attempting to cut out content. We do have a definite view of how much more work is needed to complete Volume 1, and we are reasonably pushy about getting it finished by the new timeframe of close to the end of September. But there won’t be another revision of it to a more in-depth level planned in the future. It will be completed to as full a standard as we feel is reasonably practicable at this time, and we aren’t planning to come back in the future for another full revision unless significant new content sources are located.

Because of this decision, Volume 1 is currently having new content added within Auckland City, as well as up in Northland. This has pushed the completion out somewhat and as we have suggested, the end of September is more realistic for the present. We will keep pushing out daily updates to our email list for each station as maps of these areas are completed.