Please check out this great blog post from Romanian mappers.
 
Ever since I saw great ItoWorld animation Year of Edits I wanted to make my own version. This look like it is possible, as mapguy has clearly demonstrated.
UPDATE: Ciprian aka Mapguy has made tutorial explaining how to make OSM progress animation.
 
So in order to make this work they made git repository for planet file and that is how it is possible to get a history for some town or place, because git repository keeps all changes ever made.
 
So in order to make your own animations you need to have your own planet.osm git repository. That is the first big hurdle :(
 
I hope that OpenStreetMap project creates an official public git repository so that anybody can get "history" for his town/place.
 

If/when we get history for some town what are the next steps? I'm still not clear what are the next steps needed.
 
Is somebody more familiar with this? If you are please provide some step-by-step instructions.
 
Here is the translation from Romanian blog post:
"To help Eddy, it was requested to provide OpenStreetMap on national television, I took the scripts we use it and with minor changes (required to use own Mapnik installation) I was able to generate several films with developing the project OSM in Romania. The results are not terribly spectacular (see ITO World) but I think the record pretty well out of so many people work."
 
And here is Eddys post explaining how these scripts work:
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2009-September/042646.html
"The main ideas:

  • the planet files are stored in a git repo (in another branch than master - the scripts warn about this and give advice)
  • the generation of the maps is currently tailored to focus on Caracal, my home town where I was the author of he huge majority of changes; it would be nice if this was configurable by an external file, but I expect patches - you can commit anonymously in the mob branch :-)
  • the generation can go back from the most recent version of the planet file in the "planet repo" down to a date or down a certain number of commits
  • mapnik is used for generation and the database configuration stuff surely needs checking
  • the main script is "gen_dated_maps" which in turn calls "gen_map"
  • gen_map is the rename of gen_map_Caracal and should be the generic version of the map generator
  • the images are created in a ne directory _maps, and can be added an optional time stamp"