Monthly Archives: August 2011

Board elections and other OSMF changes

We’re about to see some changes to the OSMF. The most pressing thing to be aware of is the election of new board members:

Board elections

There are four board seats up for grabs, so this represents a considerable change of faces leading our organisation. As was announced previously, we’ll be taking votes by email from 1st September. Before that though we need a finalised list of candidates. The candidates for election (so far) are listed on this wiki page.

Some good candidates but we’d like some more. We have four board seats to fill, and it’s clearly a more healthy democratic situation if we’ve got a bit of a choice. We’re looking for people who can lead our organisation to success in 2011 and going forwards. We’d like to see dedicated OSMers, people who are engaged with the community, but perhaps also people who are in a position to reach out beyond the community. We’d also like to see geographic diversity. The relative importance of these factors will be up to the voters.

If you have ideas for people who fit the bill, now is the time to have a whisper in their ear and persuade them to run for election. Ideally candidates will ensure there is a description of themselves on their wiki user page, and preferably also an election manifesto, before adding themselves to the list. But don’t forget nominations close on Wednesday 31st in time for voting to commence the day after.

To run as a candidate, and also to take part in voting you need to be a fully paid up member of the foundation, so be sure to join the foundation now if you haven’t already.

Management Team

Another recent change has been the introduction of a new “Management Team”. This new group is made up of representatives from the various working groups and (as detailed on the Management Team page) is tasked with regular feedback from/to the working groups, scoping of working groups, and decisions around implementing the budget. One of the main reasons behind this is to ease the workload of the board by taking care of some of the day-to-day trouble-shooting issues. There are various potential downsides to this idea, which people have raised on the osmf-talk mailing list. It remains to be seen how well it will work, and nothing is set in stone, but hopefully this will make life easier for board members new and old, and free them up to do more strategic decision-making.

Engineering Working Group

Also announced recently, we have a new “Engineering Working Group” with the task of assisting and guiding the community-driven development of OSM-related source code and tools. Again it remains to be seen how well this will work, and this is very open to some more keen participation. To be clearer about separation of concerns here, the “Technical Working Group” has been renamed as the “Operations Working Group”. You can find definitions of all of these teams, their membership, and their meeting details linked from the Working Groups page .

Weekly OSM Summary #24

August 10, 2011 – August 22, 2011

A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) world.

  • OSM has more then 450 000 registered members by now. About 150 000 of those contributed at least one node to the project.
  • The OSM Licensing Working Group (LWG) announced some guidelines for the preparation for the license change. Read more details in the wiki page.
  • The OSM Foundation announced that the 2011 annual general meeting and election board members will be held at State of the Map, in Denver. You can find more information here.
  • Harry Wood created a map with an overlay of the riots in London. You can access the map here.
  • Serge created basic information videos about OSM with a total length of more than 2 hours. See the videos at youtube.
  • Pascal created a website last week which shows your or other OSM member’s contributions in a Heat Map. You can find his blog post here, and the webpage here.
  • In the OSM Wiki you can find a first proposal “to enable linking different datasets with OSM data” (OpenMetaMap).
  • Last week the Wired magazine published an article about “Amateur cartographers mistaken for criminals“.
  • The new „Engineering Working Group“ has its first meeting on Monday 22nd at 5pm GMT. Read the full message here.
  • The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) wrote about their work in Somalia. And they created some OSM manuals and guides. Read the announcement here.
  • In the fourth and final episode of “Geospatial Revolution” the Map Kiberia project is mentioned. See the complete video at youtube.
  • Some aerial imagery is now available for the mapping of the city of Dedaab in Kenya, Read the wiki page or the announcement at the mailing list.
  • The Ministry of the Interior and Sports of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, published a raster map of entire Ruanda and permitted usage for OSM. Read more at the wiki page.
  • Harry Wood gave a presentation about humanitarian mapping with OSM. You can see his slides and slide notes here.
  • The Flosm-Map has now an Inkscap and Illstrator Export. Try it here (only available in German).
  • The OSM contributor “Ogmios” created a map (http://www.openqueermap.info) with a special overlay containing information for the homosexual community.
  • The “OSM Amenity Editor” is now Open Source. This tool allows you to edit OSM node features within a web browser. You can find the project at github.
  • The JXAPI now supports polygon queries. Read details here.
  • A new version of the German OSM flyer is available. You can order the flyer for free at the GeoFabrik. Read the announcement at the German Mailing List.

Did we miss something? You can contact us via weekly.osm@googlemail.com

OpenStreetMap Foundation AGM and board election

Henk Hoff, Secretary of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, announced today that the next Annual General Meeting of the OSMF and election for board members will be held at State of the Map – Denver.

To all members of OpenStreetMap Foundation,

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the 5th Annual General Meeting of the OpenStreetMap Foundation will be held at the State of the Map 2011 conference, Auraria Campus, Denver, Colorado, USA, at 12:30 MDT, Sunday, 11 September 2011.

You do NOT have to join the conference to attend the meeting. Attendance of the AGM is free. However, if you would also like to join SOTM 2011, you can still register at http://stateofthemap.org/register-now/

OSMF AGM Agenda: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Foundation/AGM11

Nominations are also now open for three OSMF board positions at the AGM. Nominations close on Wednesday, 31 August 2011 at 1700 UTC.

To add a nomination or your own name please see the instructions at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/AGM11/Election_to_Board or send an email to secretary [AT] osmfoundation.org .

All (at the start of the AGM) paid-up members of the Foundation are eligible to stand for election to the Board. If you are not already a member of the Foundation then you can sign up via http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Join.
If you have questions concerning your membership contact membership [AT] osmfoundation.org .

All (at the start of the AGM) paid-up members of the Foundation are eligible to vote at the Board election.

Proxy voting by email opens on Thursday, 01 September 2011 at 0900 UTC. Details on proxy voting by email can be found on the wiki at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/AGM11/Election_to_Board

The final vote will be taken at the AGM itself.

Henk Hoff
Secretary
OpenStreetMap Foundation
secretary@osmfoundation.org

Name & Registered Office:
OpenStreetMap Foundation
132 Maney Hill Road
Sutton Coldfield
West Midlands
B72 1JU
United Kingdom
A company limited by guarantee, registered in England and Wales.
Registration No. 05912761.

Sent by Henk Hoff to the osmf-announce mailing list

Early birthday present OpenStreetMap video series

OpenStreetMap contributor, emacsen, has just released a series of
OpenStreetMap videos for new OSM contributors.

In honor of OSM’s birthday, I present to the OSM community
a new series of videos on OpenStreetMap.

Video playlist

They’re a set of Khan Academy style videos. That is they’re each short
5-15 minute videos on a particular topic of OpenStreetMap. Right now
there’s about two hours of video, covering the basic concepts: all the
way from nodes and tags, to routing, changesets and
rendering.

The seventh Anniversary / Birthday of OpenStreetMap will be celebrated around the world on Saturday,
20 August 2011, in at least 6 cities. Organize an OSM party in your
town!

State of the Map – Denver

SotM 2010 group photo (Girona Spain)

We are less than a month away from the Fifth Annual OpenStreetMap conference, State of the Map. It will be held in Denver, Colorado, from the 9th to the 11th of September.

Most of the schedule spots are now published, and the few remaining spots will be confirmed shortly. More than forty talks and panels cover subjects of interest to beginners, experts and everybody in between.

Tickets are available including great discounts for community members and Buddy tickets are a way to save even more if you plan to attend with a friend.

Keep up to date on all of the State of the Map announcements at StateoftheMap.org.

Weekly OSM Summary #23

July 24, 2011 – August 9,2011

A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world.

  • The Map Kibera Team asked for donations so they can keep up their work. Please help them out so that this great project can go on!
  • “Buddy tickets” are now available for the State of the Map (SotM) in Denver. This means: “With our buddy-project you can get a second ticket with 50% off“. Read more here.
  • Andreas Hubel created a first alpha version of an indoor navigation website based on Javascript and OSM. You can test the website here.
  • The Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) had their first „HOT Chat“ on July 27 at 1 a.m. CET. Two chats a month are planned for the future.
  • A contributor in Great Britain was arrested during his mapping activities for the OSM project.
  • SimpleGEO announced that their Point-of-Interest database with more then 21 million points is now available for download under CC0 license.
  • A new service by Stephan Knauß shows the “areas” that you or other users have been editing in the world. Try it out with your own or a different user’s OSM username.
  • MapQuery” is a new jQuery plugin and it uses OpenLayers to show maps on your website.
  • OSMSharp is an Open Source C# library to process and display OSM data. Read more in the OSM wiki.

Did we miss something? You can contact us via weekly.osm@googlemail.com