As of now we are accepting your talks and presentations in the following State of the Map 2019 tracks:
OSM Basics: Information dedicated to newcomers
Community & Foundation: Bringing people together, working group experiences, strategies & vision
Mapping: All about making the mapping easier and better
Cartography: Your ideas on how to create good-looking manifestations of the OSM dataset
Software Development: Software for processing and editing data
Data Analysis & Data Model: Reflections about the OSM data, its model and analysis of quality and completeness
User Experiences: Tell your surprising story of using OSM as an end-user
Academic Track: There will be a proper academic track, it will be announced separately!
Two novelties deserve a special mention:
The “OSM Basics” track: We would like to welcome newcomers with contributions that get them started in the fascinating world of OpenStreetMap. These talks should specifically address the needs of people not overly familiar with the OSM ecosystem.
The “Extended talk” submission type: Big ideas need time to grow. For talks in this category we will allow double the time (40 min) compared to the usual talks. Make sure to mention why your talk needs this extended space.
You will find the Call for Participations and the link to the submission form at:
The State of the Map conference is the annual, international conference of OpenStreetMap, organised by the OpenStreetMap Foundation. The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation, formed in the UK to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project. The State of the Map Organising Committee is one of our volunteer Working Groups.
State of the Map is the annual event for all mappers and OpenStreetMap users. In line with our motto “Bridge the Map”, we invite all OSM enthusiasts – whether you are a hobby mapper, a scientific researcher, a humanitarian, with an NGO or a government agency, a small business or a global company — to join us in Heidelberg, September 21-23, 2019 and strengthen existing and build new bridges. The HOT Summit, the annual gathering of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team community, will also be directly preceding SotM – to enable all SotM participants to easier attend HOT Summit and vice versa – and facilitate further exchange.
We want to enable as many of you as possible to be part of State of the Map 2019. We are happy to announce that we can provide financial support, thanks to the generosity of our sponsors
Each year we receive more scholarship applications than we are able to support. To help us best allocate the funds, we have different levels of scholarship to pick from:
Support scholarship (admission and accommodation)
Full scholarship (admission, accommodation and full travel costs)
Enhanced scholarship (admission, accommodation, full travel costs and extra support to cover evening meals and supplementary costs)
Here are some tips to help you complete your application. You can also check out Gregory’s post on how we selected scholars from previous year’s applicants.
Select the minimum level of scholarship you need. This will help us to make the best use of limited funds and enable more scholars to join.
Make sure you clearly state your visa and travel requirements, as well as potential other funding sources.
Answer the question “Please describe your involvement in OSM and how will attending State of the Map benefit you, your local mapping community and the wider OpenStreetMap project” in 1500 characters maximum. Keep sentences short. Focus on the benefits to you and to OpenStreetMap.
We want to hear about your contributions to OpenStreetMap, your project or your group. We do not want an account of a group’s work but your individual part in it. Try to use “I” not “we“.
You may include links to your OpenStreetMap profile, a local group you run, or software you created. If your written answer is satisfactory to get in our shortlist – we might take a look at these additional details.
What topics or views will you bring to SotM that are otherwise missing?
What do you plan to achieve through coming to the SotM?
What do you plan to do when you return home after SotM?
To enable our scholars to have the chance to extend their stay for the HOT Summit, this option will also be supported through generosity of HOT Summit sponsors. Please make sure to indicate if the HOT Summit is of interest for you on the form as well.
Review team For SotM 2019 we decided to contact past scholars who might want to be involved in the review process.
Twelve persons will review the applications (Thanks!). All people who replied or self-volunteered were included.
Eleven are past scholars.
Four are women.
Four volunteered prior to being contacted.
Geographic distribution of review team’s nationalities:
4 Africa West, East, Central and Southern
4 Asia-Pacific
4 Europe
Criteria for reviewing the applications:
Here’s a list of factors that we will consider when reviewing the applications:
Is the applicant part of an under-represented minority group?
Are they from an under-represented location?
Are they contributing to OSM in a substantial way? (Not only OpenStreetMap edits, but contributed to wiki and documentation, trainers, developers).
Have they applied previously and not gotten a scholarship?
Do they have a unique story or experience to share?
Are they in a position to share their SotM experience with a larger group?
Will their attendance benefit their local community in some way?
How difficult will their visa application be?
How will attending State of the Map benefit them and OpenStreetMap?
You can update your application before the 30th of March.
Can you support the scholarship program?
Is your company or organisation interested in sponsoring State of the Map 2019 and our scholarship program? Take a look at our sponsorship packages and email us at sponsor-sotm@openstreetmap.org for more information.
2019-03-12: This post was updated to add information about the review team and the criteria that will be used.
The international State of the Map conference is organised by the OpenStreetMap Foundation. The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation, formed in the UK to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project. The State of the Map Organising Committee is one of our volunteer Working Groups.
A big use of the OpenStreetMap data is the web map on OpenStreetMap.org. Along with our hard working team of volunteer sysadmins who keep it going, we are helped by many donated tile cache servers around the world, which speed up the map in various regions. We are always open to more servers, but the Operations Working Group is currently looking for servers in Brazil, and Australia/New Zealand. If you or your organisation would like to donate a cache server and hosting, we’re ideally looking for a physical server or powerful VM with 8GB+ RAM and at least 146GB of storage. Read more details.
Our peak Brazil traffic is currently around 65 Mbps. Our peak Australian and New Zealand traffic is currently around 20 Mbps. See the full country breakdown in bits per second.
Some more information:
Brazil has the 10th highest traffic and is the largest country without a cache in it or nearby.
Worldwide peak traffic is 2300 Mbps.
Antarctica and Australia are the two continents we do not have caches on.
We fully manage the software and operating system. All config is managed via our chef recipes. We also run a local firewall on each server. If physical hardware, we monitor using it SMART, hp-health, etc and report any hardware issues back to the hosting organisation.
Will you help us and join the people and organisations that support OpenStreetMap? Thank you!
The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation, formed in the UK to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project. Volunteers, like the indefatigable team of server administrators, keep all of this hardware working.
OpenStreetMap tiles are free for everyone to use, but should be used with moderation. If you are a high traffic site you should look at switch2osm.org to find out how to use the data and keep the tiles available for everyone.
OpenStreetMap is powered by its community. While originally supported by individuals, the continuing growth and popularity of OSM have also spawned organised mapping efforts by companies employing mapping teams and unpaid groups like school classes that are directed to work on OSM.
Organised mapping efforts are an integral part of today’s OSM contribution landscape and, when done well, help make OSM better and more widely used.
The OSM Foundation has created the Organised Editing Guidelines that summarise expectations, consensus and established conventions based on discussions with the community, members of the OSMF advisory board and humanitarian mapping efforts. Their goal is to provide a framework to both organised mapping initiatives and the communities to encourage good organised mapping. They are not meant to apply to community activities like mapping parties between friends or doing a presentation on OSM at a local club. If you’re not sure whether you should apply them, contact the local community for advice.
The guidelines have been developed thanks to volunteers of the OSMF Data Working Group, with various rounds of feedback from the wider community, and have been approved by the Board of Directors. Unofficial translations are found here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Organised_Editing_Guidelines You can add your translation there, or contact the Communication Working Group at communication@osmfoundation.org
Sometimes edits made as part of an organised exercise can be problematic, or their accuracy/quality may be disputed by others in the community. As with other disputes, the Foundation’s Data Working Group will respond to organised edits that have gone wrong. While they will intervene for edits that are problematic, not following the guidelines per se is not treated an offense. The overall goal of the guidelines is to provide a framework for ‘sizeable, substantial’ activities: “We wanted something that doesn’t scare casual events off while letting us regulate a geography class gone berserk or a misguided volunteer mapathon.”
The local team prepared a wonderful logo and an appropriate conference motto “Bridging the Map” which not only applies to the basics of OSM community but also to our host city Heidelberg:
State of the Map 2019 logo by Michael Auer
Right next to the old bridge in Heidelberg there lives a curious little statue – a bronze monkey. In its hand, it holds a mirror to remind anyone crossing the bridge to look back from where they came from and remember who they are. For the 2019 SotM in Heidelberg we want to take the role of that little monkey and remind everyone that no matter where we are going and what we are doing with OSM, we should never forget that we all come from the same origin: a little map that anyone can modify and use. Whether you are a hobby mapper, a scientific researcher, a humanitarian, an NGO, a government agency, a small business or a global company — we want to bridge the gap between us, or better yet, we want to Bridge the Map.
Our estimated timeline for 2019 is
15 Feb – Call for Scholars 28 Feb – Call for Abstracts (general and academic) 30 Mar – Deadline of Call for Scholars 24 Apr – Deadline of Call for Abstracts 16 May – Start Early Bird ticket sale 20 Jun – Program Announcement 04 Jul – Switch to regular ticket prices 21-23 Sep – State of the Map in Heidelberg/Germany
Open open open
Apart from the daily work of conference preparation, we have spent considerable efforts in order to use more FOSS tools. We started by moving our meetings from Hangout to Mumble. We use HOT’s Mumble server which already serves the OSMF board and other OSMF working groups. So it was already proven that Mumble is smart and works on all platforms.Our next step was much more challenging. We moved our email communication from Google Mail to the OpenStreetMap mailing list server. We couldn’t move our domain yet as there were too many constraints for a rigorous cut. So we decided to keep the Google account with the stateofthemap.org MX until everything is sorted out. At the moment the mail address “team@stateofthemap.org” is still valid, but it is forwarded to sotm@openstreetmap.org. Tom – thank you so much! – has set up a number of private mailing lists for all our needs:
All these lists are private. Only members of the SotM working group or the appropriate teams are able to read the emails addressed to these lists. For example progam-sotm@openstreetmap.org is read by the program committee and used for all internal communication. At the same time everybody (from outside) can write to this email address send their questions to the program committee using this email address.
Our next step will concern the submission form for the conference contributions – the “Call for Abstracts”. We will move from Google forms to Pretalx, which is Open Source software. It is already used by FOSSGIS (the German local chapter). So we know about advantages and limitations.
We still have some proprietary tools in use, and switching from a proprietary to an Open Source tool takes additional work – not only for us but also for the operations working group. In the past few months we could spend some time on this, but during the hot phase of SotM preparation there will not be enough capacity. Also, the Open Source tools are sometimes less comfortable than the proprietary equivalent, and it needs a lot of communication to persuade all the affected people to make this additional effort. The State of the Map working group supports the idea of Open Source software, and we think this goal is worth the extra effort (even if the path is sometimes rocky).
