Monthly Archives: June 2024

OSM Foundation board election 2024 – How to become a board candidate

Official OSM logo by Ken Vermette, CC-BY-SA 3.0 , trademarks apply.

OpenStreetMap Foundation members will vote to elect a new board in October. There will be four seats available: of Arnalie Vicario, Craig Allan, Mateusz Konieczny and Sarah Hoffmann, whose board terms are ending. The terms of Dani Waltersdorfer, Guillaume Rischard and Roland Olbricht will continue. There are seven seats on the foundation board and board members are volunteers.

Self-nominations of board candidates will open on 28 July 2024 and you will be able to nominate yourself on this OpenStreetMap wiki page: https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/Foundation/AGM2024/Election_to_Board#List_of_board_candidates

You can create an account on the OSM wiki here and you will be able to add your name to the table that will be added on that date by editing the page here (please wait until 28 July 2024 to do so). Self-nominations will close on the 13^th of August at 23:59 UTC.

Election timeline

The timeline of the election is here: https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/Foundation/AGM2024/Election_to_Board#Key_dates

What the board is/is not, rules and responsibilities and why run

Please read the links on the OSM wiki.

A lot of the foundation’s work is done by the volunteers of our Working Groups, and if you want to help the foundation, you can also look at joining those.

Who can become a board candidate

Any natural person may be elected to become a board member, provided that:

they have been a normal OSM Foundation member [1] or an associate member [2] during the full 180 days before the General Meeting, which will take place on 19 October 2024, and
have been a normal member for the full 28 days prior to the General Meeting, and
are willing to act as a board member, and
are permitted by law to do so.

[1] Normal members provide their full residential address and can vote on all issues. Their residential address may be disclosed to other members.
[2] Associate members provide just their country of residence - which may also be disclosed to other members - and can vote - but not on all issues. Additionally, they cannot be board candidates.

If you want to find out the type of your OpenStreetMap Foundation membership (normal or associate), please check the most recent approval/renewal membership email or email the volunteers of the Membership Working Group at membership@osmfoundation.org from the email account associated with your OSM Foundation membership. Please see the OSM wiki regarding changing your membership type.

Resources about the 2024 board election and Annual General Meeting

The main two pages that have the information about the 2024 board election and Annual General Meeting are:

OSM wiki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/AGM2024/Election_to_Board and
OSM Foundation website: https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Annual_General_Meetings/2024

Resolutions proposed by OSM Foundation members

OSM Foundation members can submit resolutions and ask the membership to vote on them. The resolutions need to be supported by at least 5% of members eligible to vote, in order to be added to the ballots. Please read: Companies Act 2006: Members’ power to require circulation of written resolution. The deadline for providing the supported resolutions will be the 24th of August.

How you can help

A few of the current and past board members have mentioned that the thought of being a candidate did not cross their mind until it was suggested to them. So, you might want to think if you’d like to run for the board or to suggest being a candidate to others.

Do you want to translate this and other blog posts in another language..? Send an email to communication@osmfoundation.org with subject: Helping with translations in [your language]

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation, formed 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, is financially supported by membership fees and donations, and organises the annual, international State of the Map conference. Our volunteer Working Groups and small core staff work to support the OpenStreetMap project. Join the OpenStreetMap Foundation for just £15 a year or for free if you are an active OpenStreetMap contributor

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Invitation to State of the Map Europe 2024

The OpenStreetMap Poland Association is pleased to invite all members of the OSM community to the State of the Map Europe 2024 conference, to be held in Łódź, Poland, from 18–21 July 2024. In addition to many interesting presentations and talks, it will be an opportunity to meet, discuss and exchange experiences.

Conference tickets

Conference tickets can be purchased at: https://tobilet.pl/state-of-the-map-europe-2024.html

Traveling and accommodation

If you would like some advice on how to get to the conference, and suggestions for accommodation, we have compiled some information at: https://stateofthemap.eu/accommodation.html

If you have questions about traveling to Poland or you would like to ask something else related to the conference, you can write at: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/invitation-to-the-state-of-the-map-europe-2024/114661

Volunteering

As you know, ’State of the Map Europe’ is a non-profit event, and for organizational purposes we need people who can help us on a volunteer basis.

During the event, we will need volunteers who will be ready to support us in Łódź — mainly on the premises of the Łódź University of Technology (unless other requirements are mentioned). To check what we need and what we offer in return, please see this page: https://stateofthemap.eu/volunteering.html For volunteers from outside Łódź, a limited accommodation will be available.

We are looking forward to seeing you at the conference!

OSM Poland board

OpenStreetMap Poland is a Local Chapter of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, which supports the OpenStreetMap project.

OpenStreetMap was founded in 2004 and is an international project to create a free map of the world. To do so, we, thousands of volunteers, collect data about roads, railways, rivers, forests, buildings and a lot more worldwide. Our map data can be downloaded for free by everyone and used for any purpose – including commercial usage. It is possible to produce your own maps which highlight certain features, to calculate routes etc. OpenStreetMap is increasingly used when one needs maps which can be very quickly, or easily, updated.

OpenStreetMap at the UNMaps Conference 2024

OpenStreetMap foundation board member Sarah Hoffmann recently joined the 3rd annual UNMaps conference in Valencia, Spain to present about the OpenStreetMap project and participate in a panel discussion about crowd-sourced geodata.

The UNMaps conference brings together the GIS experts from the different entities of the UN, which was about a hundred participants in 2024. There were representatives from the UN secretariat, the different UN entities, like UNICEF and the International Criminal Court (ICC), and people from the UN peacekeeping missions. They also regularly invite external partners and contributors to present their work and join the discussions. Given the vital role that OSM already plays in their work, they asked the OSMF board to join the conference and represent the OpenStreetMap community. Also invited from the wider OSM community were the researchers from HeiGIT and the humanitarian mappers from HOT.

“It wasn’t necessary to explain to anyone who we are,” noted Sarah, “OpenStreetMap is well known and used on a daily basis within the UN. The maps produced by the UNMaps division for use within the UN heavily use OSM data, mainly replacing boundaries and names to follow the official policies of the UN.”

“Crowdsourcing Geospatial Information” Panelists from left to right: (host) Michael Montani (UNMappers; (panelists)
Benjamin Herfort (HeiGIT), Sarah Hoffmann (OSMF), Sam Colchester (HOT).

In many areas where the different UN entities operate, OSM is the best (and sometimes only) available source for geographic data. Thus, base maps using OpenStreetMap data were featured in almost every presentation. And it doesn’t stop there. UN users also contribute back to improve and complete the map in the areas where they use it, and the UN Mappers community supports the UN with organised mapping activities.

Sarah answered questions about OSM and OSM operations, including a lively discussion about iD editor as a response to the question: how do we deal with errors in the map data? In addition, Sarah joined a panel discussion on crowd-sourced data focussing on the questions of data quality and the importance of local knowledge in map data.

The discussions continued in the hallways, as well. Sarah noted that there were informal conversations about what kind of data is suitable for OSM and how to best connect with the community, as well as about what it’s like to be part of a world-wide community in peaceful cooperation to achieve a common goal.

“The conference was a great opportunity for getting to know each other,” said Sarah, “seeing OpenStreetMap data used so much in the daily operations of the UN is a great reminder how much our project has grown and how essential our data has become for so many different activities.”

A progress update on vector tiles from the Engineering Working Group

The OpenStreetMap Foundation’s Engineering Working Group has an update on the effort to create vector tiles for openstreetmap.org. Read on for why this work is important, what’s been done so far and how they are incorporating community feedback, and the technical details for those who want to know more.

The background

Currently, the openstreetmap.org website serves raster tiles, which are image tiles made up of pixels — think a downloaded image of part of a map. But the effort has begun to create vector tiles for the site, which will help improve how the map looks and how it works. You can read more about the background of the project here.

Vector tiles serve up maps as vectors: points, lines and polygons. They store geographic data (like what makes up OpenStreetMap) in a format that allows for dynamic styling and interactivity. For users, vector tiles will mean a new, modern-looking map style with seamless zoom on openstreetmap.org, the map can be updated more quickly when data changes, and it should perform better for users.

Looking further ahead, the most exciting part is what this vector tile project will make easy for volunteers and tile users: 3D maps, more efficient data mixing and matching and integration of other datasets, thematic styles, multilingual maps, different views for administrative boundaries, interactive points of interest, more accessible maps for vision-impaired users, and surely many other ideas that no one has come up with yet. You may recall that many of these have been long-term interests for people in the OSM community.

The plan

The goal of vector tiles project is to provide a vector tiles setup that can work for openstreetmap.org — that is, a worldwide, complex basemap site in heavy demand from users and services around the world, where the data underlying the map changes all the time.

Or to put it technically, to create a setup for a worldwide complex basemap under high load which requires minutely updates.

Paul Norman is leading the vector tiles project.

He is working on adding to his Tilekiln project which generates vector tiles from a PostgreSQL database (like OpenStreetMap’s), making use of the Shortbread schema, which is a data format for how to name layers & properties within a vector tile, and improving Themepark, which allows one to add OSM data to a Postgres database.

The work is split up into three steps:

1. First round of Tilekiln improvements and Shortbread Themepark improvements

2. Parallelism improvements

3. Shortbread publicly available in production

The first two steps are nearly done. Tilekiln now generates tiles in parallel, making it practical to generate tiles for the entire world. The next step is to start the deployment into OSMF hardware to prepare for production.

Technical details on step 1

For those interested in the technical details of what’s being worked on, there are five main components of the first step above.

1. Automated packaging of Tilekiln

2. Tilekiln metrics being published with a Prometheus exporter

3. Themepark Shortbread reviewed

4. A demo server running with minutely updates of Shortbread tiles, rendering tiles on-demand

5. Demo shown to community

Items 1 and 2 are complete without need of further discussion. For item 3, Paul found that the osm2pgsql Themepark Shortbread implementation needed more work than anticipated as it was missing a layer and had some issues.

Item 4 and 5 are complete. Paul’s demo server is running with minutely updates and the hardware requirements are more modest than expected.

The community has also been providing useful feedback, such as on Paul’s OSM Community Forum post.

The community offered a lot of suggestions, some of which have already been incorporated. The remaining, in-scope issues from the community are: Curved lines rendering as jagged and vector tiles being too large.

The jagged lines issue is due to how smooth curves are represented in vector tiles. It has mostly been addressed but similar issues are expected to crop up in the future. A target scale equivalent to the minimum scale of the standard tile layer has been set. Zooming in to an even lower scale is possible, but artifacts may start to appear.

Vector tile size will continue to be an issue that needs continual work, but the current tiles are particularly large. Since this part of the testing some changes have been made that cut the size in half. Tile size optimization will be an issue that needs ongoing work, as tile size is the biggest factor in user experience.

The tiles being produced are usable, but more work remains to be done. Now that the parallelism work is complete it’s possible to generate large sets of tiles in order to test, so Paul will be returning to working on the tile definitions to improve tile size and fix some remaining issues, but the current tiles are usable.

Background on the tools being used

Here is some information on the various tools used for this project.

Tilekiln is software written by Paul Norman for generating vector tiles from a PostgreSQL database. Alternatives are martin (or maybe t_rex). Tilekiln is in new development, although it uses a lot of standard PostgreSQL features to generate the vector tile data. Most OSM based maps (incl. osm-carto on osm.org) are generated from SQL database queries from a PostgreSQL database. Tilekiln generates vector tiles from similar queries. Tilekiln is new.

Themepark is part of the osm2pgsql suite of tools, to allow one to add OSM data to postgres, and share those processing steps between other projects. Many PostgreSQL based OSM map styles (like osm-carto) use osm2pgsql

osm2pgsql has been around for 15+ years in OSM, and is used in many many places. Although Paul has contributed code to it, he is not the main developer. osm2pgsql has gotten more advanced, and better, in the last few years. Part of the power is pre-processing the data, and Themepark is an attempt to make these pre-processing steps easier.

Shortbread is a “vector tile schema” created by Geofabrik. It’s a data format for how to name layers & properties within a vector tile.

This blog posts contains contributions from Adam Hoyle, Mikel Maron, Amanda McCann, Paul Norman, and Andrew Wiseman