Last week the OpenStreetMap community came together for their annual conference “State Of The Map”
We need to say a huge thank you to all the people involved in organising this year’s conference, including Henk Hoff, Gonzalo Gabriel Perez, Fernando Sanz, and Nicolás Alvarez. They battled various problems, and came out with a triumphant success!
A big thanks also to this year’s State Of The Map Sponsors:
As it has been in previous years, the conference was wonderful meeting of OpenStreetMap friends, a showcase of diverse modes of map use/contribution, and a melting pot of ideas to take the project forwards. Another big thank you to all those who presented. We will be aiming to publish videos of the talks (always more easily said than done) [update Videos starting to appear here] There are already some photos on the ‘sotm14’ flickr tag. The program on the SOTM 2014 wiki page links off to various wiki-editable session sub-pages. Please feel free to edit these pages to add links to slide-decks and other coverage.
Besides the general buzz and exciting talks, there were a couple of important extra things coming out of the conference:
OpenStreetMap Foundation Election Results
As has been the the norm in the past, we held the OpenStreetMap Foundation Annual General Meeting during the SOTM conference, and this included electing a new board. Frederik Ramm was re-elected, and we elected Kathleen Danielson and Paul Norman replacing Matt Amos and Simon Poole who were stepping down.
Congratulations to the new board, and thanks to all the candidates and organisers of this election. More election details on the wiki
New feature ‘?’
As has also been the norm at past conferences, OpenStreetMap developers have prepared a little something special as a new feature to be launched on the weekend of the conference. This year they’ve added a new ‘?’ button on the right hand side of the openstreetmap.org front page. Didn’t notice? Give it a try! More details coming soon.
New OpenStreetMap Latin America
Also during the conference there was a meeting of the brand new OpenStreetMap Latin America group. They have recently established themselves with a new ‘talk-latam’ mailing list and they are planning a “State Of The Map Latin America” conference, to join the set of local spin-off conferences held around the world.
This is fantastic news, and a great result to come out of our visit to Buenos Aires. We have aimed to organise the annual conference in a variety continents, to help spread OpenStreetMap enthusiasm to different corners of the globe. So this kind of group-forming and general boost is exactly what we are aiming for. But in fact the OpenStreetMap community of South America has always been quite impressive, so it’s only fair that the conference came there this year. And what a joy it was! Buenos Aires is a beautiful city, and the Argentinean OpenStreetMap contributors were wonderful hosts for State Of The Map 2014.
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Well done guys. Although I couldn’t make it in person, it looked like you all had a fantastic time. Great to see that you are looking to set up a regular conference for Latin America.
Yours,
Rob and the rest of the SotM 2013 local team
Are there any videos of the conference available?
I’m currently uploading the videos. It involves some manual work for each video so it may take a while until all of them are up.
The ‘?’ feature is what I’ve been waiting for. Please make a fuss about this – it looks like a small thing, but it will really emphasise what’s different about OSM.