Author Archives: Hrvoje Bogner

About Hrvoje Bogner

Posting mostly in a Communication Working Group capacity (and often with text written collaboratively among CWG and others)

Here comes State of the Map 2016

State of the Map 2016 is on. We have fixed a location. Here come the facts.

The conference will be held on September 23 – 25, 2016 in the heart of Europe, Brussels, at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB ‐ Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Elsene, Brussels). The Vrije Universiteit Brussel is the offshoot of the French-speaking Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), founded in 1834 by a Brussels lawyer with Flemish origins, Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen. He wanted to establish a university independent from state and church and where academic freedom would reign.

Following years of tradition we held a logo competition for SotM 2016. We were delighted by the response and eventually settled on the eye-catching design below. Thanks to Veronica Semeco, who designed the winning logo, and Tatiana van Campenhout, who prepared the logo and website for launch.

sotm2016

State of the Map provides a fantastic opportunity to meet the diverse OpenStreetMap community and to celebrate your achievements and look forward into the future. As an organising team we are delighted to be able to bring data contributors, data users and software developers together again and we look forward to meeting you all in Brussels.

The SotM 2016 website has launched. There you will find more information about registration, call for proposals, the programme, social events and accommodations soon. Please also take the time to sign up to our email newsletter or follow us on twitter.

Announcing SotM 2016

We are delighted to announce that State of the Map 2016 will be held in Brussels, Belgium.

Thank you to all teams who submitted a proposal. The quality of the bids was fantastic and it was a pleasure reviewing them.

We are very much looking forward to working with the Brussels team to organise a successful State of the Map 2016. See you in 2016 in Brussels!

For more info please follow stateofthemap.org

Events in 2015

Can’t wait till 2016? There are a number of upcoming OSM-centered conferences in 2015, including SotM-LatAm in Chile in September, and SotM-Scotland in October. There are also many webinars, mapping parties, coding events and socials planned for 2015.

In what is turning out to be a busy 2015, these follow earlier events: SotM-FR in Brest, France; SotM-US at the UN’s New York headquarters in New York City; and HOT Summit in Washington DC.

All these events are organised by the wider OpenStreetMap community. Thanks go to the relevant organising teams for hosting these events.

— The photo “Brussels great market square” by ijsendoorn is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Announcing the first SotM LatAm

After the success of the global State of the Map 2014 conference realized last November in Buenos Aires, the Latin America OpenStreetMap community is organizing its first continental conference.
SotM LatAm

The State of the Map Latin America will take place in Santiago, Chile, on September 4th, 5th and 6th. The conference will gather the Latin American and global mappers to share community and  entrepreneurial knowledge, techniques and experiences in OpenStreetMap. The official languages for the event are Spanish and Portuguese, with some talks in English as well.

Santiago is the capital of Chile, its financial heart and biggest city,  concentrating approximately 35% of the population of the country (6.5  million people). The event will take place on the days before the AbreLatam (September 7-8) and ConDatos (September 9-10), two of the biggest Open Data conferences in Latin America.

You can already register for the conference and submit a talk proposal on the website: http://sotm.openstreetmap.cl/

The SOTM LatAm is organized by the Fundación OpenStreetMap Chile.

OpenStreetMap tile CDN continues to grow

Since the last additions to our OpenStreetMap tile serving network in December, there has been a lot more server set-up going on.

osm-cdn-2015-03The German tile cache server tabaluga is now retired and is no longer serving tiles. This may sound like bad news, but quite the opposite! Tabaluga has been replaced with a new server, katie, which has taken over its job.
The new tile cache server katie is still located in Falkenstein, Germany, and still hosted by Hetzner.

More good news: There are two tile cache servers in Germany now!
The second tile cache server, konqi, is located in Jena, Germany, hosted by EUserv.

The Russian tile cache server gorynych just had a memory and SSD upgrade, and with this it can deliver even more content.

There is another new server in Hungary. With this Hungary becomes one of 12 countries hosting OSM CDN servers.

Tile cache server sarkany is located in Budapest, Hungary, hosted by szerverem.hu.

With all of these, the CDN (Content Delivery Network) server count comes to 16 active servers.

Tabaluga was running, thanks to Freerk Ohling, at Hetzner since May 2013, and served its last tiles in January. Freerk approached us back in April 2013 to suggest we implement EDNS client subnet support (implemented in December 2014) and to offer us a sponsored tile cache server. Now he has also kindly sponsored new tile cache servers in Germany.

Tabaluga primarily served traffic to visitors from Germany. Approximately 56 million map tiles per day. (avg 652/sec, peaking at 1245/sec). Serving close to 1TB of data per day. It was the highest traffic OSM tile cache server.

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.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation seeks additional distributed tile servers. If your organisation would like to donate a tile server and hosting, please see the Tile CDN requirements page on the wiki. You can also support OpenStreetMap by donating to 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.

Call for Venues for State of the Map 2016

The state of the map working group are delighted to announce that the call for venues for 2016 is now open!

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_Of_The_Map_2016/Call_for_venues

This is much earlier than in previous years which means that you are free to propose any dates within 2016. If there is an exciting event going on in your city that OpenStreetMappers may be interested in, then why not align the conference to this.

c8200-media_httpweaitcomfil_quipo

The State of the Map working group is here to help you. We’re an expanded team compared to the last few years and are looking forward to receiving your bids. In 2014 we were south of the equator in Buenos Aires, in 2016 we could be in your home country! So lets celebrate hitting 2 million registered users*, share experiences and ideas, and plan for the next 10 years of OSM.

See you in 2016…
— State of the Map, working group

* don’t worry – you won’t have 2 million people turning up on your doorstep looking for somewhere to stay!

Four New Tile Servers

Have you noticed faster tiles lately? Browsing the map on openstreetmap.org should now be even more responsive. Three new servers, started providing tiles over the last 2 weeks, joining a server which started earlier in the year.

osm-cdn-2015-01

Map tiles are delivered to users based on their GeoDNS location. The OpenStreetMap tile content delivery network (CDN) now supports EDNS-client-subnet to improve locating the closest region tile cache.

OpenStreetMap tiles are free for everyone to use, but should be used with moderation. If you are a high traffic site you should look into switch2osm.org to find out how to use the data and keep the tiles available for everyone.

Thanks to generous donations and active local community members, the OpenStreetMap distributed tile delivery infrastructure continues to grow.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation seeks additional distributed tile servers. If you would like to donate a tile server and hosting, please see the Tile CDN requirements page on the wiki. You can also support OpenStreetMap by donating to the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organization, formed in the UK to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and to providing geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project.