Author Archives: Ilya Zverev

We need your vote at the OpenStreetMap Awards

The community voting for the OpenStreetMap Awards 2019 is open! We had a call for nominees, during which you have submitted the names of almost a hundred mappers, bloggers, developers and teams. Then OSMF working groups, the Board and past winners helped to prepare a shorter list. And now it is again your turn: choose who gets an award during the ceremony at the State of the Map in Heidelberg.

We have 28 nominees to choose from: six categories of notable mappers, developers, writers and community builders, and a new category for teams: commercial companies and groups of people working together to make OpenStreetMap better. Every one of these worked hard, and deserves every bit of our love.

You don’t have to choose only one nominee per category: that would be an impossible choice, given we have so many great people on the list. Click as many checkboxes as you like, even all of them. What matters is not winning, but knowing that hundreds of people support you and your project. The main point of a community is to support its members, and this is your chance to do that. Don’t forget to press the “Vote” button afterwards.

The voting ends soon, on 18th of September, so please do not postpone visiting the website — spend a minute right now. Please vote now and show your appreciation!

Calling for nominees for the OpenStreetMap Awards 2019

We are announcing the call for nominees for the OpenStreetMap Awards 2019, which will be presented this September at the State of the Map 2019 conference in Heidelberg!

These are community awards, as nominees and winners are chosen by the community. The Awards strive to be a worldwide event for all OpenStreetMap members, including developers, mappers, community leaders, blog writers and everyone else. We need your help to find the best of OpenStreetMap globally.

For the fourth awards, we have made some changes. Gone are the three regional categories. Sorry. We have strong enough OSM representation in these countries to be listed together with other candidates. Also, there is a new category: Team Achievement Award. Companies, teams and groups should go there, to not compete with people in other categories. We had quite a lot of issues because of that mixing previously: how do you compare a mapper and an entire local chapter?

We’re mostly looking for new innovations, so only projects/works that were announced after June 1st 2018 are eligible. The Ulf Möller Award is an exception to this. Everyone is eligible regardless of the time when they were active in the project. You personally and your friends are eligible, do add yourself! Winners of past awards and selection committee members (in their categories) cannot be nominated.

The call for nominees will close in a month — on 15th of July. Whenever you see an interesting entry on OSM diaries or in WeeklyOSM, take a moment to submit the name for the award. The more nominees we have, the more interesting the final voting will be. Please keep in mind that we have the OpenStreetMap Awards and nominate people now!

Calling for nominees for the OpenStreetMap Awards 2018

We are announcing the call for nominees for the OpenStreetMap Awards 2018, which will be presented this July at the State of the Map 2018 conference in Milan!

We will have the same categories as the last year, including three regional categories for Asia, Africa and Latin America. We strive for increasing the diversity and expect to see more great nominees who the larger community has not been aware yet. This is your chance to make yourself or people you admire visible to the entire world. Add your nominees on the awards website!

We’re mostly looking for new innovations, so only projects/works that were announced after July 1st 2017 are eligible. The Ulf Möller Award is an exception to this. Everyone is eligible regardless of the time when they were active in the project. Winners of past awards and selection committee members (in their categories) cannot be nominated.

The call for nominees will close on 31th of May. Whenever you see an interesting entry on OSM diaries or in WeeklyOSM, take a moment to submit the name for the award. The more nominees we have, the more interesting the final voting will be. Please keep in mind that we have the OpenStreetMap Awards and nominate people!

Cover photo © by Egle Ramanauskaite

Choose the best bloggers and mappers for the OSM Awards 2017

The community voting for the OpenStreetMap Awards 2017 continues! We have 45 nominees, any number of which you can support, and only nine of them will receive the award. This is a hard choice, and to help you, we are continuing the series of posts about the work nominees did.

Influential Writing Award

For the best tutorial, documentation, blog or a blog post. A text or series of texts that attracted many new people to OSM, provided an interesting outlook on the project, or inspired the community to do better things.

Carto’Cité: there are few blogs about GIS in non-English languages, and we are lucky to have this one. Carto’Cité is a geomatics agency in Nantes, France, and not only they do work for their clients, they also regularly publish very detailed tutorials for using OpenStreetMap data in QGIS, uMap and other open tools.
Joost Schouppe: being the most visible member of the Belgian community, he organizes local events and publishes a very diverse and useful diary. He writes in detail about analysing OSM data, using data from government, about impact of mapping parties and Missing Maps events, and interviews interesting people.
BushmanK: he has posted many thoughtful diary posts about various aspects of OpenStreetMap, which make you question everything: mapping time zones, adding name translations, tagging man-made structures, using signs for names, and even governance of the map.
Ramani Huria: they are the very active community in Tanzania, and their blog is full not only with event reports, but with tutorials on JOSM, QGIS and mapping techniques, in both English and Swahili. Their articles are useful both to people from their country and to everyone else.
Arun Ganesh: better known as PlaneMad, he is the leader of the Mapbox’s data team, always watching for errors on the map and analysing data, examining mapping applications or styling maps in his spare time. All of that you can see in his blog, complete with diagrams, screenshots and funny pictures.

Greatness in Mapping Award

For significant contributions to the map data, or exemplary mapping: micro-mapping, clean-up, mapping towns from scratch, proper imports.

xscvxc: while most of us map cities we live in, xscvxc is busy mapping small towns in his region, not on the radar of urban mappers. In his 2.8 million edits he perfected his home town and proceeded to improve many other rural areas of Novosibirsk Region in Russia.
Russell Deffner: to predict and prevent malaria disease spread, you need all the settlements and their buildings on the map. Russel has coordinated a global effort to map more than 4 million buildings across 7 countries, which is a lot. Read about this on the HOT project page.
Jochen Topf: in March there were a quarter million old-style multipolygons, and now there is none. All thanks to Jochen, who is coordinating the continuing series of polygon fixing tasks, complete with statistics, maps and explanations. Subscribe to this github issue to learn about new tasks, and help him make the OSM data simpler to use.
Bishal Bhandari: for a year and a half he has been actively mapping cities in Nepal: Kathmandu, Pokhara, Tikapur and others. There are few days he goes without adding something to the map: even today he’s drawn a lot of school buildings there.
katpatuka: if you’ve been in OpenStreetMap for at least a year, you’ve sure seen edits by katpatuka. In his 10 years of editing he made 30 million changes, mostly to Turkey and China. There is no point in showing his editing heat map: he has touched almost every point on Earth, focusing on less-developed areas. And he had not slowed down: it’s like if everyone else leaves OSM, thanks to katpatuka the map will still be complete eventually.

We hope you have made your choices — head to the OSM Awards website and mark people and groups that you think did the best job the previous year. You can choose any number of nominees, and the choice can be changed at any moment before the voting closes on the 16th of August. We’ll return next week to look at the regional categories.

Choose the best among us at OSM Awards 2017

The community voting for the OpenStreetMap Awards 2017 is open! During the call for nominees you submitted more than a hundred of them. Then a number of active community members have prepared a shorter list. Now it is again your turn: choose who gets an award at the ceremony at the State of the Map in Japan.

This time you would need to consider 45 nominees in 9 categories. That is a tiny fraction of active community members who did good in the past year, but still a lot to choose from. To make your task simpler, we have made a couple of changes.

You don’t have to select only one nominee for a category: that was a hard choice last year, and most of the time you’d wish you had more votes. Now you have! Choose as many as you like, even all of them. This process is called Approval Voting: studies show it is much fairer that the regular one-vote voting, and much easier to understand than STV. The winner is still determined by the number of votes.

And do use the fact that you can change or add to your votes at any time until the voting ends (that would be on 16th of August). We will cover all nominees in this blog, so you could make an informed choice. Starting right now, with the two technical categories. Nominees are listed in a random order.

Core Systems Award

For outstanding contributions to any of the core tools, systems, processes or resources. Not limited to systems under OSMF control. The Rails port, mapnik, and any other tool that mappers use on a daily basis, knowingly or not, are eligible.

Hartmut Holzgraefe: the old MapOSMatic service for printing atlases went offline, but Hartmut set up the fork last year. And he did not stop at that: every week he is improving it in different ways. He has the biggest collection of map styles ready for printing. He added email notifications and fixed UI issues. You can even add your data on top of the map.
Bryan Housel: you know iD, our amazing web-based editor. Bryan is supervising its development. Recently he has added a tutorial to it, and it is years ahead of what other OSM software offer. That tutorial even has an entire imaginary town to play with!
Andy Allan: he has been improving OSM in small ways long before, but just a month ago Andy joined the website maintainers team and immediately started working on improving the code. And before that he upgraded all the tests for the website: important, but not very fun work, we guess.
Kevin Bullock: as an employee of DigitalGlobe, he has been always asked at State of the Map conferences about new satellite imagery for OpenStreetMap. This Spring, due to his efforts, we finally got two new imagery layers. You must have already seen them in your editor of choice.
Paul Norman and Matthijs Melissen: for more than half a year these two had been working on a major refactoring of our map style, the one you’ve liked even after roads changed their colours. Now all the rendering databases were reloaded, and style designers can finally use any tags they like: surface, covered, public_transport, you name it.

A slide from the 2016 ceremony

Innovation Award

For the best new service or approach. New tools for contributing data, image recognition, trace or OSM data analysis, new mapping approach or new perspective on old tools.

Michael Straßburger: do “telnet mapscii.me” in a console, and you will see a map of the whole world, rendered with letters and punctuation. MapSCII is a brilliant example of all our map rendering technologies at work: vector tiles from the last year winner OSM2VectorTiles, mapbox GL styles, vector transformations. While visually simple, it proves we can do anything with our map.
Yuri Astrakhan: people have long used SPARQL queries with Wikidata, and Yuri’s service links that with the spatial OSM database using 750 thousand “wikidata” keys we have. Now you can query for cities more than 2000 years old or get first ascension time for mountain peaks and get OSM identifiers for these.
OpenTopoMap maintainers: made by Stefan, Philipp and Martin, OpenTopoMap renders the whole world in a topographic style falimiar to tourists and hikers. It also provides weekly updated Garmin extracts, so you don’t have to buy paper maps for a trip.
Tobias Zwick: he is the author of the StreetComplete android map editor. Announced just in March, it has taken mappers by the storm, with half a million edits made by 5000 users. The app makes it very easy to map important properties of roads and amenities. Tobias constantly improves the app and listens to the comments on mailing lists and on GitHub.
Sajjad Anwar: visualizing changesets is one of the hardest problems in OpenStreetMap. Most of us has been using Achavi, but it is slow due to the nature of requests to Overpass API. Sajjad removed the need for querying by creating a cache of all recent changesets, so visualizing takes less than a second. His work is already used by the OSMCha, a validation tool, and could possibly be integrated into the OSM website.

Now that you know what these ten nominees did, head to the OSM Awards website and click on these you think should get an award for their work. We’ll return next week to look at writing and mapping categories.

Photo of the certificate © Blog Conhecer OpenStreetMap

Calling for nominees for the OpenStreetMap Awards

Announcing the second OpenStreetMap Awards, awarded this August at the State of the Map 2017 conference in Japan!

This is a community award: nominees and winners are chosen by the community. We are now opening the Call for Nominees, to learn more about the amazing contributors to OpenStreetMap. The Awards strive to be a worldwide event for all OpenStreetMap members, including developers, mappers, community leaders, blog writers and everyone else. We need your help to find the best of OpenStreetMap globally.

For the second awards, we added three more categories focussed on Asia, Africa, and Latin America, three continents under-represented in OpenStreetMap. We strive for increasing the diversity and expect to see more great nominees who the larger community has not been aware yet. This is your chance to make yourself or people you admire visible for the entire world. Add your nominees on the awards website!

We’re mostly looking for new innovations, so only projects/works that were announced after August 1st 2016 are eligible. The Ulf Möller Award is an exception to this. Everyone is eligible regardless of the time when they were active in the project. Winners of past awards and selection committee members (in their categories) cannot be nominated.

The call for nominees will close on 9th of July, and shortly after that we will start the second round, choosing the award recipients. Please nominate!

Propose your session for State of the Map 2017!

In August the OpenStreetMap community will be coming together for our annual State of the Map conference, this year in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan. It is set to be an exciting three day event where mappers, programmers, practitioners, entrepreneurs, and policy makers will share their passion for OpenStreetMap.

We invite you to submit your session proposals for the 2017 State of the Map, by Sunday, 2nd April 2017.

You are encouraged to submit proposals for 20 minute talks, 5 minute lightning talks, and 75 minute workshops that will result in progress and excitement in the world of OpenStreetMap. Again, the deadline is Sunday, 2nd April 2017.

Apply here

In addition to our website, we are also delighted to introduce you to the logo for State of the Map 2017. Aizu-Wakamatsu is one of the historical cites in Tohoku district, Japan. As such the design contains elements inspired by the Tsuruga Castle, the circular emblems of feudal lords of Aizu Clan, and the letters “會津” that were used for Aizu during the Edo period. You can read more about the design here, and our thanks go to Shunnosuke Shimizu for the wonderful logo.

We have our winners!

A group photo of all the nominees on the stage of the State of the Map conference

On September 25th we announced the winners of the OpenStreetMap Awards, for which hundreds of mappers voted this month. The results are:

The Core Systems Award went to Roland Olbricht for the Overpass API.
The Innovation Award went to Manuel Roth and Lukas Martinelli for OSM2VectorTiles.
The Influential Writing Award went to the WeeklyOSM Team for their weekly news blog.
The Greatness in Mapping Award went to Martin Ždila for mapping a lot of hiking routes.
The Expanding the Community Award went to Pascal Neis for his community maps.
The Ulf Möller Memorial Award went to Frederik Ramm.

All the nominees are doing important work for improving OpenStreetMap, making it better and more visible. We cannot thank you enough! Also thanks to everyone who voted and to these who spend their hours on the open maps. Please continue the good work, and prepare to nominate each other for the next awards. See you next year!

Vote for the Best at the OpenStreetMap Awards

This year, for the first time in history of our project, we are preparing for the first OpenStreetMap Awards, which will be presented this September at the State of the Map 2016 conference in Brussels.

community_yellow_people

Again, this is a community award: nominees and winners are chosen by you, the community. During the preliminary stage, you have submitted more than a hundred nominees for six categories, including the Ulf Möller Memorial Award. From those, a group of active members of the OSM Foundation have prepared a short list: five candidates for each category. It definitely was not simple: a lot has happened during the past year, and we had to omit some good nominees to fit in these five slots. With the remaining list we’re left thinking “can we just award all of them?”, but there can be only one winner (for each category). So the rest is up to you!

Please vote for your nominees on the awards website. For each of the six categories, choose one nominee. Whoever gains the most votes by the end of the voting, on September 22nd, will receive the award. The winners will be announced on Sunday, September 25th, at the State of the Map conference.

Nominate Your Heroes for the OpenStreetMap Awards

Announcing the OpenStreetMap Awards, awarded for the first time this September at the State of the Map 2016 conference in Brussels!

Add your nominees on the awards website. There are six categories: Core Systems, Innovation, Writing, Mapping, Community and the Ulf Möller Memorial Award. You can nominate up to ten people, groups or organizations for each category. Eligible are projects or works that were announced after August 1st, 2015, except for the Ulf Möller Award, for which everyone is eligible regardless of the time when they were active in the project.

The call for nominees will close August 27th, and shortly after that we will start the second round, choosing the award recipients. Please nominate!