Author Archives: Richard Weait

Help find who killed Ulf

We had sad news in January that our friend Ulf had been murdered in
Germany. Ulf’s family have asked if we can help find those who
murdered Ulf? Please see the up-to-date reports, and photos of
suspects:

http://ulf-m.blogspot.com

And please circulate. Help find Ulf’s killer(s).

We’re asking for the OSM community’s help. The people who
killed Ulf haven’t been found yet, very probably because they left the
country the morning after the crime. East European mappers, especially
from Lithuania or Poland, might have seen them, or they might at least
know about message boards in their language where the pictures and
description can be posted.

At http://ulf-m.blogspot.com, there are now English, Lithuanian and
Russian language versions, a Polish Version will follow. We are
thankful for any help in circulating our appeal in any appropriate
form.

Ulf Möller

The OpenStreetMap Foundation has learned of the death of our friend and colleague, Ulf Möller.

Update: Help find the killer

Ulf’s family have asked if we can help find Ulf’s killer(s)? Please see the photos of the murder suspects and help if you can.

Ulf Möller, 1972 - 2012

Ulf discovered OpenStreetMap in 2007 and mapped in Munich and Hamburg as well as in other countries. He was the first German elected to the OpenStreetMap Foundation Board in 2009/2010 and served on the License Working Group with attention to detail, concern for the German OpenStreetMap community and courteous persistence.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation Board offers sincere condolences to Ulf’s family on behalf of the OpenStreetMap community. We are saddened and shocked by his untimely death.

The family has requested privacy at this difficult time. Please use the comments in this post to share your memories of Ulf and condolences for the family. They will know where to find them when they are ready.

Ulf’s family has kindly provided the above photograph of Ulf as we will remember him; Smiling, happy, cycling, and apparently mapping with his GPS.

Top Ten Tasks

Contribute to the OpenStreetMap developer community by getting involved in the Top Ten Tasks!

OpenStreetMap is huge, with an extensive and varied community. Our data is used in applications for specialty and general audiences, for devices common and rare. The infrastructure that we rely upon, as members of the OpenStreetMap community is continually improved in ways more- or less-visible and with more or less celebration.
As an example, we’ve improved our friends recently. This is a small, visible improvement in the OSM web site. You might just think, “Wow, how did we go so long without this function?” If you are logged into the web site, now you can view the recent changesets by the contributors that you have added as your friends.

http://openstreetmap.org/browse/friends

This new feature sprang from a discussion on the talk@ list two weeks ago. Toby Murray made the suggestion. Mikel Maron liked the idea so much that he wrote some code[1] and Tom Hughes refined Mikel’s patch then merged it into the rails port so that we can all use it.

There are many other ways, large and small, for developers to contribute to OpenStreetMap. The Engineering Working Group, has updated the Top Ten Tasks list with some eagerly anticipated projects. There are projects that involve Rails, javascript, flash, flex, python, django and others. If you have always wanted to dig into a substantial project, with other top-notch developers, these are the projects for you.

Photo ©R.Weait, used by permission.

Languages and OpenStreetMap Foundation

Photo by R. Steven Rainwater

In March 2011 the Communication Working Group tried to make the OSMF accessible to more people by posting in more languages. As a test we added German and French to the OSMF Blog. We’re still working on improving this by making each article available. But this experiment is already a success based on the feedback that we are getting from you.

It has been successful because of the volunteers who add the translations. Thanks go to Daniel Begin and Michael Schulze for helping us reach out to more mappers in French and German.

Shortly we’ll add Russian translations as well thanks to Eugene Usvitsky. Our web statistics tell us that Russian speakers are the next-most-frequent visitors to the OSMF site. The OSMF wants to reach out in other languages as well. Would you like to help? The workload is irregular and you can work from home. 🙂 If you are interested, contact the Communication Working Group at communication@osmfoundation.org

We will consider adding translations to the site for any language except perhaps Klingon; we’re undecided on Klingon. If you can help with some of the languages that are more-frequently used in OpenStreetMap, please let us know.

If you would like to test us out first, and see how you like working with the Working Groups on a smaller, temporary project, the License Working Group has a small translation project that you can help with right now. Contact legal@osmfoundation.org if you would like to help with Czech, Chinese, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, Hungarian, Romanian, Norwegian, Slovakian, Greek, Korean, Turkish or Croatian.

Klingon photo by R. Steven Rainwater on Flickr is licensed CC-By-SA

Improving OpenStreetMap reliability and performance

macro photo of pound coins

OpenStreetMap is growing fast. We’ve recently welcomed our 500,000th signed up user, and we’ve logged our 10.000.000 th update to the map. Over the next few weeks we’re running a fund-raising drive while we invest in server infrastructure to improve reliability and performance of OpenStreetMap. If you’d like to support the project in this way, or you know anybody else who would like to give OSMers an early Christmas present, visit our fund raising site:

http://donate.openstreetmap.org/server2011

You have the option to include your name on the donors list. We’re aiming to raise £15,000 (~ 23,000 U.S. dollars). Let’s see how quickly we hit the target!

We wanted to run another fund raising drive, because last time we had a big one was back in 2009 (old blog post) and we were blown away by how quickly we raised the target amount. It seemed as though people were looking for an outlet for their generosity and goodwill towards the project. Since we’re planning to buy a new server, now seems like a good time to do it again.

The Operations Working Group, which has the important role of keeping core OSM services running smoothly, plans to invest in a new server. This will provide us with a database replica. This improvement is at the very core of the OpenStreetMap infrastructure, giving services greater resilience. It means we’ll bounce back quicker and easier in the event of a hardware failure. In time the new server will also bring about some performance improvements. We have a wiki page with more technical details and plans for the new hardware.

We hope you’ll agree that, although these improvements are very much behind-the-scenes, they are important. Please give generously to help make them happen!

Photo credit: Pound coins by William Warby CC-By-SA

SotM 2012 Call for Venues is now open

We’ve had 5 great State of the Map conferences. Manchester, Limerick, Amsterdam, Girona and Denver. Big question is: where are we going to be in 2012?

We would like to have your help with finding a great venue for the largest annual OpenStreetMap conference.

Would you like to have the 2012 edition of State of the Map in your city? Submit your proposal on our Call for Venues page on the wiki. More details about criteria and the information we would like to have from you can also be found at that wiki page.

We hope to announce our 2012 venue in the beginning of the new year.

The next OpenStreetMap conference

We’ve had 5 great State of the Map conferences. Manchester, Limerick, Amsterdam, Girona and Denver. Big question is: where are we going to be in 2012?

We would like to have your help with finding a great venue for the largest annual OpenStreetMap conference.

Would you like to have the 2012 edition of State of the Map in your city? Submit your proposal on our Call for Venues page on the wiki. More details about criteria and the information we would like to have from you can also be found at that wiki page.

We hope to announce our 2012 venue in the beginning of the new year.

Half A Million And Counting

We reached 500,000 registered OpenStreetMap users last night. Yes. That’s an army of half a million people who can edit OpenStreetMap!

This project is all about mass collaboration. Thousands of people coming together on the internet to build something great: a free map of the world. If you’d like to join these ranks, head to openstreetmap.org and hit the sign up link in the top right hand corner. We’d love to have you!

When you have an account on OpenStreetMap.org you can edit and add to the map. This is what it’s all about. We need lots of people, not just to join, but to progress on to the next step where the fun really starts. Zoom in on your neighbourhood and move across to the edit tab, to enter the map editing interface. If you didn’t already try this (we know there’s lots of you), give it a go today! Contact the community if you have any questions or problems. Let us know what’s holding you back. In recent months we’ve made great strides in making it easier to edit the map, with a stream of innovations from developers of the editors, and initiatives to create new documentation. But there’s plenty more work to do on this, so that OpenStreetMap can reach a million users, and (more importantly) so that all these users will have a go at editing!