Author Archives: Steve Coast

What wherecamp.eu will be like tomorrow…

Just like cartmanland! “So much to do at cartmanland but you can’t come! (Especially you Stan and Kyle)”

Best of luck to everyone going, seriously 🙂 , but hope we can organise an overflow quickly…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIoQJmK7Vto?wmode=transparent]

I brought my wherecamp ’09 tshirt and everything

Photo

FAILCAMP.EU

Love_your_job

Does anyone have a spare wig, mustache or other disguise to get in to wherecamp.eu? The liberal elite at wherecamp.eu have denied your humble author entry.

Seems there are quite a few people who can’t get in, too :-O I propose all of us proles meetup for an impromptu overflow meeting. We’ll call it RealWhereCamp.EU or something, we can do maybe fri/sat or maybe just Sat. I can organise some space probably for a meet.

Can the Wherecamp.eu people please message all their members and those on the waiting list with this post? We can organise things in the comments to this post, lets see how many people are about and up for it, please tweet this post too.

State of the Map USA

Those crazy cats in Washington DC have announced the SOTM in the USA, it’ll be in a (very) hot Atlanta in August. Read on for the full details…

U.S. State of the Map National Conference: Call for Papers

The OpenStreetMap-US National Chapter is proud to announce the first annual U.S. State of the Map Conference will be held August 14-15, 2010 in Atlanta, Georgia. This fun-filled and informative two day event will showcase presentations from some of the best and brightest members of the US OSM community and provide a platform to introduce the world’s largest online collaborative open geodata project to a larger American audience.

Location The conference will be held at the Georgia World Congress Center (http://www.gwcc.com/), located in the heart of Atlanta, Georgia; directly across the street from CNN World Headquarters and the Georgia Aquarium.
Call for PapersOpenStreetMap-US invites submissions from mappers, academics, policy makers, developers, geo-hackers, business leaders and open geodata supporters around the country. So, if you are involved in OpenStreetMap as a mapper, developer, community organizer – or if you use OSM in your business, research or other projects, we encourage you to submit your presentation. Submission is open to everyone in the community, no matter how new you are to the project.
Key ContactsIf you would like to submit a paper, please contact US-SOTM Speaker Committee chairwoman Kate Chapman at papers@maploser.com
Please note that the email for paper submissions will change as the State of the Map US website ( http://stateofthemap.us/ ) is completed. A notice will be posted to the talk-us list when that change occurs, likely towards the later part of this week.

For More Information To find out more information about the US State of the Map Conference, please visit us athttp://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_United_States/US_SOTM or http://stateofthemap.us/

To Get InvolvedAnd, as always, if you are interested in helping plan the event, secure sponsors, pick speakers or just want to find out more about how things are shaping up, please join us on our weekly conference calls. These calls are completely open. The call in details can be found on the wiki page listed above.
We look forward to seeing everyone in Atlanta, Georgia this August! Here’s to making our inaugural national OSM conference a success and the first of many more to come.

Cheers,

The US State of the Map Planning Committee

Random Acts of Mapness

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-03/uoc–if030510.php

“UC San Diego and Harvard deliver first experimental findings on spread of cooperation in a social network”

“In a study published in the March 8 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of California, San Diego and Harvard provide the first laboratory evidence that cooperative behavior is contagious and that it spreads from person to person to person. When people benefit from kindness they “pay it forward” by helping others who were not originally involved, and this creates a cascade of cooperation that influences dozens more in a social network.”

Nat talks about Open Data

http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/truly-open-data.html

“I’m kicking myself because I’ve been taking far too narrow an interpretation of “an open source approach”. I’ve been focused on getting people to release data. That’s the data analogue of tossing code over the wall, and we know it takes more than a tarball on an FTP server to get the benefits of open source. The same is true of data.”

Personally I’ve found talking to governments to be a big time sink at best.