Category Archives: Funds

Funding drive – Improving OSM reliability and performance

Pound Coins
Pound Coins photo by William Warby CC-BY-2.0


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:

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!

Donation to OSMF by MapQuest/AOL

More great news for OpenStreetMap!  A gift of fifty thousand dollars has been donated by MapQuest/AOL to the OpenStreetMap Foundation. The funds follow an earlier donation by MapQuest to the Foundation in September 2010.

Donate today!

Donations to the OpenStreetMap Foundation enable OSMF to acquire and operate the infrastructure that makes OpenStreetMap work. Recently, this has meant exciting things like faster disks and more RAM for OSM servers, but it has also meant improvements in important but mundane things like back-up power and cabling.

Contributions from companies like MapQuest and from individuals like you are what keeps OpenStreetMap going. Your donations of local knowledge and GPS track files keep the OSM database growing. And your contributions of time, expertise and financial support allow the OSM infrastructure to grow with the database.

You can donate to OpenStreetMap with your credit card.

Donation for OSMF Hardware from MapQuest

MapQuest have made a donation to the OpenStreetMap Foundation. The funds will be applied to hardware improvements and will benefit OpenStreetMap contributors around the world.

The OSMF would like to thank MapQuest for their donation, as do, I’m sure, the more than 311,000 OpenStreetMap contributors who will see the benefits of the improved hardware.

You can make a donation to OpenStreetMap, too.

OpenStreetMap$.org

Ever since OpenStreetMap started to receive interest and publicity its been regularly misquoted in the plural form, OpenStreetMapS. Now thanks to some diligent work by Grant Slater we are the proud owner of the openstreetmaps.org domain.  No more will folks around the globe be able to google it badly.

Unfortunately getting the domain wasn’t cheap, in fact we had planned to run a donate drive to cover the cost before purchasing it, but such is our popularity we were concerned that the price might rise, so we’ve nipped in quick and secured it at the original offer price and now its ours.

Alas though the Foundation is now out of pocket by $1300 / £800.  Please make a donation to help us raise this to replenish the coffers for when the next opportunity arises.

Raised so far: