Category Archives: Party

Happy 18th Anniversary, OpenStreetMap :)

*Cake for OpenStreetMap’s 18th anniversary, celebrated by OSM Bangladesh at BSMRSTU (Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Science and Technology University). Photo by Sawan Shariar, CC-BY-SA 4.0*

This Sunday, 7th of August 2022,
we are celebrating 18 years of OpenStreetMap!

Celebrations started the previous week and will continue for one more week. So, how do you plan to celebrate? 🙂

Planning to organise an online or in-person event? Please add your event to the OSM wiki! If wiki editing isn’t your thing, email communication@osmfoundation.org with your event details and we’ll add it 🙂

Making a birthday cake? See previous examples of OSM cakes for inspiration. Don’t forget the attribution!

You could post why you love OpenStreetMap 🙂 Remember to use the hashtag #OpenStreetMap18 on social media.

Posting photos of celebrations? If your photos are accompanied with the text “CC-BY-SA 4.0” (or another open license), we can add them to the OSM wiki (or feel free to add them yourself! ~ register here).

Or you could post a photo of yourself holding a written message 🙂

Planning an online party or mapathon?

You can use the BigBlueButton video server of the OpenStreetMap Foundation! To get a free account and your own video room, please signup.

You can use your video room even after the birthday, for any OSM-related event.
Community members in low-bandwidth environments may benefit from using BigBlueButton’s low-bandwidth settings.
Please add your event to the OSM wiki! If wiki editing isn’t your thing, email communication@osmfoundation.org with your event details and we’ll add it 🙂

Join us!

Observance of the anniversary of the creation of OpenStreetMap is held on or about the 9th of August, which is the anniversary of the registration of the OpenStreetMap.org domain name. The concept of OpenStreetMap predates the domain name registration, but that seems a suitable anniversary date 🙂

Happy celebrations everyone 🙂

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Do you want to translate this and other blogposts in another language..? Please send an email to communication@osmfoundation.org with subject: Helping with translations in [language]

OpenStreetMap was founded in 2004 and is an international project to create a free map of the world. To do so, we, thousands of volunteers, collect data about roads, railways, rivers, forests, buildings, and a lot more worldwide. Our map data can be downloaded for free by everyone and used for any purpose – including commercial usage. It is possible to produce your own maps which highlight certain features, calculate routes, etc. OpenStreetMap is increasingly used when one needs maps that can be very quickly, or easily, updated.

100 million edits to OpenStreetMap

Today, the 100 millionth changeset was uploaded to OpenStreetMap. This milestone represents the collective contribution of nearly 1 billion features globally in the past 16+ years, by a diverse community of over 1.5 million mappers.

The result is the largest free and open map dataset in the world, providing critical infrastructure for understanding our planet and running our society.

Changeset number 100,000,000 was uploaded by user Lamine Ndiaye. They added buildings in Nianiane, Sénégal. Look out for an interview with this mapper in an upcoming edition of WeeklyOSM.

100 million times a mapper has chosen to share their knowledge of the world with everyone. 100 million thanks of appreciation. And our mapping is growing and accelerating. Changeset 90 million was only about 6 months ago.

Will you join us as we make the next 100 million contributions? Get started now!

Celebrate the 16th OSM anniversary!

*The 16th OpenStreetMap anniversary will be celebrated on the 8th of August, 2020!* *Image*: *Fictional map data rendered with the standard style of osm.org (osm-carto). CC-BY-SA 3.0, trademarks apply.*

On Saturday, 8th of August 2020,
we will celebrate 16 years of OpenStreetMap!

Planning an online party or mapathon?

You can use the BigBlueButton video server of the OpenStreetMap Foundation! To get a free account and your own video room, please signup.

You can use your video room even after the birthday, for any OSM-related event.
Community members in low-bandwidth environments may benefit from using BigBlueButton’s low-bandwidth settings.
Please add your event to the OSM wiki! If wiki editing isn’t your thing, email communication@osmfoundation.org with your event details and we’ll add it 🙂

Other ideas

Post why you love OpenStreetMap. We will publish a collection of messages later 🙂
Post a photo of yourself holding a written message 🙂
Use the hashtag #OpenStreetMap16 on social media
Make/order a birthday cake. See previous examples of OSM cakes for inspiration. Don’t forget the attribution!
If your photos are accompanied with the text “CC-BY-SA 2.0” (or another open license), we can add them to the OSM wiki (or feel free to add them yourself! ~ register here).
Do you have more ideas? Share them in the comments 🙂

Join us!

Get notified about new blogposts: Subscribe to the RSS feed!

Do you want to translate this and other blogposts in another language..? Please send an email to communication@osmfoundation.org with subject: Helping with translations in [language]

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation, formed 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, is financially supported by membership fees and donations, and organises the annual, international State of the Map conference. It has no full-time employees and it is supporting the OpenStreetMap project through the work of our volunteer Working Groups. Please consider becoming a member of the Foundation.

OpenStreetMap was founded in 2004 and is a international project to create a free map of the world. To do so, we, thousands of volunteers, collect data about roads, railways, rivers, forests, buildings and a lot more worldwide. Our map data can be downloaded for free by everyone and used for any purpose – including commercial usage. It is possible to produce your own maps which highlight certain features, to calculate routes etc. OpenStreetMap is increasingly used when one needs maps which can be very quickly, or easily, updated.

Celebrate the 15th OSM anniversary with a birthday party!

*The 15th OpenStreetMap anniversary will be celebrated on 10th of August, 2019!*
*Image by OSM Communication Working Group*, *CC-BY-SA 3 .0*. *OSM logo by Ken Vermette, CC-BY-SA 3 .0 & trademarks apply*.

The “Birthday” of OpenStreetMap is lost in the sands of time. Observance of the anniversary of the creation of OpenStreetMap is held on or about the 9th of August, which is the anniversary of the registration of the OpenStreetMap.org domain name. The concept of OpenStreetMap predates the domain name registration, but that seems a suitable anniversary date.

This year the anniversary will be celebrated on
10th of August!

Will you organise an OSM birthday party?

How to organise a community birthday party

Contact OSMers in your area and talk among yourselves. Decide what you want to do.
It can be as big or as small as you want. A few people meeting for some food/drink, or a bigger event.
Invite new people! It can be a great way to spread the word about OSM. Promote your event.
You can make/order a birthday cake. See previous examples of OSM cakes for inspiration. Don’t forget the attribution!
If you take photos, you can share them on the OSM wiki afterwards.
Edit this wiki page and put details of your event in.
Remember a core principle of OSM: Have fun!

If wiki editing isn’t your thing, email communication@osmfoundation.org with your event details and we’ll add it 🙂

Events are already planned in Japan, Belarus, Germany and the US.
Join us!

Do you want to translate this and other blogposts in your language..? Please send us an email to communication@osmfoundation.org with subject: Helping with translations in [your language]

OpenStreetMap was founded in 2004 and is a international project to create a free map of the world. To do so, we, thousands of volunteers, collect data about roads, railways, rivers, forests, buildings and a lot more worldwide. Our map data can be downloaded for free by everyone and used for any purpose – including commercial usage. It is possible to produce your own maps which highlight certain features, to calculate routes etc. OpenStreetMap is increasingly used when one needs maps which can be very quickly, or easily, updated.

1 million map contributors!

We passed a milestone recently which deserves some celebration: OpenStreetMap has now reached 1 million map contributors. Over the lifetime of our project, 1,000,000 different users have created a user account and made edits to the map! 1 million is a big number, and the growth of our community continues apace.

“At its core, OpenStreetMap is all about humans sharing knowledge about the places they visit, live and work in. Our fantastic project is only possible thanks to over a million individuals who generously volunteer their time to help others find their way in the world.”
Peter Barth – OSMF board

If you haven’t tried contributing to OpenStreetMap yet, it’s not too late to join a million others! sign up today and map your neighbourhood!

You may remember we celebrated 1 million users way back in 2013, but that was the count of signed up users — an impressive number, but not everyone who signed up has yet contributed to the map (Why have users signed up but not contributed? The reasons for this have been described in various ways over the years but similar participation patterns are seen in many online communities)

Simon Poole has been crunching the changeset logs and watching the count of map contributors tick past 1 million:

Read Simon’s diary entry for more analysis including a look at recent editor software usage trends. Of course we are tracking many other stats on our ‘stats’ page too.

So let’s celebrate! One million and still growing!

Happy New Year!

2017 has been a good year for OpenStreetMap and the OpenStreetMap foundation. Many things happened and have been achieved that push our project even further. As not everyone was able to watch out for all that great news, we’ll highlight some of 2017’s events and give you some pointers for a further read.

Kate Chapman rounded off the year with her chairperson’s report in which she highlighted the growth of the Foundation membership, enabling it to further support our project. We have almost 900 foundation members in December 2017, which is in part a success of our membership drive last year. In addition to our individual members, we have an additional 24 corporate members, thanks to our new corporate membership program which took effect on Jan 1, 2017. Besides many renewals and tier upgrades we were able to welcome two new bronze members and five new gold members, with many big players on the list. Corporate memberships are a great way for some of our biggest data users to help remove the financial burden from our mappers who already donate so much of their valued time. A larger number of corporate members also makes us less dependent on single large donors. This is a great success.

Let us not forget that it’s the mappers who ultimately power our great geographical data though, and as foundation membership has grown, so has the number of mappers. In the final weeks of 2017 we hit the milestone of 1 million map contributors! We’ll bring you some more details of what that means in another blog post. One big boost to our contributor numbers that received much public attention was Pokémon Go. The news coverage about this game making use of OpenStreetMap data encouraged many players to go edit OpenStreetMap. Back then, we even published a blog post with tips to help new mappers coming from Pokémon Go. While the Foundation and its Data Working Group received some complaints about bad edits related to the game, many more trainers made valuable changes to the map. And in the end, players with constructive, fact-based edits persisted and continue to enrich our project.

OpenStreetMap is a large project with a worldwide community and as such, we’re quite diverse. That’s also why the OpenStreetMap Foundation is pushing for more Local Chapters (LCs) to form local representations of OpenStreetMap enthusiasts. That being said, we’ve been able to welcome three(!) new Local Chapters last year already. OSM UK, was last year’s first new addition (welcome!), followed by OpenStreetMap France (welcome!). Technically there has been a third one early in December 2017! But hold your horses. We’ll be bringing an announcement of that one very soon! That means the OSMF has six Local Chapters as of now, and hopefully at least two more LCs will follow in 2018. By the way, if you’re from a local community and are interested in starting your own Local Chapter or just want to chat about it or seek input, we had some meetups at the last two SotM conferences with new ideas and have revived the local-chapters mailing list for that reason.

Speaking of SotM, the global annual conference of OpenStreetMap went to Japan this year. State Of The Map 2017 was another fantastic event, and our busy organizing committee (one of the foundation working groups which you can join!) is already ramping up to bring together the 2018 conference in Milan, Italy.

There have been many more topics and development over the year and Dorothea, responding to feedback on our foundation members’ mailing list, compiled a list of foundation tasks and projects that have been either completed during this year or are still ongoing. Furthermore, there’s also a great overview of hers that summarizes all OSMF board meeting minutes in 2017, featuring topics discussed and decisions taken.

Speaking of the OSMF board, we had board elections in December 2017 and want to take the chance to congratulate Heather Leson and Paul Norman for being voted to the board! This year’s elections have been somewhat exhausting with about 50 different threads and about 600 messages on the foundation members’ list, compared to not even half that many during the rest of the year. The language was a bit heated at times, although there were also quite a lot of interesting and valuable discussions. Let’s hope that some of this energy and passion will be channelled into year-round community involvement in foundation matters.

And so, with a great and eventful 2017 coming to an end, we’re welcoming 2018, looking forward to yet another great year for OpenStreetMap!

Mappy new year everyone!

Come join as at the State of the Map social event!

As if your 8am to 6pm State of the Map schedule was not social enough, we are packing your Saturday night with an officially sponsored State of the Map social event. And it will definitely be an event worth remembering as we convene both in silo and in style at the Brussels Event Brewery. Named after the huge tanks (‘silos’) of the former brewery, this multi functional industrial area will be home base for Belgian beers (aka drink), Belgian food (aka frites) and maybe a Belgian waffle or two.

Come join us after the social presentations close on Saturday, September 24th for the official State of the Map 2016 social event! The details for your fast recall:

Where: Brussels Event Brewery SILO room
Where 2.0: Rue Delaunoystraat 58 B/1 | B-1080
When: From 7:00 pm
What: Free Beer, food, wine and water
Who: Free of charge for anyone registered for State of the Map
Why: Because there will be a lot of mapping to talk about

Hack Weekend December 2013

Last December we had a hack weekend in London, thanks to AOL UK/MapQuest (my employer) for donating meeting space in their offices and food. About 20 people turned up and did some awesome stuff and we, at the Engineering Working Group, thought you might be interested in what went on and perhaps running your own event.

OSMers hacking away at the Hack Weekend in London, December 2013. Thanks to SK53_OSM via flickr for this photo under CC-BY-SA 2.0.

Continue reading →

Early Bird Registration for OpenStreetMap State Of The Map 2008

Just one day more for early bird registration for OpenStreetMap’s second international conference in Limerick, Ireland on the weekend of 12-13 July 2008. Drop everything and go to registration.

If you need some general travel orientation, there’s a SOTM 2008 travel page.

Limerick is 25 km from Eire’s Shannon International Airport and it is a 30-minute journey to Limerick by connecting bus running every hour (timetable) throughout the day. If you are coming in from Shannon, Dublin or Cork airports and want or can offer a ride see our ride-sharing page.

The main venue has accommodation available for our special rate of ‚¬70 single and ‚¬100 for double/twin per night including breakfast – email gillian@kilmurrylodge.com and quote “Open Street Map” – or here are some lower cost options nearby. This ~~WikiTravel~~ WikiVoyage link also has more on bus, train and car hire plus other accommodation options and what to see.

The venue itself is The Kilmurry Lodge to the east of the town centre [map].

A great opportunity to meet your fellow mappers from all over the world.

See you there.

Registration for The State of the Map 2008 is now open

Head over the State of the Map 2008 site to register for this year’s OpenStreetMap conference – sign-up before the 6th May to get an early bird discount.