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.

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.

A hackday at State of the Map is a great opportunity to start working on those awesome projects that seemed unimaginable just a few days before, or to continue something already under way. Join us and get hands on with code, documentation sprints and mapping activities. What you work on is up to you!

As usual the hackday will be after the main conference, Monday the 26th of September. This year we are lucky to have found a space donated by Brussels Environment. We can use the BEL conference center with room for about 100 people right in the city center of Brussels. We will need the space because we are joining forces with OSGeo Belgium who have their FOSS4G Belgium conference the day before SOTM.

We ask you kindly to subscribe here and indicate if you want to order food. Make sure you order if you want to eat at the venue because you are not allowed to bring in outside food. We are still looking for a sponsor – but failing that, we will ask for a contribution of 6€ on the day.

All further practical details can be found on the event page. Hope to see you all there!

Your State of the Map team

Thanks to the support of our amazing sponsors we have kept the Early Bird tickets for State of the Map available for as long as possible. With less than 8 weeks to go until we gather in Brussels the Early Bird offer will soon come to an end.

You have until 7th August to grab your price savvy tickets now before normal prices kick in.

Don’t forget your accommodation though! The number of rooms available in our hotel deal drops by half when Early Bird closes so book your room before it’s too late.

Your State of the Map team

Today we’re sharing the programme of upcoming talks at State of the Map 2016 with you!

Over the last few weeks the State of the Map team have been hard at work reviewing your session proposals. We’ve translated, we’ve read, we’ve scored, we’ve filtered, we’ve talked, we’ve listened, we’ve tweaked and we’ve debated! But most of all we’ve thoroughly enjoyed learning about your exciting OpenStreetMap projects. And we’d especially like to thank you for your input via the community survey, important input to the process.

It’s been a big challenge getting to this step. We’ve picked out the best talks but with a limit of just 44, this meant some difficult decisions had to be made. We hope you enjoy the programme of talks – to join us in Brussels don’t forget to purchase your ticket and book your accommodation.

And will soon be adding the Sunday workshops, and lightning talks. There will definitely be space for you to set up informal discussion groups (“birds of a feather” session) during the event.

The FOSSGIS conference (Free and Open Source Software for Geographical Information Systems) takes place annually, usually in Germany. This year it takes place in Salzburg, Austria. Tickets are still available. Register here. Registration is free for OSM contributors.

This big conference has included OpenStreetMap as a large part of the programme, and has welcomed OpenStreetMap community attendees throughout the history of our project. We gave a round-up of local SOTM conferences previously. Essentially FOSSGIS is the local “State Of The Map” conference for the German-speaking part of the world. With over 400 attendees last year, this is a big event in general, and a big event on the OpenStreetMap calendar!

This year the conference also features a special “OSM Sunday” in the run up to the main conference. Sunday July 3rd is a day dedicated to OpenStreetMap topics. Don’t miss it! On top of that, around half of the presentations, lightning talks and workshops during the week at the conference will be on OpenStreetMap topics (other topics being around open source geo software). And don’t forget the big social event on Tuesday, July 5th.

Community voting for State of the Map 2016 is now OPEN! Inspired by the community that makes OSM a reality we want you (!!) to inform the conference program.

Community voting means you now have a say in the talks that mark this historic conference. To participate in the vote, please head over to the survey site.

After you click the link, we will ask you to prove you’re not a robot. You can provide us with your OSM username to help us with spam detection. You’ll then get a huge page of talks to rate, sorted at random. Feel free to rate as many as you like. Just don’t leave the page open for too long, as your session might time out. When you’re tired of it, just scroll down, hit Next until you can Submit your answers.

This is a breakdown of what it all means:

Voting will be open until June 10. We want to hear from the community but also know your privacy is paramount. Your vote can be anonymous if you wish, and will always be confidential.

You matter in the creation of OpenStreetMap and we want your voice to be heard in the creation of its conference. So vote!

The open source survey tool is kindly hosted by Made4it (http://www.made4it.be/), a Belgian data analysis and market research company.

On September 23 we convene in Brussels to discuss the achievements and future of OpenStreetMap at the international State of the Map 2016 conference.

SOTM 2016 Session Proposals and Scholarships! 

The call for proposals and scholarships closed the other week and the organizing committee is hard at work curating a conference from all the amazing (really amazing) applications. But we wanted to let you know something first. We had more session and scholarship submissions than ever!!! Counting any OpenStreetMap conference!! Ever!

Our world-breaking numbers for State of the Map 2016 are:

• 196 session proposals!!!!
• 157 scholarship applications!!!

Everyone has something to contribute to OpenStreetMap and so many want to be at the international conference to say it.  In the coming weeks, the conference program committee will read through each of these submissions and we’ll start to put together the program. So expect more news on the State of the Map schedule by end of June. It’s going to be an exciting summer and a geo happy September. We hope to see everyone there!