March 9th, 2011 – March 20th, 2011
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world:

• After the terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the OSM community started efforts to provide up-to-date maps of the affected region for search-and-rescue teams and other relief organizations. Information on how to get involved can be found in the wiki here; the main discussion platform is the HOT mailing list and the IRC. HOT was able to get access to post-earthquake imagery to map flooding, damaged roads and buildings. As you can see on the wiki page, the community also created special Garmin maps for download and maps highlighting things like the road status (passable/impassable).
• Kate Chapman has created some stats on the activity in Japan and Christopher Osborne did some visualizations.
• Even the Haitian OpenStreetMap mappers are contributing to the crisismapping efforts for Japan and Libya. You can do it too!
• Leigh Hunt has made an animation (gif) of the editing activity of the OSM community in Christchurch, NZ after the earthquake.
• The deadline for the Call for Papers for this years SOTM conference in Denver has been extended.
• The OpenStreetMap-Foundation blog gives you a summary of all the different Working Groups that are available for February 2011.
• A new script osm2postgresql imports OSM data into a PostGIS db. For example, it improves the rendering in QGIS.
• A new version of the WordPress OSM Plugin (German article) is available. It improves some bugfixes and is campatilbe with WP 3.1.
• Pascal wrote a blog post about the “Growing agreement of the new Contributor Terms and about relicensing OpenStreetMap data (-Update-)”.
• Osm2xp is a scenery generator for the X-Plane simulator. Using OSM data, it will generate 3D buildings into X-Plane, each one with its real location and real shape.
• “MapQuest is providing several address files that contain user-provided latitude and longitude locations across the world. Our users provided these exact locations to us so that they could be mapped correctly on our MapQuest maps.”
• Skidea is offering special Garmin maps for ski resorts.
• Matt Williams built a postcode finder based on OSM data.
• ITO has launched ITO Map – “A new map overlay service for OpenStreetMap”. The different overlays do a great job in highlighting the diversity and richness of OSM data.
• OpenStreetMap was accepted for the Google Summer of Code. All the ideas are collected in the wiki here.
• A blog post about the security and ethics of live mapping in repressive regimes and hostile environments.

Authors: Pascal, Jonas & Dennis
Did we miss something? Do you want to help us collecting the news for next week’s issue?
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02/24/2011 – 03/09/2011
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world:

• Registration for the SOTM.EU is now open. Early bird tickets are 60€. The organizing team announced, that they’ve confirmed Steve Coast as a keynote speaker. The Call for Papers was also extended till 20th of March.
• MapQuest enabled bicycle and pedestrian routing for the whole world. Transit routing is now available for six cities in the US.
• The OSM User Groups Map got a new domain http://usergroups.openstreetmap.de/.
• A map of the highway status in France http://beta.letuffe.org/ (from red to blue)
• poi.openstreetmap.nl provides a POI-Export function for Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg.
• A neat data visualization video showing public transport in Rennes using OSM data donated by the city of Rennes.
• ITO World is working on ITO Map, a future map rendering service.
• The 100,000,000th way was recently added to the database.
• The OSM History Viewer has been repaired and is working again.
• For South-East Asia there (German) is a visualization available, which shows unmapped streets and waterways. In the map you can find objects which are only available in Google and not in OSM.
• Walking Papers is testing some new print features and needs your help.
• Jochen Topf has developed a tile server for Tirex using Node.js
• Christoph Eckert is generating preprocessed OSM maps for MoNav on the German dev server.
• “OSM2World is a converter that creates a three-dimensional model of the world based on OpenStreetMap data. The model can be exported to different formats.”
• OpenStreetMap is planning to participate in the Google Summer of Code again this year. Ideas will be collected here.
• The developers that worked on some awesome new features during the OpenLayers Mobile Code Sprint are looking for people to test of the new stuff.
• The Google Sketchup Plugin has its own wikipage now.
• The Firefox-plugin “Operator” extracts so-called mikroformat-information of websites (for example addresses). User:FrViPofm has extend the tool for OSM and is searching for further active developers now, who are willing to translate the French tool into several languages.
• A new build of Maperitive supports SRTM1 and custom digital elevation models (DEMS) now.
• pyTrainer is a tool for Linux with a focus on ForeRunner. It can display GPS-tracks in graphs, maps and uses OSM in its current version. An article about this topic can be found here HanBlog.net (German).
• The company Omniscale announced a free OSM parser (imposm.parser).
• OpenTrail, an Android OSM app for walkers and hikers, has been released.
• With the new version of the “Open GPS Tracker” Android app, you can now upload GPX files directly to the OSM server.
• Fixing things in the OSM database without actually knowing what you’re doing is always a bad idea – here’s a recent example.
• An iPhone app was causing several outages and periods of slowness last week due to an abusive breach of our tile usage policy.

Authors: Pascal,Jonas & Dennis
Did we miss something? Do you want to help us collecting the news for next week’s issue?
You can contact us via mail or Twitter.