I wanted to keep the community up to date on happenings with the SOTM committee meetings. Everyone, yes, everyone is welcome to join! Today we had a great meeting with fellow OSMers Ivan Sanchez Ortega, Will King of Geodata Solutions, Emilie Laffray, Richard Weiat just to name a few.

We talked about the current bids for 2010: both Spain and Italy are really excited to host the conference! It’s really awesome to see their enthusiasm.

As a committee we’re creating some criteria for the proposed host city. It’s not meant to limit the choices, but more help decide the best location. This makes everything very transparent and also lets unsuccessful bids figure out how to do better next time. It also lets SOTM organizers (and the OSM-F Board, if they want) to vote on the bids.

Some criteria could be:

* Easy access by public transport (plane, train, bus) with a maximum of 1.5 hour travel from major airport

* Availability of accommodation close to the venue

* Venue facilities (conference rooms, AV, WiFI, break out areas, right size)

* Venue catering

* Interestingness of the city

* How well the organizing committee will cope with the organization

* Outreach & marketing activities planned by the organizers

* Does the venue make SOTM accessible to a new group of OSMers (as opposed to the same people as last time)

With this in mind, the SOTM committee is extending the bid deadline another two weeks to December 1, 2009 and we will have a decision (drumroll please!) On December 7th.

We’re asking everyone to reach out in your circle of OSM friends to create new proposals. Twitter, FaceBook and the talk lists are just a few examples.

For information on how to write your proposal visit the the OSM wiki site here.

This is the current OSMF logo

and the OSMF has opened a competition for a new one. So get scribbling and submit your alternatives on the wiki over here.

There’s a good summary of LUG Radio Live 2009 over here including OSM happenings with a talk by Andy Robinson:

Andy Robinson, also known as “Blackadder”, is an active contributor to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) Project and is the current secretary of the OSM Foundation. OpenStreetMap is an open source project run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data. The OpenStreetMap maps are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.0 license.

It’s nothing short of spectacular watching the share price of TomTom and other PND manufacturers over the last 48 hours:

What can you say but :-O

Google just nuked from orbit the entire PND industry:

Which leaves everyone from PND manufacturers to waze to carriers wondering what’s next. There’s been lots of commentary already that I won’t repeat.

You’ve gotta give it to these guys for technical ability in any case.

Check out this use of OSM data to make music. They map longitude to time and latitude to pitch with some city data. Or you can play it directly from this post as below:

We’ve built the £800 necessary for the purchase of the openstreetmaps.org domain name, so thanks to all who donated!

Yes, it’s true:

Have a look at this PDF showing where people edited (not where they live!) over an 8 week period. Germany leads the way!