Check out the MetaPlaces conference in San Jose in September. Good crowd of speakers including yours truly.
As Tyler Bell of Yahoo! is quoted on the website:
“I’m delighted to see this focus on an holistic location aware experience and business. The future of geo technologies has very much outgrown its origins in the traditional automotive sector.”
When you’re 5 years old you get asked questions like “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Well, OpenStreetMap is 5 years old and there are a few answers to that question. But maybe a good first answer would be “banned on Google Enterprise maps”. You must of made an impact by then, huh? And yes, it’s true!
[…] You agree not to, and not to allow third parties or Your End Users, to use the Services or Content: […] to use or display Tele Atlas’ US Address Points obtained from the Services on a base map comprised of map data or content provided by International Publishers NV, NavNGo Kft., NAVTEQ Corporation, OpenStreetMap Foundation, or Zenrin Co., Ltd. […]
Check it out on the Google Maps API Premier Acceptable Use Policy.
Last weekend the OSM servers received a major reorganisation, tidy and new machines including beasts like the new tile server yevaud which has ‘only’ 24Gb of RAM and a few terabytes of storage. You can read more about what was done on the wiki page.
Here you can see the internet’s Matt Amos opening the new boxes:
And here the interwebs Andy Allan of OpenCycleMap fame in an action shot:
Two days of hard work led to some super professional server cabinets all neatly stashed and humming away:
As well as Matt and Andy, Grant Slater (see more below), Cragg Nilson, Kai, Frederik Ramm and Dave Stubbs all helped out so big thanks to them!
Whilst at the OSM 5th Anniversary Party I had the chance to chat with a number of people and put together some videos using the awesome Flip HD camera (Amazon UK
I did an interview at the excellent Fire Station Pub in London last week, you can check it out here
The brilliant part about crowd sourcing mapping data is that, unlike Wikipedia articles, there’s less of a chance of bias. There’s no opinion involved. Either a road is there or it isn’t. The only issues have been over road naming in the disputed area of Northern Cyprus and the odd bit of accidental map graffiti.
Super genius Matt Amos built this map of OSM mailing list activity:
It shows first where we have mailing lists and second the level of activity in terms of number of posts per month.
And this one shows the posts per capita measured in posts per million people.
So the clear disparities are there, but we can fix them and begin to build communities across all those grey areas.
Jesus Holy Mother ZOMG amazing level 5 priority 3 DEFCON 7 amazing awesome.
This made my year, it’s super turbo incredible stupendous.
I will personally buy a bottle of champagne for anyone who brings anything half as good to the party on Saturday! So, watch this:
The OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF) has it’s annual elections coming up this weekend. Here’s the fun facts:
Check out the AGM wiki page and especially the crucial election of board members. The entire OSMF board is up for election as well as some new faces. Each has a manifesto, lists their affiliations, race and pet cat ownership. Who you vote for ultimately helps set the direction of parts of the project and continues to support almost all aspects of it, from the SOTM conference to running the servers.
Then afterward, we have the 5th anniversary OSM meetup with much food, drink and merryment!
Please do come, and note down yourself on the wiki page because it’s going to be at least 23% more awesome than any other OSM event you’ve been to!
But this is an international effort so be sure to check out the Toronto party and run your own near you if you can’t make it!
Check out this article in Berner Zeitung BZ here (if you speak German 🙂 )
I’m at WhereCamp5280 in Denver, Colorado. 5280 refers to the number of feet in a mile since Denver is the mile high city. There are some great talks here and the conference is free and extends to tomorrow, Saturday 16th August so come along.
I did a talk about OSM of course and then Peter organised a group discussion on OSM in the USA (see above). It was really quite something as it was the first time we had a group of people who are already doing things with OSM. People from USGS, ESRI, universities and companies who are using the data and running events like mapping parties. Of course we’ve had impromptu groups like this in Europe for the some time, and BOFs at things like Where 2.0 in the US. But, from my experience so far the ones in the USA have mainly been people new to the project. So, it’s a milestone for the US community, and it’s great!
Unlike some crowdsourced projects that have fizzled, OSM has managed to attract a large following of enthusiastic contributors who constantly “trace” routes they take by car, bike or foot. Users tag points on their routes, and share the resulting places of personal interest on the maps with other users. Some of the bigger map providers also offer such geo-tagged metadata, like Google’s MyMaps.
Check out the webmonkey article over here.
