Call for Papers for the StateoftheMap 2009 is now open

What are the burning OpenStreetMap issues that you want to talk about?  Have you been working on the next killer OpenStreetMap application?  Have you been promoting mapping and opengeodata, holding mapping parties and tirelessly mapping in the sun, rain, wind and snow?

The call for papers for the third international StateoftheMap conference is now open.  The OpenStreetMap Foundation invite contributions from mappers, geo-hackers and open geodata supporters around the world.  If you are involved in OpenStreetMap mapping, coding or community organization – or if you want the chance to present your ideas or opinions to the OpenStreetMap community, you should submit a paper to the StateoftheMap 2009.

Themes for 2009 are:

OSM 2010 – Taking OSM from 100,000 to 1,000,000 contributors

OpenStreetMap has come a long way in a very short space of time.  With 100,000 contributors all around the world, OpenStreetMap has its future ahead.  But there are also some big challenges ahead.  How can OpenStreetMap continue to support new mappers around the world?  How can the successes of mappers from well mapped countries be repeated in the unmapped world?  What will a community of 1,000,000 mappers look like and what technical infrastructure needs to be put in place to support OSM’s growth?  What are the new challenges that the OSM community must rise to in order to attract more mappers from diverse cultural backgrounds?  What lessons can be learned from other open-source and open content communities who have made the transition from bedroom projects to world renowned successes?

New Mapping Frontiers – Expanding OSM into new communities, new regions and mapping new features with OSM

OSM started with some roads and footpaths in central London and now includes 1000s of different types of geodata around the world.  As OSM continues its goal to provide a free map of the world, where will the line be drawn between “mappable” and “unmappable”.  The third and fourth dimensions, indoor mapping and historic mapping are all there for the taking.  What about aerial imagery?  Will UAVs and community contributed aerial data provide detailed, open datasets?  Is there really such a thing as “ground-truth”, or is all mapping subject to interpretation?  What about subjective data: where do reviews, ratings and personal opinions fit in the OSM database?  As OSM is taken up by new communities, what are the cultural barriers that need to be broken to make sure that new mapping frontiers are crossed?

OSM Application Development – Building applications that use the OSM APIs

OSM’s APIs provide a great base for all kinds of application development.  What are the killer apps of 2009?  Will this be the year of the OSM Mobile Editor?  How can OSM’s trailblazing cartography continue to break new ground?  What are the “enterprise” tools and services that are bring OSM maps to new users around the world?

Tools Tips and Techniques – Practical workshops that take a deep dive into a specific area of OSM

Are you power user of an OSM tool?  If you’d like to share your expertise with OSM editors, cartography tools or OSM APIs, you can propose a session to host.  Maybe you want to learn more about a particular area of OSM – if so you can also request a session to be given.

Session Formats

  • Talk – present your paper in either a 15 or 30 minute slot with time for questions afterwards
  • Discussion Sessions – Groups of 5 – 15 people hold an informal group discussion of a special interest topic
  • Lightening Talks – 5 minutes to say your piece.  Sign up on the day
  • Workshops – 2 hour sessions that give OSMers the chance to take part in an in depth tutorial

The call for papers closes on the 3rd May 2009, so you have just over 6 weeks to get your abstracts in.  A provisional program will be published in mid May 2009.

To submit your paper, follow this link.  If you need any more information about submitting a session, contact Nick.

To register for the StateoftheMap 2009, click here.

Hardware Upgrade Appeal: Thank you

Wow, what a week. We launched the Hardware Upgrade appeal last Thursday to raise £10,000. And just 2 days 15 hours and 20 minutes later in the small hours of Sunday morning we reached that target.

Cray X-MP/48 Supercomputer

This all happened so quickly we were astonished and totally humbled by the generosity and goodwill towards the project. It happened so quickly in fact that we felt that a lot of people wouldn’t even have had an opportunity to donate, so we decided to keep the appeal open a bit longer.

So after exactly a week we are formally closing the appeal having raised £16,222. The donate site will still stay up but we’ll change the wording so that it’s for general fund raising and not focused on any particular need.

We have some very big thank yous to make. Firstly, we are enormously grateful to Google. The guys from the Google Open Source Programs Office really appreciate what we are doing and donated £5,000. Awesome.

Second we have to thank CloudMade. Steve and Nick are always the first people to dig deep and support the project, whether it’s tile hosting for cycle maps, organizing mapping parties or sponsoring the State of the Map conference. Once more they didn’t hesitate and donated £2,000. Thank you CloudMade.

Third, Richard Weait deserves mention. Richard does a lot for OpenStreetMap. Running mapping parties in North America, talking at countless Linux User Group meetings, coordinating mass geodata imports and, um, designing curling icons. On top of all this he donated $1,000 out of his own pocket. Props.

And last, but definitely not least, we need to thank every single other person who made a donation. Collectively you raised all the rest – in true crowd sourced style. Your roll of honour is here. Each and every single donation is really appreciated. Thank you guys.

3U server

We’ve raised enough for a new database server. It will probably be a better spec than we had planned or hoped for, so it should see us good for some time.

And with the remaining funds? Well I think everyone agrees that the wiki server could use some better hardware so we’ll be able to take care of that. Beyond that, if the community has any ideas then we’d really like to hear suggestions for what else needs a bit of a boost. Please tell us which other core services you think would benefit from a bit of help.

OSM needs new servers

Our first set of ‘real’ servers was installed by me (SteveC), Nick Black and Nick Hill utilising the latest in safe server transport – Nick Hill’s overloaded Peugeot. Here they are being modelled:

Today we’re kicking off a funding drive to raise £10,000 to buy new API database servers for the upcoming new API and server software which we call “0.6” as it’s the 6th version. Specifically we’re after a 3U Rackmount server, 2x Quadcore, 24GB RAM, 10x SAS 15kRPM disks.

OpenStreetMaps exponential growth since day one has led to increasing demands on the hardware and software clockwork which make it tick day and night, and this funding drive will put us in a fantastic position to cross the next hurdles of mapping the planet. We have incredibly dedicated volunteer sysadmins and coders building OSM today, so let’s give them the best tools for the job to continue building the most detailed map of the planet.

So please consider heading over to donate.openstreetmap.org and chip in some cash for the cause. We’ll keep you up to date with the process of buying, setting up and installing the new hardware.

Donate today!

Surveying OpenStreetMap in Africa

I’ve had a few inquiries into OSM in Africa recently, put together this brief survey of the action there. If I missed anything, post in the comments.

OpenStreetMap is growing rapidly across all of Africa. Mapping is spreading through local mappers, mappers on vacation, foreign nationals, and remote mapping using satellite imagery. A recent comparison judged that OSM had the most comprehensive coverage of Africa among web mapping services, especially in cities.

Wiki Projects

There are active African wiki projects in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Congo-Kinshasa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia .. and other places no doubt.

Particularly interesting is a project to map the entire Nile.

UN

Bo Robert Pederson of UNICEF has been informally mapping Accra and Nairobi to comprehensive levels, and will be investigating bringing OSM more directly into UNICEF’s activities. There’s strong interest in East Africa in OSM as a component of the East Africa Spatial Data infrastructure.

In cooperation with the UNJLC, Neil Penman and other volunteers from IBM importing UN data sets for Southern Sudan into OSM. We continue to explore opportunies for collaboration there.

Conferences and Mapping Parties

In September 2008, the FOSS4G conference was held in Cape Town. Open Geographic Data and OpenStreetMap emerged
as main themes of the conference. Very successful mapping parties were held in conjunction, including mapping in townships.

Local mappers in Cape Town recently negotiated the release of all street data held by the Cape Town metropolitan region,
to supplement the already stellar OSM coverage there. This link is a quick rendering of the newly freed data.

In July 2008, Wikimania (the Wikipedia conference) was held at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. OSM was presented to great reception. A mapping party was held in Cairo, and over the last six months Egypt’s maps have grown extremely
rapidly.

2009

Already a strong start to 2009, with new initiatives to promote and use OpenStreetMap in Africa.

DC Based technology consultants Development Seed have active humanitarian mapping projects using OSM in Zimbabwe, Somalia, and the DRC; And they are seeking interns to help with the effort.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation will be distributing donated GPS units to mappers in developing countries.

Not yet formally announced, the codenamed “Mappers Without Borders” project will be providing OSM mapping assistance to humanitarian response and development projects, particularly in Africa. (As a still informal entity, we’ve recently been active in mapping the Gaza Strip.)

68 GPS units donated to OSM

We are delighted to announce that OSM has received a donation of 68 GPS units. Thanks go to James Doughty of Diass who very kindly donated them.

Donated GPS Units

In addition to the 68 GPS units, which are mainly Garmin Geko 201s, James also provided an assortment of batteries, battery chargers and cables. There’s a full inventory of everything we received here (google spreadsheet).

So now we have to decide how to make the best use of them. Obvious uses are mapping parties and the GPStogo scheme, but if anyone has other good ideas for ways that we could use them then we’d really like to hear about it.