We’ve been selected to mentor students this year. We have about six potential mentors so far, and now we need some students. If you are a student, or teach students, or know either teachers or students, and think they’d be good match for OpenStreetMap in the Summer of Code, encourage them to look through our projects, get in touch with us, and apply next week.

Many many thanks go to Spaetz for putting together our application.

It’s been pointed out a couple of times that the Foundation hasn’t been super public in its activities. In some cases it just can’t be, say if it’s secretly negotiating a data donation or something but for the most part we can waffle on about our achievements. So what have we been doing? We have monthly phone board meetings which last 2-3 hours to go over everything. A lot of it is fairly mundane like responding to communications but others take somewhat more work, things like:

• The conference. Andy, 80n and Steve from OSMF are working with NickB, cjb_ie and bigbro to put all of this together. This is itself taking an hour or so conference call per week and lots of background organisation. Expect a CFP and announcements etc in the next week or two.
• The license. Steve, Andy and Richard have been working on this. We’ve met and talked to various people including Jordan who wrote the ODL and pushed a process through on talk-legal
• xmas party, Brighton launch party and other social events
• Local chapters, GPS Unit donations and other smaller initiatives

Your friendly foundation board is available to help on these things and more.

This month, Schuyler Erle and myself will hold a series of multi-day workshops in several India cities. Researchers, students, programmers, activists and members of the community are invited to participate, learn, and take stewardship of their city. These will be very practical, hands-on days, covering the entire toolset of OpenStreetMap and empowering participants to lead the growth of free and open mapping in India. We will map India!

This kicked off by just idly chatting about bringing together Mumbai Free Map and OpenStreetMap. Schuyler had worked with CRIT over the past couple years to bring extensive geographic data of Mumbai online, and spread the word of open source geo. Why not share with OSM? Well that quickly spiraled into an idea for a continent wide month long trip. And it would have remained just an idea, if not for the amazing organizing that has taken place in just a few months. We’re now geared up to visit six cities — Pune, Mumbai, Trivandrum, Bangalore, Delhi, Kolkotta — and educate, and learn, and discuss, and MAP! If anyone reading is based in these cities, or has connections there, and are interested in participating, please do get in touch.

We’ve been organizing on the FreeMap wiki, and will also be bringing the OSM India wiki page up to date. You can find full details on the workshops there. There’s a Google Calendar for the OSM India events and dates in the OSM Current Events calendar as well.

So I will be blogging, obsessively if there’s time, on Brain Off, posting photos to flickr with tag freemapindia2008, making animations and other artifacts, and of course, maps.

Thanks everyone who has helped bring this to reality — I can’t quite believe this is actually happening. Fantastic!