The State of the Map scholar experience

We were delighted to welcome 15 scholars to Japan for State of the Map 2017. Scholars help make State of the Map one of those unique moments in our community when we come together and share our mapping experiences in person, from literally every corner of the globe.

With the generous support of our sponsors and the tireless effort of the organizing team, for the first time at a State of the Map we achieved 100% success in visas and scholar attendance. Visas can be long and bureaucratic ordeals! Extra special thanks for Dorothea for going above and beyond in supporting this work — including calling up Japanese consulates around the world!

We asked the scholars to share a few words on the experience. We love reading about the experience and what it’s inspired for the future — required reading if you love OpenStreetMap! Here’s a few excerpts…

Anisa Kuci – full post
“After answering the questions that were kindly asked by the audience, I was ready to enjoy so many great talks, workshops and lightning talks I spotted on the agenda for the next three days, and a very productive meet-up that happened the third day of the conference, where everyone shared thoughts about how local chapters and OSM Foundation can help each-other grow bigger, and we had the opportunity to share the wish of the Albanian speaking community to become a chapter.”

Georgia Marina Andreou – full post
“The scholarship gave me the chance not only to raise awareness on the impact of natural processes on cultural heritage, but also to understand through an array of examples the truly empowering capacity of mapping. As such, I left the conference with a long list of ideas for future mapping.”

Jaisen Nedumpala – full post
കോണ്‍ഫറന്‍സില്‍ പങ്കെടുക്കുന്നതിലുപരി, ഒരു വികസിത രാജ്യത്തെ സ്ഥിതിഗതികള്‍ നേരിട്ടു കണ്ടു മനസ്സിലാക്കണമെന്ന ആഗ്രഹം കൂടിയുണ്ടായിരുന്നു മനസ്സില്‍.

Marco Minghini – full post
“Another indelible memory from SotM 2017 is the official announcement I gave during a Plenary Session about the next State of the Map conference, that my university (Politecnico di Milano) will host on July 28-30, 2018 in Milan, Italy! It was amazing to make this announcement and get that long, long applause :)”

Samaila Alio Mainassara – full post
“Cette participation m’a permis de découvrir l’écosystème OSM à travers les échanges et le partage d’expériences avec les différents participants.”

Selene Yang Rappaccioli – full post
“El espacio de discusión que se realizó durante ésta última edición del SOTM Internacional, contribuyó a crear diálogos, conocer perspectivas y esclarecer dudas sobre la necesidad de construir, no sólo el mapa más completo, sino también la comunidad más completa, donde se abarquen las diferencias, multiplicidades, diversidad de miradas y diferentes relatos y experiencias.”

Sidorela Uku – full post
“I saw that maps were more than a visualisation of our world, there is humanity, they can be as important as saving lives. This conference really affected me emocionally and also inspired me a lot. Now I want to do even more, have many things in my mind, need to set up a plan and continue contributing.”

Suthakaran Sundaralingam – full post
“I also plan to become a member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, and form an OpenstreetMap foundation in Sri Lanka.”

Tommy Godphery Davian Charles – full post
“getting acquainted with each other was a walk over, this was possible because we all spoke a common language which is ‘Maps and Development’.”

State of the Map Working Group

Let’s meet at FOSS4G+SotM Argentina 2017!

Are you living in Argentina or visiting in October?

Mark the following days on your calendar: 23-28th of October 2017!

The OpenStreetMap and FOSS4G communities will meet at a combined event in Buenos Aires, for six days full of geomatics workshops, presentations, exhibitions and interactions, ending on Saturday, October 28th, with a mapathon and hackathon day!

Are you interested? Read the detailed program.

The conference will take place at the National Geographic Institute in Buenos Aires, where many OpenStreetMap related events are hosted.

The Argentinian OSM community is very lively and you can get a glimpse of it at this recent interview on the OpenCage data blog.

You can follow the conference news on the various social media (see the image above) and the related hashtag is #foss4gAR.

Let’s meet in Argentina!

Join the OpenStreetMap Foundation now and help shape the future of the project

Raise your hand if you like OpenStreetMap.

Now, raise your hand if you’re an OpenStreetMap Foundation member.

If you care enough to edit day in day out, travel to a State of the Map conference, write up your thoughts on a diary entry, teach someone to map — then you should join up to support OSMF and help shape the future of the project.

You’ll have an official voice in the governance of the Foundation — the organization which owns and maintains the servers, holds the license, runs the State of the Map, coordinates local chapters. As OSM grows, the influence of OSMF will rise in the future. Anyone whose heart beats for OSM should get involved in OSMF to safeguard the huge time investment they make as a mapper.

We’re running a membership drive from now until November 11. If you aren’t a Member, sign up now. You can help by liking, retweeting, or spreading the word about the Membership Drive to friends or at local events/conferences.

Would you like to join but currently there is no suitable money transfer facility? A membership fee waiver policy will be implemented soon – stay tuned!

You can also contribute by joining the Membership Working Group or sharing with it your ideas about expanding the membership.

Join the Foundation – the future of the project should be shaped by the people who care about it the most.

DWG survey on organised editing

The Data Working Group is conducting a survey as part of its work on a policy covering paid mapping.

When OpenStreetMap started, it was largely a project of hobbyists contributing to OSM in their spare time. They chose freely what to map and which tools to use, and they took individual responsibility for their contributions.

The continuing growth and popularity of OSM have also brought more and more organised mapping efforts, mostly in the form of companies setting up paid data teams to improve OSM data in specific regions or for specific use cases, but also unpaid groups like school classes that are directed to work on OSM.

These organised mapping efforts are an integral part of today’s OSM contribution landscape and, when done well, help make OSM better and more widely known.

In order to ensure good communication, and a level playing field, between individual community members and organised editing groups, the OSMF Data Working Group has been tasked with developing guidelines for organised groups. These guidelines will above all set out some transparency requirements for organised groups – things that are already voluntarily followed by most groups today, like informing the mapping community about which accounts edit for the team.

We have prepared the following survey with a few questions about such a policy to give us a better understanding of what the mapping community expects from such a policy. The survey is aimed at everyone editing (or planning to edit) in OSM, whether as individual mappers or as part of a team, and your answers will help us in fleshing out a draft policy.

Within the scope of the survey, and the policy to be written, we define paid mapping (or paid editing) as any editing in OSM performed by someone who is told by a third party what to map (and potentially also how to map it) and who receives money in exchange. We define other organised mapping (or editing) as any editing that is also steered by a third party, but where no money is paid.

The survey is available at https://osm-dwg.limequery.org/741554

The OSMF Data Working Group

Recap of Google Summer of Code 2017

With this year’s Google Summer of Code’s recent successful completion, we thought it would be a good idea to recap and shine a spotlight on the individual projects. It’s the 10th year we were participating with success, so thanks to Google for supporting us again, and thanks to the Engineering Working Group for managing our participation this year!

The Google Summer of Code is a program run by Google to match student developers to open source projects. Students may apply to any of the participating projects, based on their preferences or relevant experience. The students that get selected receive a stipend (paid by Google) to spend one summer working on their project, gaining valuable experience while contributing code to real-world projects.

This year, we had five student projects with a really great student developer for each of them and all of them passed, i.e. they all finished their project plan in time. Additionally, there were two OSM-related projects outside of the OSMF umbrella: Indoor Support for Marble based on OSM and a plugin API to display OSM data on NASA Web WorldWind. But we had a bit of bad luck as well: Google gave us the opportunity to select even more students and, while we had applications from two more great students lined up, they didn’t start their project with us due to reasons not within our control.

Anyway, as not everyone was following the students’ work, we thought we should share the outcome of this year’s summer of code with you.

OpenGL Renderer for libosmscout

Let’s start with the first project, which is part of libosmscout, a C++ library for offline map rendering, routing and location lookup. What libosmscout doesn’t have right now is a render path based on OpenGL.

Tim Teulings, the mentor for this project, shared with us that he was very happy to see Fanny work on that task as none of the existing project members had time or the respective know-how, but it was still a highly requested feature. So they felt very lucky to have a great student like Fanny to work on it. What’s more, she even said that she’s keen on continuing to work with that project.

Her part of the library with a small demo application can be viewed on Github and all of her work was continuously merged.

As you can see, her renderer works quite well and produces beautiful maps. The objective was to support areas, ways, labels and ground to be rendered correctly. In addition to that, the code now supports most of the styling options and works on Linux, as well as on Windows. You can read more about the work and the results on her user diary.

We hope Fanny will stick to her plan to continue to work on libosmscout and stay a part of our great OSM community!

3D Model Repository

The next project we’d like to present to you is the 3D model repository by Pedro (also known as n42k). The project idea has been around for a while, but in the past we either didn’t have a good student or failed to get enough project slots. This year was different and we finally got both!

Eiffel Tower Model by joe89v (source)

The task itself is easy to explain: “We want a website that allows uploading 3D models to use for OSM”. But still, there were a lot of decisions to make: The site is now intended for all kinds of models, unlike previous efforts targeted only at buildings. It will initially focus on OBJ as a file format, and will provide unique IDs that can be easily linked in OSM. To make sure that the models fit the needs of the various applications in the OSM ecosystem, developers from two 3D renderers (OSM2World and OSMBuildings) mentored the project together.

Pedro published some of his work in his diary and his highly appreciated code can be viewed at Gitlab. Currently, the mentors are in the process of checking with the OSMF’s Licensing Working Group and others to deal with some details like hosting, branding and some “legal issues” (e.g. with regard to the geocoding guideline), but we’re expecting to see the site go live later this year.

Enhancing JOSM pt_assistant

Another project we want to talk about is the enhancement of the PT Assistant Plugin for JOSM by Giacomo Servadei. While the plugin name suggests this is all about public transport, the scope of this project grew to include hiking and bicycle routes as well.

Besides the extension of scope, Giacomo worked hard to extend the plugin and make it even more useful. For example, it now allows you to sort stops according to the sequence of the ways in the route relations, and it helps you with splitting roundabouts while keeping the route relations that pass over it. But it also has a better check for problems and now reports and suggests fixes, for example gaps of a single way or routes that don’t start or end neatly on a stop_position node near to a corresponding platform node.

You can read about Giacomo’s main results and his detailed timeline in the wiki. It also includes direct links to the dedicated tickets and associated patches. All of his work got merged and you can easly activate his plugin and test the outcome for yourself.

In addition to that, Polyglot, who was Giacomo’s mentor for this project, has written some diary posts about it.

Web-based Public Transport Editor

Dkocich worked on a similar project, but this time it wasn’t about a JOSM plugin. Instead, the goal was to create a website to edit public transport relations without the need to start a full blown editor.

While the editor is not merged yet, this will probably happen soon. Before the finished version of the editor is published by his main mentor Ilya, you can already have a look at his great work and test his version of the OSM Public Transport Editor. You can also have a look at his code on his Github project.

JOSM Refactoring

The next project in this list is all about JOSM’s core code. This project was mentored by Michael Zangl, a former student who had participated in GSoC the two previous years, working on different JOSM tasks – an experience that had allowed him to gain a very deep understanding of JOSM’s core. This year’s project started out as an effort to refactor the menu bar to have a proper API to use, but the project’s goals got extended and modified a bit during the summer.

Bogdans worked hard to dive into JOSM’s codebase and familiarize himself with JOSM. You can have a look at his work on his wiki user page, which also contains a list of tickets he worked on and patches he wrote which got merged.

Much of his work is “under the hood”, so unless you’re contributing to JOSM development or plugins yourself, you probably won’t easily notice most of the improvements while working with JOSM. Still, there are some visible updates: Bogdans added the option to search based on presets, and also merged the “Download” and “Download from Overpass API” actions into a single dialog box. Furthermore, there’s a Wizard that helps mappers with constructing Overpass queries now, much like the one known from Overpass turbo.

Again, you can read more about his work on Polyglot’s diary, since he served as a co-mentor.

Summary

This was a great Google Summer of Code again and we’re very happy that we were able to participate. We want to use the opportunity to thank all the students for their work and we’re hopeful that you as a user will benefit from one of them as well. In addition to that, we’d also like to thank the mentors for spending their spare time to help the students finish their tasks and the EWG for doing the administration of this year’s GSoC.

After the conclusion of this year’s GSoC, we performed a small survey among our mentors to gather feedback, and even though some of them had to invest considerable hours in it, they unanimously responded that it was worth their time and that OSM should participate again next year. So we conclude by tasking the EWG to apply again next year!

State of the Map Asia 2017: From Creation to Use of OpenStreetMap Data

We invite you to join State of the Map Asia 2017 on September 23-24 in Kathmandu, Nepal.

State of the Map Asia (SotM-Asia) is the annual regional conference of OpenStreetMap organized by OSM communities in Asia. The first SotM-Asia was organized in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2015, and the second was organized in Manila, Philippines in 2016.

This year’s conference, the third in the series, is going to be organized on September 23 – 24, 2017, at Park Village Resort, Budhanilkantha, Kathmandu – an oasis of tranquil greenery in the midst of Nepal’s crowded urban Kathmandu.

The event aims to bring together around 200 OpenStreetMap enthusiasts from Asia and beyond. The event will provide an opportunity to share knowledge and experience among mappers; expand their network; and generate ideas to expand the map coverage of the Asian continent. The theme we have chosen for this year’s meeting is ‘from creation to use’ of OSM data. This theme has been chosen as in the last decade there has been significant growth in the amount of data generated, however Asia still lags behind several other continents in terms of making use of this data. We believe that this decade will see a dramatic growth in the geospatial sector and in the ways people will utilize OSM data. Furthermore, this event will deepen the bond and enhance collaboration among the scattered OSM communities of the largest continent.

You can refer to http://stateofthemap.asia for more details and updates.

Features

The conference will feature remote keynote address from Kate Chapman (Chairperson of OpenStreetMap Foundation), and keynote speeches from Dr. Lee Schwartz (Geographer of the United States of America) and Prof. Taichi Furuhashi (professor at Aoyamagakuin University and President of CrisisMappers Japan).

We are proud to announce that one of the major highlights of this year’s State of the Map Asia will be 15 country presentations, representing all regions of Asia (Central, Eastern, Northern, Southern, South-Eastern and Western). The conference will also feature presentations ranging from Creation to Use of OpenStreetMap Data and several parallel sessions featuring speakers working in diverse fields such as disaster, governance, entrepreneurship and fine arts. Finally, a special government panel, featuring high level government officials from Southern Asia, will discuss creation and use of OSM data and how government is working to officially recognize OSM data as a source of service delivery.

Participation

Kathmandu Living Labs, this year’s conference hosts, has been able to secure full scholarships for more than twenty OSM Asia community members and an additional five partial scholarships.

The conference is free to attend for all OSM community members, and registrations can be made using this form. Park Village Resort, the conference hotel, has provided discounted conference rates for participants. Conference rates apply only for registrations made through this form.

Autumn is one of the best seasons to visit Nepal. Dashain -Nepal’s most celebrated festival- also falls during this time and we encourage all people to participate in the festivities after the workshop.

We are looking forward to see you in Kathmandu on September 23-24, 2017!

The organizers of SotM-Asia 2017

Thanks to the SoTM 2017 organisers

The international OpenStreetMap conference, State of the Map 2017, took place last weekend in Aizu Wakamatsu, Japan. Three fantastic days of talks and workshops on all things OpenStreetMap. Thanks to all those who attended!

Here’s the group photo (for those who got up early to be in it). There are many more photos to be found here on the facebook group (cc-by-sa-4.0)

Huge thanks also to the SOTM organising team. This team is made up of a group of long-term conference organising stars, and also the local team who this time were our wonderful hosts in Japan.

The folks handling the video recording have done a very speedy job of publishing all the recordings from the the two main rooms:

Session videos

As mentioned, there’s also a big collection of photos on a facebook group. Also check out the #sotm tweets, and a SOTM 2017 wiki page where we can link these things as well as blog write-ups etc. We’ve shared so many ideas a this conference, let’s try to keep track of them all! Also stay tuned for more blog posts following-up on some conference themes.

Let’s meet at the State of the Map, Japan!

OpenStreetMap communities form an integral part of OpenStreetMap. State of the Map conferences is held across the globe to celebrate the essence of these communities. Through the year we get an opportunity to interact with fellow OpenStreetMap contributors via various channels like OSM diaries, mailing lists, OSM Forum and many others, but seldom have an opportunity to meet those that live far from us. State of the Map conferences has become one of the platforms where the OSM usernames get faces and reflect the online world of OSM that we interact with every day!

To make the most of this opportunity you can now use this attendees page! You can add your OSM username, projects you have been or are working on, the country you are from, the dates you are planning to attend the conference and your contact information.

Photo by Harry Wood, CC BY-SA 2.0 on Flickr

Why is this useful? You can connect more easily with people from different parts of the world working on similar projects as you are. It can help you coordinate your travel with fellow OpenStreetMap contributors. It will help in setting up sessions, meetings and most importantly, help you make the most out of State of the Map.
Don’t forget to add your details and do look into the page before you travel to State of the Map!

See you all in Japan!

Choose the best bloggers and mappers for the OSM Awards 2017

The community voting for the OpenStreetMap Awards 2017 continues! We have 45 nominees, any number of which you can support, and only nine of them will receive the award. This is a hard choice, and to help you, we are continuing the series of posts about the work nominees did.

Influential Writing Award

For the best tutorial, documentation, blog or a blog post. A text or series of texts that attracted many new people to OSM, provided an interesting outlook on the project, or inspired the community to do better things.

Carto’Cité: there are few blogs about GIS in non-English languages, and we are lucky to have this one. Carto’Cité is a geomatics agency in Nantes, France, and not only they do work for their clients, they also regularly publish very detailed tutorials for using OpenStreetMap data in QGIS, uMap and other open tools.
Joost Schouppe: being the most visible member of the Belgian community, he organizes local events and publishes a very diverse and useful diary. He writes in detail about analysing OSM data, using data from government, about impact of mapping parties and Missing Maps events, and interviews interesting people.
BushmanK: he has posted many thoughtful diary posts about various aspects of OpenStreetMap, which make you question everything: mapping time zones, adding name translations, tagging man-made structures, using signs for names, and even governance of the map.
Ramani Huria: they are the very active community in Tanzania, and their blog is full not only with event reports, but with tutorials on JOSM, QGIS and mapping techniques, in both English and Swahili. Their articles are useful both to people from their country and to everyone else.
Arun Ganesh: better known as PlaneMad, he is the leader of the Mapbox’s data team, always watching for errors on the map and analysing data, examining mapping applications or styling maps in his spare time. All of that you can see in his blog, complete with diagrams, screenshots and funny pictures.

Greatness in Mapping Award

For significant contributions to the map data, or exemplary mapping: micro-mapping, clean-up, mapping towns from scratch, proper imports.

xscvxc: while most of us map cities we live in, xscvxc is busy mapping small towns in his region, not on the radar of urban mappers. In his 2.8 million edits he perfected his home town and proceeded to improve many other rural areas of Novosibirsk Region in Russia.
Russell Deffner: to predict and prevent malaria disease spread, you need all the settlements and their buildings on the map. Russel has coordinated a global effort to map more than 4 million buildings across 7 countries, which is a lot. Read about this on the HOT project page.
Jochen Topf: in March there were a quarter million old-style multipolygons, and now there is none. All thanks to Jochen, who is coordinating the continuing series of polygon fixing tasks, complete with statistics, maps and explanations. Subscribe to this github issue to learn about new tasks, and help him make the OSM data simpler to use.
Bishal Bhandari: for a year and a half he has been actively mapping cities in Nepal: Kathmandu, Pokhara, Tikapur and others. There are few days he goes without adding something to the map: even today he’s drawn a lot of school buildings there.
katpatuka: if you’ve been in OpenStreetMap for at least a year, you’ve sure seen edits by katpatuka. In his 10 years of editing he made 30 million changes, mostly to Turkey and China. There is no point in showing his editing heat map: he has touched almost every point on Earth, focusing on less-developed areas. And he had not slowed down: it’s like if everyone else leaves OSM, thanks to katpatuka the map will still be complete eventually.

We hope you have made your choices — head to the OSM Awards website and mark people and groups that you think did the best job the previous year. You can choose any number of nominees, and the choice can be changed at any moment before the voting closes on the 16th of August. We’ll return next week to look at the regional categories.

Choose the best among us at OSM Awards 2017

The community voting for the OpenStreetMap Awards 2017 is open! During the call for nominees you submitted more than a hundred of them. Then a number of active community members have prepared a shorter list. Now it is again your turn: choose who gets an award at the ceremony at the State of the Map in Japan.

This time you would need to consider 45 nominees in 9 categories. That is a tiny fraction of active community members who did good in the past year, but still a lot to choose from. To make your task simpler, we have made a couple of changes.

You don’t have to select only one nominee for a category: that was a hard choice last year, and most of the time you’d wish you had more votes. Now you have! Choose as many as you like, even all of them. This process is called Approval Voting: studies show it is much fairer that the regular one-vote voting, and much easier to understand than STV. The winner is still determined by the number of votes.

And do use the fact that you can change or add to your votes at any time until the voting ends (that would be on 16th of August). We will cover all nominees in this blog, so you could make an informed choice. Starting right now, with the two technical categories. Nominees are listed in a random order.

Core Systems Award

For outstanding contributions to any of the core tools, systems, processes or resources. Not limited to systems under OSMF control. The Rails port, mapnik, and any other tool that mappers use on a daily basis, knowingly or not, are eligible.

Hartmut Holzgraefe: the old MapOSMatic service for printing atlases went offline, but Hartmut set up the fork last year. And he did not stop at that: every week he is improving it in different ways. He has the biggest collection of map styles ready for printing. He added email notifications and fixed UI issues. You can even add your data on top of the map.
Bryan Housel: you know iD, our amazing web-based editor. Bryan is supervising its development. Recently he has added a tutorial to it, and it is years ahead of what other OSM software offer. That tutorial even has an entire imaginary town to play with!
Andy Allan: he has been improving OSM in small ways long before, but just a month ago Andy joined the website maintainers team and immediately started working on improving the code. And before that he upgraded all the tests for the website: important, but not very fun work, we guess.
Kevin Bullock: as an employee of DigitalGlobe, he has been always asked at State of the Map conferences about new satellite imagery for OpenStreetMap. This Spring, due to his efforts, we finally got two new imagery layers. You must have already seen them in your editor of choice.
Paul Norman and Matthijs Melissen: for more than half a year these two had been working on a major refactoring of our map style, the one you’ve liked even after roads changed their colours. Now all the rendering databases were reloaded, and style designers can finally use any tags they like: surface, covered, public_transport, you name it.

A slide from the 2016 ceremony

Innovation Award

For the best new service or approach. New tools for contributing data, image recognition, trace or OSM data analysis, new mapping approach or new perspective on old tools.

Michael Straßburger: do “telnet mapscii.me” in a console, and you will see a map of the whole world, rendered with letters and punctuation. MapSCII is a brilliant example of all our map rendering technologies at work: vector tiles from the last year winner OSM2VectorTiles, mapbox GL styles, vector transformations. While visually simple, it proves we can do anything with our map.
Yuri Astrakhan: people have long used SPARQL queries with Wikidata, and Yuri’s service links that with the spatial OSM database using 750 thousand “wikidata” keys we have. Now you can query for cities more than 2000 years old or get first ascension time for mountain peaks and get OSM identifiers for these.
OpenTopoMap maintainers: made by Stefan, Philipp and Martin, OpenTopoMap renders the whole world in a topographic style falimiar to tourists and hikers. It also provides weekly updated Garmin extracts, so you don’t have to buy paper maps for a trip.
Tobias Zwick: he is the author of the StreetComplete android map editor. Announced just in March, it has taken mappers by the storm, with half a million edits made by 5000 users. The app makes it very easy to map important properties of roads and amenities. Tobias constantly improves the app and listens to the comments on mailing lists and on GitHub.
Sajjad Anwar: visualizing changesets is one of the hardest problems in OpenStreetMap. Most of us has been using Achavi, but it is slow due to the nature of requests to Overpass API. Sajjad removed the need for querying by creating a cache of all recent changesets, so visualizing takes less than a second. His work is already used by the OSMCha, a validation tool, and could possibly be integrated into the OSM website.

Now that you know what these ten nominees did, head to the OSM Awards website and click on these you think should get an award for their work. We’ll return next week to look at writing and mapping categories.