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.

Photo of the certificate © Blog Conhecer OpenStreetMap

Who is in your space at State of the Map?

Image taking during mapathons at Open Labs Hackerspace in Albania

Working together. Picture from a photo under CC BY-SA 4.0 by Anxhelo Lushka

There is a great program of talks and workshops for this year’s State of the Map, but as people gather from around the world we want to make the most of this in-person time together. On all three days of the conference we’ll have some rooms available for a more informal schedule.

Bookable Spaces

What area of OpenStreetMap are you involved in, and do you want to discuss specific subjects with like-minded people? The engineering group, mappers that cycle, those wanting to increase diversity and representation,… we’ve had some great sessions before.

Edit the OSM wiki page to suggest a group or a topic, so others can get interested in joining you. During the conference, confirm your session with the event team for its time slot to be decided.

Free and Open Space

After an inspiring talk or during the lunch breaks you might find yourself deep in conversation with fellow delegates and want to carry on the discussion away from the noise of our foyer area. There will be a room known as “Free and Open Space” that can’t be booked. This might also be a place where small groups would want to work together, coding a new feature of OpenStreetMap software or collaborating on documentation and guides.

Turn up when you want to use it, find some chairs, and chat away.

Lightning Talks

Check out the program for this year’s selection of talks. Perhaps something new has happened since the deadline for proposing talks, perhaps you didn’t have the idea quite worked out. On Friday and Sunday we will try to make some extra slots available for lightning talks. These are quick five-minute talks that don’t need to have slides.

If you’ve got something to share in this manner, please add it to the OSM wiki page so that we are aware of how much time we would need to make available.

Your State of the Map team

Visa information to support your trip to State of the Map in Japan

Travelling to State of the Map in Japan? You may need to first obtain a travel visa. This post will guide you through the process of checking and obtaining a visa.

The first step is to determine whether you need a visa. We recommend using this handy tool which makes it quick and easy to check. Those people who are fortunate to be able to travel to Japan without a visa can stop reading – we look forward to meeting you at State of the Map.

Visa policy of Japan, (c) Twofortnights, Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

If you determined that you do need a visa then you will need to contact us. To make the process as smooth as possible, please head over to this page and complete the “Visa application form”, “Invitation Letter” (visa applicant section) and “Itinerary in Japan”. We will complete the remaining part of the invitation letter and send it back to you. You should also take time to familiarise yourself with the visa process described here for most nationalities as you will also need to prepare other documents including the “Letter of guarantee” (if a company is paying your travel expenses) or recent bank statements (if you are paying all expenses).

OpenStreetMap Featured Images

Every week we choose a new OpenStreetMap “featured image”. Here’s our images of April, May and June:

(click to view bigger images and explanations)

An OpenStreetMap Featured Image (otherwise known as “Image Of The Week”) is chosen each week. Recently we’ve been putting them out on twitter and facebook, so you’ll most likely have seen them there. We’re still a little behind on posting them, so consider this a preview! But featured images also appear each week on the wiki main page.

If you come across an image which you would like to put forward as image of the week (either your own image or somebody else’s), head over to “Featured image proposals” and edit that page to make your suggestion there. Anyone can join in with the process of investigating, improving and discussing the suggestions, and picking an OpenStreetMap image of the week each week. If wiki editing is difficult for you, just email CWG with your suggestions.

Summary of Board’s Face-to-Face Meeting

Better late than never, I want to share my thoughts and the topics discussed at the OSMF board’s annual Face-to-Face meeting in May this year.

We met on the 20th and the 21st of May in Amsterdam at the same location as last year. Martijn and Mikel made a quick survey and put considerable time into compiling an agenda for the weekend for us. This year we also had Dorothea, our administrative assistant who helped us keep time and took notes during the meeting for us.

Board members still smiling after a hard day of work

We discussed many topics and I will try to share them with you. I will focus on topics which I believe will be of particular interest to the community, but I’ll also include issues and impressions I simply found interesting myself.

Welcome Mat

Saturday started of with a session about how to define the “OSM community” which was more about knowing where each other stands. This led to the question about the community’s or the board’s relation to “corporate stakeholders” as well. Although I had the impression that we had quite different views on it and I felt a bit like an extremist, this was quite a productive discussion and in a follow up working session we developed a first draft for a “Welcome Mat”. This will be something for organizations and companies to read to familiarise themselves with the project, the community and especially to learn about the expectations we have and the responsibilities they have. The current plan is to compile the main points into a draft to share in July.

Sticky notes everywhere

Microgrants

A planned program for microgrants was the focus of a second large working session on Saturday. You might know similar programs from e.g. OSM-US, HOT or FOSSGIS. As a start and as a first trial we want to make a time-bound program where you can apply for microgrants until a specific date. We discussed many of the details like the budget, the set of applicants, a rough timeline and the need for a committee to help on with the selection and to provide some kind of “supervision”. We plan to have a dedicated blog post and more details coming soon, in August this year.

Working Groups and Volunteers

Sunday started off with a topic that I expected to be highly controversial: Working Groups and their role with regard to the board. But I was proven wrong. We talked about and discussed the scope of each working group, their (potential) needs and their relation to the OSMF board. It was quite interesting as almost every working group has at least one board member in its ranks.

One very obvious theme from our discussion about working groups is the lack of volunteers. Let me add a personal thought here: We have quite a few people running for the OSMF board each year with many great ideas. As the board is mainly assisting, you can achieve something more easily by actually joining a working group and not the board! Anyway, one of our working sessions on Sunday was dedicated to a “volunteer drive”. We run successful money donation drives but money cannot always be used to buy time. So, we really need more volunteers to help run our project, which is why we want to try and run a volunteer drive next year. If you can’t wait that long: Go on and join one of our great working groups now! 🙂

Rapid Fire

We had a couple of rapid fire sessions where each of us could name a topic they are personally interested in. Mine was about our need to properly explain why we need or want an administrative assistant. To make our decision more transparent, we plan to fully disclose the scope of the job’s duties and hope to demonstrate why we think it’s worth spending money on some administrative tasks instead of doing it ourselves or searching for volunteers. In a similar vein, Frederik asked about the others’ thoughts on putting financial tasks into professional hands. One reason, for example, is that it’s a major pain for new board members to get access to our bank account. Furthermore, we talked about an updated travel policy which is scheduled to be drafted in August. We mostly asked what and whom we do fund and up to which amount. One side aspect was to pay Kate’s travel to the SotM-Asia 2017 where she will be the keynote speaker.

Other than that we had a talk about a corporate editing policy, something the DWG has been tasked with and I guess you’ll see a public community survey on that topic soon.

Conclusion

Cute Baby-Alpaca
(c) Zenalpaca, Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Sadly, not many community members had the time to join our planned evening with the local community on Saturday. I still had the opportunity for some interesting private conversations, though: I know a lot more now about growing tomatoes and raising goats and I would recommend anyone with a farm to get some alpacas. 🙂

But we didn’t meet for fun, but for work: It was a friendly and productive meeting and – given the financial outcome of last year (read: the corporate membership program) – it didn’t feel so bad to spend some money on the meeting. We don’t have tangible results to show yet, but that was not the goal: The meeting was about discussion and offered an opportunity to talk about various issues that would be hard or impossible to tackle via the mailing list or on mumble. In order to not let that time go to waste, it’s now important to follow up on those topics. That’s why we ended our meeting with a “Mapping Where from Here” session to produce a schedule with follow-up tasks and a timeline describing what we would like to be finished when. So I hope you’ll hear more about the microgrant program and the welcome mat soon. Stay tuned! 😉

Calling for nominees for the OpenStreetMap Awards

Announcing the second OpenStreetMap Awards, awarded this August at the State of the Map 2017 conference in Japan!

This is a community award: nominees and winners are chosen by the community. We are now opening the Call for Nominees, to learn more about the amazing contributors to OpenStreetMap. The Awards strive to be a worldwide event for all OpenStreetMap members, including developers, mappers, community leaders, blog writers and everyone else. We need your help to find the best of OpenStreetMap globally.

For the second awards, we added three more categories focussed on Asia, Africa, and Latin America, three continents under-represented in OpenStreetMap. We strive for increasing the diversity and expect to see more great nominees who the larger community has not been aware yet. This is your chance to make yourself or people you admire visible for the entire world. Add your nominees on the awards website!

We’re mostly looking for new innovations, so only projects/works that were announced after August 1st 2016 are eligible. The Ulf Möller Award is an exception to this. Everyone is eligible regardless of the time when they were active in the project. Winners of past awards and selection committee members (in their categories) cannot be nominated.

The call for nominees will close on 9th of July, and shortly after that we will start the second round, choosing the award recipients. Please nominate!

New and renewed corporate members

Last October we introduced the new OSMF Corporate Membership tiers. We’d like to thank the following organisations who have entered or renewed onto the new corporate membership tiers:

Toursprung NextGIS

Your organization can become a Corporate Member for as little as €500 for ‘Supporter’ level, all the way up to €20,000 for ‘Platinum’ level. The above all opted for ‘Bronze’ level, except Toursprung and NextGIS who are ‘Supporters’. Coming soon we’ll bring you news of some new ‘Gold’ level members! Each level has different benefits but the biggest benefit of all is the knowledge that your organization is doing its part to support the growth and sustainability of the OpenStreetMap project. So thanks again to all our Corporate Members!

Registration is now open for State of the Map 2017

Tickets for State of the Map 2017 are now on sale! Come register for this international gathering of the OpenStreetMap community. Move fast in order to guarantee yourself the “Early Bird” discounted rate!

Get your ticket here

State of the Map offers value for anyone excited about open location data. Our main conference days will feature nearly 50 talks, open spaces for gatherings, and exhibition areas where individuals and organizations can meet. Hundreds of OpenStreetMap community members are expected to attend and we want you there!
The early bird catches the worm. Or “早起きの鳥は虫を捕らえる.” The world of OpenStreetMap belong to those who get (tickets) early.

Community survey for the State of the Map 2017 program

Picture of people voting at Wikimania 2014, with license CC-BY by Sebastiaan ter Burg

Thank you everyone for submitting session proposals for State of the Map 2017 conference. We have a great line up of sessions this year, it is time to share your views and help shape the State of the Map 2017 program.

Please participate in our OpenStreetMap community survey. It’s open to all, whether you are planning a trip to Japan for the conference, attending virtually on the live streams, or just enjoying our session videos afterwards. You can provide us with your OSM username to help us with spam detection (we won’t share your username with anyone). You’ll then get a huge page of talks to rate, sorted at random. Feel free to rate as many as you like. Just don’t leave the page open for too long, as your session might time out. When you’re tired of it, just scroll down, hit Next until you can Submit your answers.

You matter in the creation of OpenStreetMap and we want your voice to be heard in the creation of its conference. The survey is only open until 23rd April 2017, so go to the survey now!

The open source survey tool is kindly hosted by Made4it (http://www.made4it.be/), a Belgian data analysis and market research company.