Vote for the Best at the OpenStreetMap Awards

This year, for the first time in history of our project, we are preparing for the first OpenStreetMap Awards, which will be presented this September at the State of the Map 2016 conference in Brussels.

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Again, this is a community award: nominees and winners are chosen by you, the community. During the preliminary stage, you have submitted more than a hundred nominees for six categories, including the Ulf Möller Memorial Award. From those, a group of active members of the OSM Foundation have prepared a short list: five candidates for each category. It definitely was not simple: a lot has happened during the past year, and we had to omit some good nominees to fit in these five slots. With the remaining list we’re left thinking “can we just award all of them?”, but there can be only one winner (for each category). So the rest is up to you!

Please vote for your nominees on the awards website. For each of the six categories, choose one nominee. Whoever gains the most votes by the end of the voting, on September 22nd, will receive the award. The winners will be announced on Sunday, September 25th, at the State of the Map conference.

Gather your Birds of a Feather at State of the Map

When we get together for State of the Map, there is so much to do… in-person.

On Friday, Saturday and Sunday of State of the Map, we will have several spaces for Birds of a Feather (BoFs). BOFs are informal meetings, planned ahead or thought up spontaneously. These can be gathering points for discussions, mapping, code and documentation sprints, and hacking sessions. They can even be organized rest and napping sessions! These meeting are whatever you want and whatever you need to make a successful State of the Map.

The Birds of Feather sessions will take place in the Foyer and “Building D” classrooms, adjacent to the main conference hall. We will have a sign up board prominently in the main area to schedule sessions and add ideas.

And all day Sunday, we have Free and Open Space in Nelson Mandela Hall! Collaborate together on coding, mapping, or documentation sprints. Plan the next big thing. Unlike a Birds of a Feather session this is a non-bookable room; let’s make it a hive of activity open to all.

Start sharing your informal session ideas for State of the Map. And keep up with the latest State of the Map on the @sotm twitter account. See you there!

image courtesy Dirk Ingo Franke https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wesselburen_flock_of_birds_04.03.2011_18-20-45.JPG

image by Dirk Ingo Franke

State of the Map: Asia and Latin America

We’ve had plenty of State of the Map conferences in 2016. Japan, United States, France, and Italy all organized their national conferences. Czech Republic and Slovakia united to run their event together. In September it’s the time for the global State of the Map in Brussels, Belgium. And to end this great year of events, we are going to have two continental State of the Map conferences: in Asia and Latin America.

Both conferences had their first editions in 2015 and will repeat their success this year. Both events are also offering free tickets for all attendees.

The State of the Map Asia will take place in Manila, Philippines, from October 1st to 2nd. The call for presentations has already finished, and the program will be published soon.

São Paulo, Brazil, will host the State of the Map Latam from November 25th to 27th. The call for talks, workshops and working groups is still open: submit yours before September 25th! The event accepts activities in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Book your place and go meet the mappers of Latin America and Asia.

Come join as at the State of the Map social event!

As if your 8am to 6pm State of the Map schedule was not social enough, we are packing your Saturday night with an officially sponsored State of the Map social event. And it will definitely be an event worth remembering as we convene both in silo and in style at the Brussels Event Brewery. Named after the huge tanks (‘silos’) of the former brewery, this multi functional industrial area will be home base for Belgian beers (aka drink), Belgian food (aka frites) and maybe a Belgian waffle or two.

Come join us after the social presentations close on Saturday, September 24th for the official State of the Map 2016 social event! The details for your fast recall:

Where: Brussels Event Brewery SILO room
Where 2.0: Rue Delaunoystraat 58 B/1 | B-1080
When: From 7:00 pm
What: Free Beer, food, wine and water
Who: Free of charge for anyone registered for State of the Map
Why: Because there will be a lot of mapping to talk about

Nominate Your Heroes for the OpenStreetMap Awards

Announcing the OpenStreetMap Awards, awarded for the first time this September at the State of the Map 2016 conference in Brussels!

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.

Add your nominees on the awards website. There are six categories: Core Systems, Innovation, Writing, Mapping, Community and the Ulf Möller Memorial Award. You can nominate up to ten people, groups or organizations for each category. Eligible are projects or works that were announced after August 1st, 2015, except for the Ulf Möller Award, for which everyone is eligible regardless of the time when they were active in the project.

The call for nominees will close August 27th, and shortly after that we will start the second round, choosing the award recipients. Please nominate!

Hackday at State of the Map

A hackday at State of the Map is a great opportunity to start working on those awesome projects that seemed unimaginable just a few days before, or to continue something already under way. Join us and get hands on with code, documentation sprints and mapping activities. What you work on is up to you!

As usual the hackday will be after the main conference, Monday the 26th of September. This year we are lucky to have found a space donated by Brussels Environment. We can use the BEL conference center with room for about 100 people right in the city center of Brussels. We will need the space because we are joining forces with OSGeo Belgium who have their FOSS4G Belgium conference the day before SOTM.

We ask you kindly to subscribe here and indicate if you want to order food. Make sure you order if you want to eat at the venue because you are not allowed to bring in outside food. We are still looking for a sponsor – but failing that, we will ask for a contribution of 6€ on the day.

All further practical details can be found on the event page. Hope to see you all there!

Your State of the Map team

Getting involved in the Operations Working Group

OpenStreetMap has a map display, and more importantly a database of raw map data, and more importantly than that a community of map contributors! All of these things require servers. Big computer systems crunching lots of data and handling lots of internet traffic. This is the realm of the “Operations Working Group“, who make the decisions and take the actions that keep these servers ticking, and keep OpenStreetMap (the map, the database, and the community) up and running.

Difficult technical work which only a few people are directly involved in. But today Andy Allan blogged about how they’re working on getting more people involved in the Operations Working Group.

openstreetmap server diagonal The OpenStreetMap project is nearly 12 years old, and we’ve been very lucky to have a small team of talented volunteer system administrators doing a fantastic job over that time, spending donated money wisely and meeting some huge scaling challenges for the core infrastructure.

“There’s a pride in keeping OpenStreetMap humming along and not causing too much of a fuss”

But increasingly OWG have been quietly enhancing their server configuration management approaches. All code/configuration scripts are maintained openly in github, and recently the team are looking to make this easier to test, so more people can feel confident in proposing improvements to the server set-up.

“The goal is to allow future developers to improve each cookbook using only their own laptops”

You can donate to the OpenStreetMap foundation, which will help fund our servers. But you can also get involved in improving the server set-up, and it’s gradually getting easier to be more directly involved. If you can help, read Andy Allan’s blog post to learn more. Thanks to Andy and the rest of the Operations Working Group for all their hard work.

Closing soon! Early bird registration and hotel deal for State of the Map

Thanks to the support of our amazing sponsors we have kept the Early Bird tickets for State of the Map available for as long as possible. With less than 8 weeks to go until we gather in Brussels the Early Bird offer will soon come to an end.

State of the Map - Brussels 2016

You have until 7th August to grab your price savvy tickets now before normal prices kick in.

Don’t forget your accommodation though! The number of rooms available in our hotel deal drops by half when Early Bird closes so book your room before it’s too late.

Your State of the Map team

Announcing the Program for State of the Map 2016

Today we’re sharing the programme of upcoming talks at State of the Map 2016 with you!

Over the last few weeks the State of the Map team have been hard at work reviewing your session proposals. We’ve translated, we’ve read, we’ve scored, we’ve filtered, we’ve talked, we’ve listened, we’ve tweaked and we’ve debated! But most of all we’ve thoroughly enjoyed learning about your exciting OpenStreetMap projects. And we’d especially like to thank you for your input via the community survey, important input to the process.

It’s been a big challenge getting to this step. We’ve picked out the best talks but with a limit of just 44, this meant some difficult decisions had to be made. We hope you enjoy the programme of talks – to join us in Brussels don’t forget to purchase your ticket and book your accommodation.

And will soon be adding the Sunday workshops, and lightning talks. There will definitely be space for you to set up informal discussion groups (“birds of a feather” session) during the event.

FOSSGIS 2016

The FOSSGIS conference (Free and Open Source Software for Geographical Information Systems) takes place annually, usually in Germany. This year it takes place in Salzburg, Austria. Tickets are still available. Register here. Registration is free for OSM contributors.

This big conference has included OpenStreetMap as a large part of the programme, and has welcomed OpenStreetMap community attendees throughout the history of our project. We gave a round-up of local SOTM conferences previously. Essentially FOSSGIS is the local “State Of The Map” conference for the German-speaking part of the world. With over 400 attendees last year, this is a big event in general, and a big event on the OpenStreetMap calendar!

This year the conference also features a special “OSM Sunday” in the run up to the main conference. Sunday July 3rd is a day dedicated to OpenStreetMap topics. Don’t miss it! On top of that, around half of the presentations, lightning talks and workshops during the week at the conference will be on OpenStreetMap topics (other topics being around open source geo software). And don’t forget the big social event on Tuesday, July 5th.

OpenStreetMap Blog