Weekly OSM Summary #71

June 3rd, 2013 – June 17th, 2013
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world.

The videos of the State of the Map US conference are online now. Also Code for America wrote a blog post about the conference.
You can find more or less all videos of the German FOSSGIS & OSM conference 2013 here and the entire schedule here.
The new OSM editor ID has been translated into more than 30 languages now. Also the new version 1.1. of the editor is available for testing purposes.
Any .geojson file in a GitHub repository will now be automatically rendered on an OSM map. Wondering how you can create a geoJSON file? Read this quick how to.
Alexander Avtanski developed a tool that processes GPS tracks and creates a video from the collected data. See an example at his OSM user page.
A new website creates polygons in different formats out of OSM relations. You can try it out here.
An OSM Data Report 2013, created by MapBox.
Sarah wrote a reminder about the Nominatim usage policy.
A blog post about the HOT OSM data model.
A new website which renders OSM data which has 3D tags, you can try it out here.
A new version of the well-known OSM rendering software Mapnik has been published.

Authors: Pascal & Dennis – (thx @ “Wochennotiz”)

Extending the OpenStreetMap Infrastructure Funding Drive

There’s been an amazing response to the OpenStreetMap infrastructure funding drive launched last month. Given the incredible enthusiasm for strengthening OpenStreetMap’s core infrastructure, we’ve decided to extend the funding drive so we can do even more and do it right.

We’re now asking for an additional £32,500 / $50,000 that will allow the OSM Operations Working Group to make hardware purchases and build out our server set-up. This increase in capacity will open the doors to even more growth of our lively community, and ensure that map editing will always be available.

You can help us now by donating online or contact us.

Where Your Donation Goes

Phase 1: Cost £40,000 / $60,000 (Achieved!)

An additional master database server to improve reliability and performance.
A new central file server for greater capacity.

Phase 2: Cost £32,500 / $50,000 (Help us fund this!)

Routing servers (more details on this to come)
Tile cache servers in NA for faster loading tiles.
Off-site backup improvements so that, in the event of a disaster, OSM will be back up quicker.
Additional database read-only servers for greater speed and responsiveness.

Your contributions will directly improve the single most important piece of infrastructure for OpenStreetMap. Thanks for your support and for helping OpenStreetMap continue to grow and become faster, more reliable, and more powerful.
You can donate now at donate.openstreetmap.org or by contacting us.

Nearly there now

On donate.openstreetmap.org you can see we are inching towards our fund raising target now (97% at time of writing).

We recently paid in all the little donations which came in via the micro-donations platform flattr.

Before that we also received $5000 from Inquiron creators of Mapsdata

Thanks to all of you. Nearly there now!

Weekly OSM Summary #70

May 20th, 2013 – June 3rd, 2013
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world.

Lokku and Mapbox made large donations to the OSM Server Funding 2013. Thanks guys. You can also donate here!
Three OSM related projects of the Google Summer of Code have been accepted: OSM: Cached API proxy, Surveying mobile application for OpenStreetMap mappers (Field Papers-like) and The creation of a stable and improved OpenTripPlanner Android client for pedestrian, cyclist, and transit routing based on OpenStreetMap and GTFS data.
The registration for the State of the Map Baltics 2013 is open.
Frederik created some stats about densely mapped areas in OSM (per sqkm).
Pascal, Dennis and Alexander published a new research study titled: “Comparison of Volunteered Geographic Information Data Contributions and Community Development for Selected World Regions“. They compared OSM data for twelve areas around the world.
Nelson Minar wrote a blog post about “American river map: a vector tile tutorial“.
The Drone Adventures Project shows how it uses drones for mapping tasks in Haiti.
Simon Poole added turn restriction support in the Vespucci editor.
The Cyclestreets project published a new app for Windows Phone 8 and Blackberry 10.
The OpenFloorPlan project uses the OSM iD Editor to create SVG floor plans. The OpenFloorPlan project is a set of open source JavaScript libraries that can be used to manipulate and interact with SVG-based floor plans in HTML5 or NodeJS.
A slideshow about the new OpenLayers 3. OpenLayers is an open source JavaScript library to load, display and render maps from multiple sources on web pages.
Vladimir Agafonkin published some slides about Leaflet: “Leaflet: Past, Present, Future” and “High Performance Data Visualizations in JavaScript“.
A new plugin adds a button to any Leaflet map that lets users jump to the OSM edit page. Example.
Tom MacWright’s “CartoCSS” slides of the Foss4g 2013.

Authors: Pascal & Dennis – (thx @ “Wochennotiz”)

Funding Drive reaches 70% – thank you MapBox!

Thanks to MapBox who have pledged a $20,000 donation towards our fund raising drive.

MapBox provide tools for designing and hosting stylish maps using OpenStreetMap data. They’re bringing our maps to an impressive range of customers and end users. Meanwhile MapBox developers have driven progress in several important open source development efforts within the OSM ecosysem including of course the recently launched iD editor. They’re also big supporters of OpenStreetMap.US and the SOTM US conference. If you’re attending this (in just a few days now) you can thank them in person for this donation pledge.

Ever played one of those games where completing a task brings up an “Achievement Unlocked” message? Well, MapBox’s donation pledge is contingent on the fund raising goal being reached. So our task is to raise the remaining 30% and unlock the funds for OpenStreetMap’s new hardware.

donate.openstreetmap.org

For any questions around larger contributions, please contact the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

Why do we need this new database server? Simply because the growth in OpenStreetMap contributions is outpacing what our existing machines can handle – it’s a good problem to have. The new machines will handle our explosive growth for at least the next 12 months, giving our hard-working, dedicated operations volunteers time to plan for continued growth in the future.

You can read more on the MapBox blog

State Of The Map – Register now for early bird prices

Tomorrow is the last day of May, and your last chance to grab yourself a “State Of The Map” conference ticket at the reduced “Early-bird” prices.

Photo Frances Schmechel CC-BY-SA on flickr

State Of The Map is the international annual conference of the OpenStreetMap foundation. There’s a lot of excitement about stateofthemap.us taking place in San Francisico in just over a week’s time. This is shaping up very nicely, and registration is still open. It is organised by OpenStreetMap U.S., and is followed by SOTM Baltics in August. Various other local chapters are running their own local conferences. ….but the main event….

State Of The Map is taking place in Birmingham, England. 6-8th September. A few months away, but book early to avoid disappointment (and save a bit of money). Register now!

There’s also an upcoming deadline for the call for presentations. A great opportunity to reach out to the OpenStreetMap community. Get your presentation ideas submitted there. We’d love to hear from you.

Fund-raising drive. Thank you Lokku

We kicked off a new donation drive a couple of weeks ago (at the same time as bringing you the new iD editor). We have a £40,000 target for some specific hardware upgrades, and since then we’ve seen tremendous support and good will directed at OpenStreetMap from people all over the world as the donations come in, bringing us up to 23% of the target at time of writing.

We’ve just received our first large donation from Lokku, pushing us forwards to the tune of £2500 . Thank you Lokku!

Perhaps this will be the first of many larger donations from supporting companies. We’re very grateful to Lokku for kicking things off, and for all their support over the years. Lokku are the people behind Nestoria, #geomob london, and also (coming soon) OpenCage Data. You can catch up with them at the U.S. conference SOTM US, and OSMPlus.

If you would like to make a donation head over to…

>>> donate.openstreetmap.org <<<

There is additional information on the wiki about our plans for these funds, but essentially with the money raised, we’ll be making some new hardware purchases which are important and necessary to keep things running smoothly as we continue to see astounding growth of our community. More mappers contributing, and more end users seeing our maps.

Weekly OSM Summary #69

May 6th, 2013 – May 20th, 2013
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world.

The OSM project started a fund raising project for a new server. You can support it with a donation here.
The release of the new OSM editor iD has recently been mentioned in several online (tech) press articles, such as theverge, thenextweb and TechCrunch. After the launch, the OSM project experienced a strong increase in newly registered members. Also the roadmap version 1.1 has been published.
The well-known wheelmap.org project webpage has a new design. The main purpose of the project is to provide an online map to search, find and mark wheelchair-accessible places.
Mapbox developed a new Open Source Vector format. You can find some more information here. Furthermore you can find a great tutorial about vector maps here.
The new Geochat JOSM plugin enables a chat in the JOSM OSM editor between mappers in your area.
The OSM KortGame, which is a mobile web-app which helps to fix OSM data, is asking for your feedback, you can leave it here.
You can find a JOSM map style specifically tailored for the HOT project here.
How can you use data stored in a Google spreadsheet and visualize it on an OSM map?
An OSM map with rCharts, Leaflet and Leaflet-geoCSV.
An article describing how you can create interactive OSM maps with Inkscape.

Authors: Pascal & Dennis – (thx @ “Wochennotiz”)

OSM Foundation Awarded the “Geospatial Content Organisation of the year 2012”

OSMF: Geospatial Content Organisation of the Year 2012

The Geospatial World Leadership Awards Jury has conferred the OSM Foundation with the “Geospatial Content Organisation of the Year 2012” award. This award on earlier occasions has been presented to both Google Earth and Bing Maps and is given out by Geospatial Media based on nominations by the Geospatial World Magazine.

According to their statement, the jury “was convinced and felt overwhelmed with vision and capabilities of the Foundation in developing, maintaining and making available, the voluminous, exhaustive and constantly updated geospatial data.”

The award was received by Henk Hoff, board member, on behalf of the OSMF, during the Award Night of the Geospatial World Forum. Henk thanked the organisation for the award and with that recognizing the project as a reliable source for global open geo-data. He continued with: “The real success behind OpenStreetMap is it’s community. A community of more than a million volunteer contributors around the world. I would like to dedicate this award to them.”

Weekly OSM Summary #68

April 22nd, 2013 – May 6th, 2013
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world.

The newly developed OSM editor, named iD, has reached version 1.0 and is now online at the main OSM website. Also the main OSM website has a new feature: Add a note!
The Call for Papers for the upcoming State of the Map (SotM) in the UK is out. The registration is open too and the fee for community members is 60 Pounds – Early Bird.
The next OSM Hack Weekend in Karlsruhe (Germany) will be at June 1st and 2nd.
The Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) is searching a senior field coordinator for Bangladesh (Sri Lanka). Further, Mikel asks for help to write an HOT Activation Protocol.
An article on the OSM US blog tells you more about “OSM’s Growing Use in U.S. Government“.
Amir and “How to say: No…This is not a bug!” in OSM.
Pascal created a website with some statistics and contributor rankings of the latest OSM “Add a Note” feature.
Humberto Yances wrote about the “La Boquilla Project“: “including the use of OSM maps for mangrove conservancy, social inclusion and community strength”.
Martijn van Exel wrote a blog post about the Chicago Hack Weekend.
A blog post by Eric Fischer about “Visualizing the Progress of OpenStreetMap Around the World“.
Marco Antonio shows his first previews of OSM 3D on a smartphone.
“Mapping the history of San Francisco street names“, great visualization by Noah Veltman.
A useful script that can be applied in JOSM allows you to download errors detected in OSM that need to be fixed. You can find more information in the OSM wiki.
The open source POI+ editor still needs some translations. You can help here.
Tom’s “Hexbin Edits on OpenStreetMap” website is available at github.
The Planet.osm website by bbbike.org has been updated. You can export OSM data in a variety of data formats (e.g. Garmin OSM or ESRI’s shapefile) for your individual area of interest. They also published a free of charge iPhone Bike app.
A new version of RTKLIB, an open-source software package that allows accurate positioning, was released on April 29th. You can find more information in the OSM wiki.

Authors: Pascal & Dennis – (thx @ “Wochennotiz”)

Where Your Donation Goes

OpenStreetMap Blog