Weekly OSM Summary #73

July 1st, 2013 – July 15th, 2013
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world.

The preliminary schedule of the State of the Map 2013 in Birmingham is online.
The OSM Data Working Group wrote an “Activity Report for Jan-Jun 2013“. Also all protocols of the Licensing Working Group can be found here.
First ideas of the OSMF Future Working Group have been published.
Harry Wood published his slides that introduce “An OpenStreetMap training course intro“.
Charlotte Hoarau created a 3D Watercolor OSM map (based on a Stamen map and a national elevation dataset).
ESRI published a lightweight set of tools that allows ArcGIS services to work with Leaflet.
Based on the “leaflet-providers” preview page, you can copy and paste JS code for different OSM maps that you can use in your leaflet online browser map.
Russ Deffner mapped the entire Colorado State University.
Johannes Kröger published his results about his “Analysis and improvement of the OpenStreetMap street color scheme for users with color vision deficiencies“.
Maxim Rylov wrote a blog post about “High Cartographic Quality Label Placement on OSM-based Map“. You can find two great examples here and here.

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

New map controls on OpenStreetMap.org

We’ve just gone live with some changes to the map controls on the OpenStreetMap.org front page.

“Re-organise the map tools. Take them from all four corners and just put them together in a more organised way”, explained Designer Saman Bemel-Benrud in his SOTM U.S. presentation as he put forward this and many other ideas for front page design improvements.

As well as re-arranging things, you can now use browser geo-location to locate the map where you are (), and the map layers picker () now gives a preview of the different map styles on offer (Those which we feature on the front page. There are many others of course)

We’re excited to unveil these changes which we think will improve the experience, particularly for new site visitors, and we will continue to make improvements in the coming months. Obviously if you’ve been using the OpenStreetMap website for some time, the re-arrangement may take some getting used to, but we hope you like it too!

Big thanks to John Firebaugh, Saman Bemel-Benrud, Tom MacWright who did the javascript development and design work for this with a healthy dose of feedback and collaboration from others. Many issues have already been discussed and weighed up, but if you have further feedback, the dev talk mailing list could be the best place for it. (Updated: discussion seems to be happening on the ‘talk’ mailing list)

Weekly OSM Summary #72

June 17th, 2013 – July 1st, 2013
A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world.

Why has the OSM server fund raising been extended?
Early sign ups to the State of the Map in Birmingham will get an individual mug.
The income and balance sheets of the OSM Foundation have been published.
The OSM download area at the Geofabrik server has been extended and improved for USA & Canada.
A new HOT project regarding the flooding in India has been started. You can find an additional blog post about the work here and a video by Harry Wood about how to map missing rivers. Also HOT Indonesia started working on some new material for learnOSM.org
Tate Watkins wrote a blog post about mapping in Haiti and Yohan Boniface is working on an HOT OSM map style. More information and a preview are available here.
Frederik Ramm created some tiles that focus on low zoom levels (0-8). You can find some more information in the mailing list thread.
A map made of wood and mapped OSM data.
Some new program releases which are important for OSM: v0.6 of Leaflet (browser-map-lib), v0.3.4 of OSRM (routing engine) and v0.4 of uMap (OSM maps in your html site)

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

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.

Where Your Donation Goes

OpenStreetMap Blog