Here be Dragons

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So what’s with the Dragons? As OpenStreetMap grew, and acquired more
computers to run the OpenStreetMap services, those computers needed
names. These server names provide a way to refer to a specific piece
of computer hardware, regardless of the services that device might
currently provide. Naming servers according to a theme has a long
tradition in IT circles. Typical server name themes include planets,
constellations, characters from specific books or plays, and other
popular culture references.

In 2008, the OpenStreetMap community decided to use dragon names as
the theme for OSM server names. Dragon names were chosen as a tribute
to the “Here be Dragons” marked on unexplored portions of maps and globes.
Several other themes were considered including the names of
cartographers and explorers.

And now we have even more dragons.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation, and the Operations Working Group, would
like to thank Nokia UK Limited and BitFolk.com
for their recent donations of hardware to the OpenStreetMap
Foundation. You can read more details about their generous donations on the OpenStreetMap Foundation Blog.

Dragon bridge photo by Dani_7C3
is licensed CC-By-SA

More new servers

Dragon sculpture on the Dragon Bridge in Ljubljana. Photo CC-By-SA, dani_7C3


The OpenStreetMap Foundation, and the Operations Working Group, would like to thank Nokia UK Limited for the donation of some of their redundant server hardware. This hardware has found new purpose in the form of “soup“[1] and “fiddlestick“[2], two new web front end servers. A third server “eustace“[3] will be used initially as a trial web statistics server.

The web front-end servers, soup and fiddlestick, replace puff and fuchur who had performed that role since 2008. Web front-end servers in OpenStreetMap provide the data browser and data layer, as well as user diaries and other “social” functions.

Eustace will debut in a new role for OpenStreetMap by collecting web statistics. The OpenStreetMap Foundation wants to know more about how users experience the OSM web site in an effort to improve the way that OSM services are delivered.

[1] Character from The Clangers, a UK children’s TV programme.
[2] Strangewood (1999): Fiddlestick, a small musically emotive dragon.
[3] Turns into a dragon in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Chronicles of Narnia) after slipping on a gold bracelet.

Introducing Zark

Zark, during installation.

Zark is the newest OpenStreetMap server. Give Zark a warm welcome. Continuing the in the tradition of naming OSM servers after dragons, the name “Zark” is taken from the Eidolon Chronicles/Shadow World books by Jane Johnson.

The first task for Zark will be to serve as a trial / evaluation server for the OWL – OpenStreetMap Watch List service. OWL’s popularity on the dev server has lead to performance problems and long update delays. After more than a year of development and increasing popularity of OWL’s ability to follow local changes without distracting “Big” changesets, moving OWL to Zark will make this service even more effective for mappers.

Many thanks to bitfolk.com for donating this server.

New Board Members

Final votes were cast today at the Foundation AGM, and the results are in. Congratulations to our new board members:

Richard Fairhurst, Matt Amos, and Dermot McNally

Mikel Maron was also re-elected onto the board.

[Update] : The votes tallied up as follows: 98 votes for Richard Fairhurst, 81 Matt Amos, 74 Mikel Maron, 68 Dermot McNally, 47 Kate Chapman, 44 Eugene Usvitsky, 42 Derick Rethans, 41 Niccolo Rigacci, 27 Serge Wroclawski.

Thankyou to all of our candidates. This year we really had an excellent group of highly dedicated OSMers to choose from, and the choice was a difficult one. The relatively even spread of votes is reflective of this. We hope and expect that you will all play an active role in the foundation in 2011-2012.

Vote for OpenStreetMap Foundation candidates for the Board

The 2011 election is under way for members of the OpenStreetMap Foundation Board of Directors. Further to our previous post, there’s now nine candidates to choose from, which is great! Members of the OSMF can vote in person at the annual general meeting at State of the Map or by proxy via email. Probably many people will be doing the email option. The list of candidates and voting details are found on the wiki.

Please read the email instructions carefully. Note that the deadline for voting by email is coming in a couple of days time: Thu 8th at 17:00 UTC.

If you need to join the foundation first then time is definitely running out! (There’s a delay for processing by the membership secretary) Join the OpenStreetMap Foundation here.

Questions to candidates and discussions can be found on the OSMF-talk@ archives and on the Election discussion page on the wiki.

Vote photo by Marc Tarlock is licensed CC-By-SA

Vote for OpenStreetMap Foundation candidates for the Board

The 2011 election is under way for members of the OpenStreetMap
Foundation Board of Directors. Members of the OSMF can vote in person
at the annual general meeting at State of the Map or by proxy via email. You can join the OpenStreetMap Foundation. The list of candidates and voting details are found on the wiki.

Questions to candidates and discussions can be found on the OSMF-talk@ archives and on the Election discussion page on the wiki.

Vote photo by Marc Tarlock is licensed CC-By-SA

Weekly OSM Summary #25

August 22, 2011 – September 4, 2011

A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) world.

  • The 7th OpenStreetMap Anniversary Birthday party was celebrated worldwide. See the best birthday cakes here.
  • Elections for the OSMF board started! You can find additional information here and here.
  • The Licensing Working Group (LWG) will schedule a second mass-email to OSM contributors which have not agreed to the new license yet. Additional important information: „A very small number of contributors have declined the new contributor terms and asserted that their contributions are in the public domain. This does not mean that the collective data in the OSM database is public domain. Their “PD” position contradicts the explicit decline. Therefore the LWG takes the position that their contributions cannot be published under ODbL without acceptance of the contributor.“ Read all meeting minutes here.
  • You can pay your OSM Foundation membership with bitcoins too!
  • The Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) prepared a data import for Somalia. You can help to integrate this data to OSM. Read the announcement here.
  • „OpenStreetMap and Warm vs. Cold Geography“. Nice blog post by Martijn.
  • Simon enhanced the ODbL statistics with some new countries. Read more at his webpage.
  • A new version of the “Overpass API” now returns metadata such as timestamp and user name too. “The Overpass API (or OSM3S) is a read-only API that serves up raw XML encoded OSM map data. Overpass API includes functionality similar to that of XAPI“ (Wiki).
  • Last weekend the “State Of The Map Scotland 2011” took place in Glasgow (Scotland). 

Did we miss something? You can contact us via weekly.osm@googlemail.com

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

Board elections and other OSMF changes

We’re about to see some changes to the OSMF. The most pressing thing to be aware of is the election of new board members:

Board elections

There are four board seats up for grabs, so this represents a considerable change of faces leading our organisation. As was announced previously, we’ll be taking votes by email from 1st September. Before that though we need a finalised list of candidates. The candidates for election (so far) are listed on this wiki page.

Some good candidates but we’d like some more. We have four board seats to fill, and it’s clearly a more healthy democratic situation if we’ve got a bit of a choice. We’re looking for people who can lead our organisation to success in 2011 and going forwards. We’d like to see dedicated OSMers, people who are engaged with the community, but perhaps also people who are in a position to reach out beyond the community. We’d also like to see geographic diversity. The relative importance of these factors will be up to the voters.

If you have ideas for people who fit the bill, now is the time to have a whisper in their ear and persuade them to run for election. Ideally candidates will ensure there is a description of themselves on their wiki user page, and preferably also an election manifesto, before adding themselves to the list. But don’t forget nominations close on Wednesday 31st in time for voting to commence the day after.

To run as a candidate, and also to take part in voting you need to be a fully paid up member of the foundation, so be sure to join the foundation now if you haven’t already.

Management Team

Another recent change has been the introduction of a new “Management Team”. This new group is made up of representatives from the various working groups and (as detailed on the Management Team page) is tasked with regular feedback from/to the working groups, scoping of working groups, and decisions around implementing the budget. One of the main reasons behind this is to ease the workload of the board by taking care of some of the day-to-day trouble-shooting issues. There are various potential downsides to this idea, which people have raised on the osmf-talk mailing list. It remains to be seen how well it will work, and nothing is set in stone, but hopefully this will make life easier for board members new and old, and free them up to do more strategic decision-making.

Engineering Working Group

Also announced recently, we have a new “Engineering Working Group” with the task of assisting and guiding the community-driven development of OSM-related source code and tools. Again it remains to be seen how well this will work, and this is very open to some more keen participation. To be clearer about separation of concerns here, the “Technical Working Group” has been renamed as the “Operations Working Group”. You can find definitions of all of these teams, their membership, and their meeting details linked from the Working Groups page .