Membership updates

The membership team have been running a bit behind on OpenStreetMap Foundation membership renewal reminders. They should now have sent an email for everyone with an expiry before early June and have replied to everyone who has renewed or joined. If you expected to hear from them or if your main email address has changed, please send an update to the membership team at membership@osmfoundation.org

Scheduled downtime Thu 23 June 2011

Thursday 7:30am (23rd June 2011 GMT/UTC+0) the API and map data
editing on www.openstreetmap.org will be unavailable. The maintenance
period is expected to last for 12 hours.

The following services will be unavailable during the maintenance period:
API, editing features of www.openstreetmap.org and
planet.openstreetmap.org including replication diffs.

The wiki, mailing lists and help.openstreetmap.org will be unaffected.

Purpose: Some of the core servers are being re-located to another data-centre.

Additional information will be posted on the wiki as the maintenance
window approaches:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Servers/June_2011_Maintenance

http://blog.osmfoundation.org/2011/06/09/downtime-announcement-23-june-2011/

Downtime announcement: 23 June 2011

Thursday 23rd June 2011 7:30am (GMT/UTC+0) the API and map data editing on www.openstreetmap.org will be unavailable. The maintenance period is expected to last for 12 hours.

The following services will be unavailable during the maintenance period:
API, editing features of www.openstreetmap.org and planet.openstreetmap.org including replication diffs.

The wiki, mailing lists and help.openstreetmap.org will be unaffected.

Technical: Some of the core servers are being re-located to another data-centre.

Additional information will be posted on the wiki as the maintenance window approaches:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Servers/June_2011_Maintenance

WIN a FREE trip to State of the Map 2011!

Starting today you have an awesome chance to win a FREE trip to State of the Map in Denver!

Create a fun and unique video about what OpenStreetMap means to you and why you should be chosen and you could be the lucky winner!

Here are the details:

 

OpenStreetMap Video Competition

Create a 1-3 minute video with the following criteria to guide you:

1. The video should be fun, unique and show what OpenStreetMap means to you.

2. Explain why we should choose you to be at State of the Map 2011!

3. Normal necessities and niceties:

No vulgar language

No nudity

No animal cruelty

4. Video must have CC, CC-BY or CC-BY-SA licensing

5.  Post your video to YouTube.com with the hash symbol: #sotm11

6. Email your submission (plus link to video) to video@stateofthemap.org.

Hint: Promote your video on twitter, blogs, FaceBook, etc to get more views!

The competition is open now until July 8th, 2011 11:59pm PST.

Winner will be announced by July 15th, 2011.

Winner will be chosen by a combination of video popularity and by the SotM organizing committee.

Enter as many times as you like!

No purchase necessary.

*Free trip includes round-trip flight, hotel for three nights and one (1) Passport ticket to State of the Map 2011.

 

Scholarships available to State of the Map 2011

Today the State of the Map committee announced a program to cover full travel and accommodation costs for mappers to attend State of the Map 2011 in Denver, Colorado (United States).

More information about scholarships can be found on the State of the Map website and the OSM wiki page. 

Here are the general guidelines: 

 *candidates should be from places where costs would prohibit attendance, developing countries and places that are “interesting” geopolitically. 

 *ideal candidates for funding are from countries with a small OSM community, perhaps just a few mappers in total.

*nominees have made a significant start at mapping their city, either through imagery or with their own GPS, and are directly familiar with the process of OSM. They may have started communicating among themselves, and made plans and scoped out the process for their local district. But, the community is nowhere near critical mass, and they need the inspiration and support to take OSM to the next level.

 

Nominations should be sent to scholarship@stateofthemap.org. For each nomination, include the mappers name, OSM user name, email address, location, and a paragraph or two on why they’d be great to have at SOTM. Self nominations are accepted.

The nomination period is open until June 25th and the number of scholarships rewarded will be based on the success of fund-raising. You can also be part of the “Sponsor-a-Mapper“ program, to help fund deserving mappers to attend State of the Map. 


 

Project of the Month: Education Month

The theme for Project of the Month during June 2011 is education.
We’ll map the places that we associate with educating ourselves and
others. Is the primary school that you attended included in
OpenStreetMap? Your high school? Add those places to the map. We’ll
look at post-secondary schools and other places associated with
education as the month progresses.

During the course of the month, we’ll be adding local primary and
secondary schools. You’ll find guidelines on how to map schools on the wiki.

The classroom photo is by Liz (perspicacious.org) and it is licensed CC-By

Weekly OSM Summary #18

May 16th, 2011 – May 30th, 2011

A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap world.

  • The email for users, who didn‘t accept the new Contributor Terms so far, is ready now. It should be translated in as many languages as possible. A first batch of emails has already been send out now.
  • Blog post by Patrick Weber about “Where’s the Search” field on the OpenStreetMap.org main page. Maybe as a result of this post, the search field has now been moved to an upper left position on the main OSM page.
  • Muki Haklay repeats the comparison for the UK between the OSM and Ordnance Survey Meridian 2 datasets. You can find an interactive webpage with the results here.
  • We now have more then one million relations in our database!
  • Open Data in Vienna is now available and the first application is out: The Toilet Map Vienna. An Augmented-Reality-App based on Open Data from Vienna.
  • A new mailling list for the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF) is available.
  • The OSMF-Wiki has a new skin made by Harry Wood. This way you can differentiate it from the normal OSM wiki.
  • Jakob Altenstein wrote a bachelor-thesis about the efforts of the OSM license change. It is available in German here.
  • A new series shows how communities from different countries map around the world.
  • Pascal Neis wrote a blog post about the new Web-GUI for the Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) with OSM data.
  • Some thoughts from Olvier Kühn about “Could a less restrictive share-alike license give OpenStreetMap data a boost?“
  • Steve Coast pleads for moderation of the OSM mailing lists.
  • First preliminaries for the change from 32bit to 64bit node IDs.
  • The first tour guide with OSM maps has been published. It is available for ten cities along the Danube. You can find more information in German here and a screenshot here.
  • OSM user “Head” created a haptomap with OSM.
  • The project “building=yes” is a searchable directory for all buildings of the OSM database.
  • Chris Hill wrote about his first impressions with Leaflet (an OS JavaScript library for making tile-based interactive maps for mobile/desktop browsers) und created a demo.
  • A map by Magnificent shows areas a user can reach using public transport in a given time for certain cities.
  • Employees of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster hosted an OpenStreetMap Mapping Party in São Paolo with 40 students. (Link is in German)
  • Harry Wood wrote a summary of the last London Hack Weekend.
  • Tim Adler published a usage statistic for the Wikipedia POI Layer here.
  • A first GSoC project update from Customised OSM Tile Server and request for feedback.
  • Martijn van Exel would like to start a new OSM service (for example with twitter) and includes some ideas about anonymous edits.
  • A book about OpenLayers 2.10 has been published.
  • TileMill’s latest version supports PostGIS and can render from an OSM database.
  • Blog Post by Mike Dobson about “examining Google Map Maker and how its edit and authority systems function“. Part one and part two.

Did we miss something? You can contact us via mail.

OSM mailing lists: time for a change?

OSM has had a good run with our mailing lists, especially if you grade that based on quantity. We have over 100 of them for Iranians to Australians, for importers to newbies.

The problem is that they’re an echo chamber. Every mail is sent to everyone. That means intelligent postings as well as complete garbage get the same precedence and everything is equally loud.

Unfortunately some of the main lists have become less than nice places to be. Low signal to noise and a scorched earth policy from the more flamey participants pushes people away.

Below: Newbies prepare to enter talk@openstreetmap.org…

Alien-movie-spacesuits1

Let’s look at some solutions. One is to get rid of them. We spend too much time worrying about this crap, just kill talk@ and move to a new list discuss@ or something. Let that list have a clear and simple etiquette policy list. Put someone in charge of kick/banning people who don’t play nice. The problem here is there are very few people willing to take responsibility for being the moderator. It’s unpaid, nobody will be nice to you (except me, obviously) and it’s hard work.

Below: Mailing list infestation marines prepare to nuke the talk@ list from orbit, because it’s the only way to be sure.

Aliens-vs-predator-players-wanted-20090526000151286-0001

Another is that we let the talk@ list be. All the clueful people decamp to a new list with a nice policy as above. Stop linking to talk@ and leave the bozos there. Hopefully they don’t notice.

Below: a newbie after making a polite suggestion on legal-talk@

Aliens-half-synthetic1

We could all migrate (one imagines this follows a sea parting) to the forums. There we could be safe for awhile. Newbies are more at ease in forums. It’s easier to delete posts, they don’t have the same permanence that a mailing list does: Forever in the archive, and already sent to all participants.

None of these options are easy and we can just vote with our feet.

There is an interesting technical solution possible though. Take the forum mechanics to a mailing list. So instead of every post going to every participant just send it to participants with high karma. If they like the post (either explicitly by clicking/emailing something, or implicitly by not doing anything) then it goes to others on the list. That list can have override features so I can get sent everything in a thread or block certain people. I’ve actually started building something like this but it’s too big to fit in the margin.

Below: calm arrives at talk@ during a license discussion, unicorns descend from the skies and free healthcare for all

Seeking_utopia_11

Before utopia arrives, Steve’s top tips for the mailing lists are as follows

  • Stop asking permission on the lists, you will never get it
  • Don’t feed the trolls
  • Clueful people post more, and more cluefully to drown out said trolls
  • Someone should be appointed to moderate the lists and just warn, kick and then ban people who aren’t nice. Just use common sense to identify who they are