On Sunday January 22nd 2023 between 10:00 and 15:00 UTC/GMT the API database servers will be unavailable due to maintenance. You can see this in your local time zone at Event Time Announcer – OpenStreetMap API Maintenance 1
We are planning to upgrade the software which runs the main OpenStreetMap database. Unfortunately, we cannot do this without some downtime.
API will NOT allow map editing (using iD, JOSM, etc), and
replication updates will be paused (minutely updates and changeset replication).
We expect that the database upgrade will not take the full duration, and we will try as far as possible to keep the API available in read-only mode, but the API may be briefly unavailable.
OpenStreetMap was founded in 2004 and is a international project to create a free map of the world. To do so, we, thousands of volunteers, collect data about roads, railways, rivers, forests, buildings and a lot more worldwide. Our map data can be downloaded for free by everyone and used for any purpose – including commercial usage. It is possible to produce your own maps which highlight certain features, to calculate routes etc. OpenStreetMap is increasingly used when one needs maps which can be very quickly, or easily, updated.
What is the OpenStreetMap Foundation?
The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation, formed to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project, is financially supported by membership fees and donations, and organises the annual, international State of the Map conference. The OpenStreetMap Foundation supports the OpenStreetMap project through the work of our volunteer Working Groups. Please consider becoming a member of the Foundation – you can become a member for free, if you are an active OpenStreetMap contributor.
The launch of the Overture Maps Foundation is a significant development in the world of open map data. The founding members of Overture are influential tech industry leaders, and have committed a lot of resources. While many details of Overture remain unclear, the OpenStreetMap Foundation is interested to get a better understanding of the project. In the best scenario, OpenStreetMap would benefit from Overture’s advancements in software development, from the data and from funding. However, we also recognise risks, and will continue to develop our ability to grow the community and to fund our infrastructure and future development.
OpenStreetMap data is available for anyone to use, from hobby map makers to global corporations, and we encourage Overture to do the same, following our community expectations and licensing terms. The technical problems that Overture is addressing, such as quality checks, data integration, and alignment to schemas, are valuable for any map data provider. We know data consumers have been working on these challenges in isolation for too long, and by bringing these issues out into the commons, and open sourcing the tools, we can all benefit.
Following the announcement, we have had informal conversations with some people involved in Overture to ask questions and learn more. In particular, we asked about how work scoped in Overture overlaps with OpenStreetMap, and what the future involvement of member companies in OpenStreetMap will be. The answers have been helpful, though many questions remain. We have encouraged Overture to engage with our community and to share their plans publicly. We’ll share a few points here that were discussed informally.
Everyone we talked to emphasised that Overture is not intending to replace or fork OpenStreetMap. They see the work as complementary. The individual companies expect to continue working directly with OpenStreetMap, and may even increase their involvement, including financial contributions. Map edits that are right for OpenStreetMap, should go to OpenStreetMap. This stated commitment to OpenStreetMap’s work and community also suggests that the companies and Linux Foundation are on board to support OpenStreetMap financially. Overture has come together with a small group, and the intention is to grow and work out many details. They welcome OpenStreetMap involvement in the form that makes most sense.
The OpenStreetMap community has vast experience and knowledge in working with the diverse and complex realities of geographic data and compiling it into a unified global dataset. This knowledge can be supported but not replaced by automated approaches. We firmly believe that our community-driven approach to data collection will remain foundational to any global map. The mission of the OSMF to support the growth and development of OpenStreetMap community is more important than ever.
We encourage Overture to engage with the Foundation and the OpenStreetMap community, and make us a part of Overture’s strategic discussion holistically. Through good engagement, we can identify areas to collaborate and bring improvements to the core of OpenStreetMap, rather than creating duplicate or competing efforts. The resources that Overture’s founders are investing into the project, and their stated commitment to OpenStreetMap’s work and community, show the value they place on good maps, and the potential for supporting improvements in areas core to OpenStreetMap’s mission. We welcome Overture to discuss with the OSMF Board, and to explore the best ways to facilitate ongoing communication, decision-making, collaboration, and support.
The Engineering Working Group (EWG) would like to announce a call for proposals for the following project: Adding the ability to mute users on the openstreetmap.org website.
About the project
Users who receive unwanted messages to their openstreetmap.org message inbox currently have to report the message writer and wait for an administrator to take action. This feature will make it possible for anyone to painlessly mute (ignore) private messages from another user.
Before submitting a proposal make sure to also read the Engineering Working Group’s Project Funding Proposal Framework for a general overview of the process. Should you have any questions about the funding process please reach out to the Engineering Working group at engineering@osmfoundation.org.
About the Engineering Working Group
The Engineering Working group is charged with, among other things, handling software development paid for by the OSMF, putting out calls for proposals on tasks of interests, offering a platform for coordination of software development efforts across the OSM ecosystem, and managing OSM’s participation in software mentorship programs.
The Engineering Working Group meets once every 2 weeks. Meetings are open to all and all are welcome. Questions? Please send an email to engineering@osmfoundation.org. We are a small group and are still welcoming new members!
About OpenStreetMap
The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation, formed to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project, is financially supported by membership fees and donations, and organises the annual, international State of the Map conference. Our volunteer Working Groups and small core staff work to support the OpenStreetMap project. Join the OpenStreetMap Foundation for just £15 a year or for free if you are an active OpenStreetMap contributor.
Notes is a core feature of the OpenStreetMap.org website. It enables you to add a comment on the map to assist others in mapping/editing OpenStreetMap. Other users can respond to your notes, for example to ask for additional details if necessary. Members of the OSM community in Bogotá in Colombia have been holding notathons – meetings to close pending OSM notes – and now they’re trying to help the various Latin American communities to do the same. Below is an interview of Andrés Gómez (OSM Colombia) by Juan Arellano (volunteer translator in the OSM Foundation’s Communication Working Group), conducted originally in Spanish and translated into English.
Juan Arellano – Hi Andrés, how and when did you become interested in OSM note resolution?
Andrés Gómez – I became interested when we were in lockdown due to the pandemic, with a lot of free time and unable to leave the house. It was the end of 2020, I was browsing Pascal Neis’ statistics page, and on the OSM notes overview page I saw that Colombia was really bad in terms of closed notes compared to open ones. This wasn’t so surprising as the Colombian community was not very active, and we had neglected this aspect.
So I read all I could find about notes, comments and how to solve them, but I didn’t find that much info. It felt a bit like when I started mapping in OSM… I was struggling to get started. It turned out that notes are a different layer, with their own process and flow, and I didn’t really understand their purpose.
However, after solving a few, I started to understand the mechanics. But solving 5,000 notes was a huge task! I tried to mobilise a group I had created years ago, MaptimeBogota. We had done mapping parties before, so I proposed virtual events, since we all had to be at home, and I waited to see what would happen. I had to be insistent. From May 2021 every Saturday at 11am I organised a virtual event. At first no one attended, but I kept insisting.
After several weeks, Doris Ruiz arrived, who knew about GIS, but not OSM, and we supported each other. Later came Rafael Isturiz, who knows about open source communities and IT administration, and I managed to convince him of the potential of the notes (now, he is the biggest note evangelist I know, and great things have been achieved thanks to him). Grigoriy Geveyler, who supported us in the dissemination of events then also joined the group, and obviously Juan Melo, who has become one of the great contributors worldwide. With such a group, the dynamics of solving notes improved, and we all learned a lot not only about notes, but also about OSM and GIS. In January of this year, we were able to announce the closure of all the old notes in Colombia.
JA – Do you use special tools for note resolution?
AG – At the beginning we only used the Pascal Neis tool, as we only wanted to solve the notes in Colombia. But once we completed this objective, Rafael proposed replicating the model in other countries. So, we started sharing the topic in the OSM Latam channel on Telegram and eventually organised a meeting, supported by Celine from OSM Mexico, to integrate the countries in the region. We already knew how to use tools like BigBlueButton, how to make presentations, how to disseminate via Meetup, so all the logistics were easy and the event got a good response from the community. Rafa proposed the idea of doing a ‘Notathon’, an event focused on the resolution of notes for any country, where multiple contributors could resolve notes in the same area together.
To develop the workflow for the notathons, we investigated other tools. NotesReview is good for a few notes in a given area. Anton’s OSM Note Viewer has had an impressive evolution, and we have requested some features from him via GitHub, and he has supported us in developing them. More recently, we have used the DAMN project to divide areas of interest, so that we can work collaboratively resolving notes in the same area without overlapping.
JOSM (Java OpenStreetMap Editor) is our preferred editor for resolving notes, and we have all shared our experiences of different plugins that can help in the note resolution process. For example, Erick de Oliveira’s notes for creating unmapped tracks are quite demanding, so Rafa proposed Fast Draw, and that helped us a lot to solve about 700 notes. Continuous download also allowed us to automatically download data from wherever the notes are, and so sped up resolution. We even found a couple of bugs in JOSM, and created their respective tickets in Trac. We have also requested other applications to incorporate notes functionality, such as FediPhoto and EveryDoor (which already did!).
JA – So, has the Latin American OSM community responded to your calls for notathons?
AG – Yes, and we have grouped all the notathons from the different countries in Latam in a Telegram channel. This is a first step, because there are people with more experience in notathons than us; for example, Felipe Eugenio from Chile, who has solved more than 8,000! Having a channel dedicated to notes has allowed us to work with focus on a specific topic. Some people who don’t participate in very active OSM channels, because they deal with so many different topics, prefer the Latam Notes channel because it is punctual and decisive.
In terms of participation in notathons, the community is a bit shy, and there are few newbie contributors arriving, but in a 1-hour event, such as the notathon in Cuba, around 100 notes are resolved. That’s a very high number, as we were all supporting each other, whilst asking Ghostsama, who was in Cuba, to clarify things for us from a local perspective.
We feel we have discovered new possibilities through notathons and we want more people to support and join us. We really think that, through the notathons, you learn a lot about OSM – in fact, when you go to solve a note, you don’t necessarily know what it will be about or what the user means, so you have to search, read, learn, and that’s it, you have evolved your knowledge and skills through OSM!
JA – What’s next for this project, any new ideas to implement?
AG – For me, the notes are the “voice” of the users of our maps, and we have to “listen” to them. We know that note resolution can be done collaboratively between people in the field and people contributing remotely, so one idea is to explore the potential use of notes in disaster response, where people on the ground can report what they see and, in real time, remote mappers can make modifications to the map. We have been thinking about doing a hybrid mapping party, where we would put this idea into practice.
OSM is also being used by platforms like Facebook or Instagram, and when our map is displayed on those social networks, there is the option to make a report. We would like these platforms to integrate these reports as notes, which would keep OSM more up to date. These companies could even deploy staff to solve the notes submitted by their users and, in this way, we all win.
To conclude, notes have been present for several years within OpenStreetMap and there are already several communities that believe in the importance of closing notes. I believe we are just discovering the potential of notes and that the appetite for them is growing – people from other communities are reaching out to us as they see us as a step ahead in this. We want to keep innovating with OSM notes, and for the community around them to grow!
JA – Finally, tell us a bit about yourself and your relationship with mapping and #openstreetmap.
AG – I’m a systems engineer. I have been working as a DBA for Db2 for more than 15 years. Data and databases have always interested me; that’s why OSM is of my interest. My relationship with OSM dates back to 2009, when I started drawing some nodes and lines near my parents’ house. I didn’t really know how to contribute and wasn’t aware of the governance mechanisms or the communities around me.
In Bogota they had just implemented a new transport system: the SITP. This system is much more structured than the chaotic old system, but with a major shortcoming to this day: it does not display information to its users! There are no maps on the streets, and boarding a bus can be a nightmare. It was at this point that I started to do a lot of research on OpenStreetMap: joining the community, reading the wiki, discovering applications, websites, services, etc. and this has helped me better understand the dynamics of the ecosystem.
Although I am passionate about it, transport is a complicated thing to implement, and requires a lot of effort, so I eventually put it aside. However, my interest in strengthening the OSM community increased, and I consider myself one of the leaders of the Colombian community, and I am also pushing the Latam community towards greater integration.
Summary: After carefully considering and reviewing the Call for Venue bids for State of the Map (SotM) 2023, the SotM Working Group (WG) has decided not to organize an international State of the Map 2023. Instead, we focus on finding a venue in Africa for 2024 that ensures safety criteria.
The State of the Map Organizing Committee (SotM WG) is a volunteer-led working group that organizes international SotM conferences that bring together members from the worldwide OSM community. To achieve this, we partner with a local OSM community to bring home the SotM conference in their country. The local community is selected among other bids after our open Call for Venues.
SotM WG has held multiple voice meetings and discussions within the group. We have carefully reviewed the bid applications and considered the issues that may arise along with each.
Bid 1: Paris, France
The France team had withdrawn their bid application for SotM 2023.
Bid 2: Prizren, Kosovo
The Kosovo team had submitted a strong bid that clearly laid out all the details and plans for the conference. This was planned to be closely before or after FOSS4G 2023, similar to what happened in SotM 2022 in Italy.
However, the SotM WG acknowledges that in-person international SotMs had been held in Europe for three consecutive years, and overall (excluding online conferences in 2020-2021), 9 out of the 13 international SotM conferences were held in Europe (source: [1])
Bid 3: Yaoundé, Cameroon
The Cameroon team had also submitted a strong bid that clearly laid out all the details and plans for the conference. SotM Africa 2023 will take place in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and they had offered that if this bid is accepted, the conference will merge with the international SotM 2023, which would be the first-ever international SotM in Africa and an opportunity to reach new faces and OSM communities.
We looked very deeply into this bid and discussed all possibilities with the local team of Yaoundé. However, security and safety are pressing issues in Cameroon (sources: [2][3][4]), and members of the OSM community had also expressed concerns about this.
No SotM 2023, and plans for SotM 2024
After carefully considering and reviewing the bids for SotM 2023, we have decided not to organize an international State of the Map 2023. Instead, we will focus our efforts on finding a perfect venue for 2024 in Africa – or if there is no possibility in Africa for 2024, we will look for a country in a region which was underrepresented in the history of SotMs.
We hope to open the Call for Venue for SotM 2024 by early 2023.
Call to action: We’d like to invite you to join the SotM WG and help us with the work for SotM 2024. If you are interested, please send us a message by emailing sotm [at] openstreetmap [dot] org.
Here’s an opportunity to get involved in the OpenStreetMap Foundation, the nonprofit that supports the OSM project!
The OpenStreetMap Foundation Board elections are coming up in December, and there are three seats that will be open. If you’re interested in running, the deadline to nominate yourself is coming up, October 22, 2022 at 23:59 UTC.
About the OpenStreetMap Foundation Board of Directors
The seven-person Board of Directors works on OSM Foundation matters on a volunteer (unpaid) basis and is elected by the OSM Foundation membership.
The board meets regularly to work on administrative, policy, and fundraising issues, to vote on resolutions and to support the OSMF Working Groups, which are also composed of volunteers. The Working Groups are always looking for help too!
For the December election, the terms of Board members Eugene Alvin Villar, Jean-Marc Liotier and Tobias Knerr are expiring, so their seats will be available. (They also may choose to run again.)
If you’re interested in running yourself, or know someone who might be, there is more information about nominations and the elections here. You can nominate yourself!
Board members serve two year terms and may be reelected a few times, with a term limit of three terms in the last eight elections. (You can get more information about board term limits in sections 33 and 34 of the OSMF Articles of Association. The Articles of Association are the rules and guidelines of the OSM Foundation.)
The Board elections start December 3rd and close December 10th. You can see more key dates here.
Monthly board meetings are open to OSMF members to observe or ask questions. You can find minutes of past meetings here.
Why you should run for the Board
We always need board candidates! Consider it yourself or ask someone else who you think might be good for the next OSMF board election, which will take place on the 10th of December, 2022!
Why run for the board? Below you can read the personal views of current and past board members:
(Please note that in order to run, you need to be a Normal OSMF member 28 days before the election, not an Associate one, and you must have been a member during the full 180 days before the election.)
If you’re not already a member of the Foundation, it’s a great way to support the OpenStreetMap project, voice your opinions and also become eligible to vote in Board elections. You can learn how to join the OSMF here, which can be free if you are an active contributor to OSM.
Note: translations for this post are to come.
About OpenStreetMap
The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation, formed to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project, is financially supported by membership fees and donations, and organises the annual, international State of the Map conference. Our volunteer Working Groups and small core staff work to support the OpenStreetMap project. Join the OpenStreetMap Foundation for just £15 a year or for free if you are an active OpenStreetMap contributor.
OpenStreetMap Foundation corporate member OpenCage is pleased to announce a new collaboration with popular geospatial podcast MapScaping to help encourage the growth of small OpenStreetMap-based projects.
OpenCage has purchased four episodes worth of MapScaping advertising slots, and will donate these slots to small OpenStreetMap projects. Each selected project will receive a 30 second ad read, a presence on the MapScaping website, and promotion via social media. The definition of “OpenStreetMap projects” is intentionally left vague to encourage a wide spectrum of applications. Examples of the types of projects OpenCage and MapScaping could imagine supporting with the initiative include: open source tools seeking developers, OSMF volunteers recruiting volunteers, start-ups looking to make their service more widely known, or local OSM communities advertising new initiatives.
“Our service has depended on OpenStreetMap since the day we first started eight years ago. While we’ve always done our best to give back to the OSM community – for example by sponsoring events, and becoming corporate members of the foundation – we specifically wanted to find a way to help smaller, up and coming projects. Working with MapScaping gives us a great tool to help these projects accelerate,” said Ed Freyfogle, OpenCage co-founder.
Daniel O’Donohue, founder and host of MapScaping said, “We’re delighted to provide a platform to help the OpenStreetMap community grow by sharing these projects with our global audience. OpenStreetMap has been a key ingredient in the explosion of geospatial innovation over the last decade, and I’m looking forward to working with creative projects that are at the leading edge of that innovation.”
About OpenCage
OpenCage operates a highly-available, enterprise level geocoding API based on OpenStreetMap and other open datasources. In addition to being corporate members of the OSMF, OpenCage are proud members of the UK and German local chapters, co-sponsor and contribute to the open source development of Nominatim (the primary OpenStreetMap geocoding software), and regularly sponsor OpenStreetMap events.
About MapScaping
The MapScaping Podcast is a weekly podcast for the geospatial community. Started in 2019, MapScaping has grown rapidly to become a leading independent media voice in the global geospatial discussion. The show profiles innovative geo projects and technologies, and provides a forum to discuss issues facing the geospatial community.
What is OpenStreetMap?
OpenStreetMap was founded in 2004 and is a international project to create a free map of the world. To do so, we, thousands of volunteers, collect data about roads, railways, rivers, forests, buildings and a lot more worldwide. Our map data can be downloaded for free by everyone and used for any purpose – including commercial usage. It is possible to produce your own maps which highlight certain features, to calculate routes etc. OpenStreetMap is increasingly used when one needs maps which can be very quickly, or easily, updated.
What is the OpenStreetMapFoundation?
The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation, formed to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project, is financially supported by membership fees and donations, and organises the annual, international State of the Map conference. The OSMF supports the OpenStreetMap project through the work of our volunteer Working Groups. Please consider becoming a member of the Foundation – you can become a member for free, if you are an active OpenStreetMap contributor.
The 15th State of the Map conference took place in Firenze, Italy and online from 19th-21st August. This would not have been possible without the work of the organising team and other volunteers, speakers, attendees in person and online, people who submitted posters or talks, translators, the contributors to the project and the sponsors.
Self-submitted photos of some State of the Map 2022 attendees. Compilation by volunteers of the State of the Map working group.State of the Map 2022 attendees in Florence, Italy. Photo by Carlo Prevosti, CC BY-SA 4.0
You can read about some of the attendees’ experiences (in various languages) or post your own if you attended either in Florence or online. Feel free to add the link of your entry to the above OSM wiki page (requires a different log-in than your log-in to www.osm.org).
If you saw photographs of the catering hall, you might have noticed the posters on the walls. But what were they about..? You can check the interesting variety of posters here – which is fortunate even for Florence attendees, as in some cases the posters were not easy to reach due to the placement of the tables 🙂
As in the previous years, this year we had a lot of academics visiting the conference. If you are interested in the academic track, the proceedings are published on Zenodo.
Ticket statistics
If you like statistics, you can find some below 🙂 Please note that these are related to the tickets purchased/obtained and do not correlate 100% with the stats of attendees (as a few people had tickets but did not manage to attend the conference). Additionally, providing information such as country or organisation/company (if applicable) was optional.
195 people with online (Venueless) tickets only.
406 Florence ticket holders (with online ticket as well).
The online (Venueless) ticket was needed only if you wanted to interact with other online attendees. Otherwise, you could see the talks streamed for free – and the recordings are currently being added online (more information below).
Of the 406 Florence tickets obtained, there were
218 for people associated with organisations/companies (profit, non-profit, local OSM organisations – as self-declared during registration), including * 74 for people from State of the Map 2022 sponsoring organisations. * >= 34 for people associated with HOT (most self-declared during registration).
>= 58 for people from Universities/research institutes (most self-declared during registration).
30 for State of the Map 2022 volunteers.
20 for OSM Foundation travel grantees.
Regional and country statistics of Florence ticket holders
136 people (33% of the Florence ticket holders) provided a country during online registration.
Regional statistics for the 33% of Florence ticket holders:
90 Europe
19 America
14 Asia
11 Africa
2 Oceania
The following countries had five or more ticket holders:
26 Germany
16 United States
15 Italy
11 Great Britain
9 France
7 Netherlands
5 India
5 Romania
People from the following countries also had tickets and mentioned their country during online registration: Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czechia, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Greece, Hungary, Japan, Malawi, Moldova, Nepal, Nigeria, Rwanda, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
Statistics of online-only ticket holders
Most online-only ticket holders did not provide much information during online registration. For example, none of the 195 online-only ticket holders provided their country.
Organisation 95 of the 195 online-only ticket holders provided an organisation during registration. Of these, 11 were associated with a university or research institute and 7 were from State of the Map 2022 sponsoring companies.
T-shirt preferences
Of the 406 Florence ticket holders,
122 (30%) chose a lady t-shirt.
284 (70%) chose a male t-shirt.
Visa support
We helped 64 people with supporting documents for their Visa applications. This number was increased compared to State of the Map 2019, where we received similar requests from just 19 persons. The increase was partly due to increased requests by YouthMappers and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT).
YouthMappers: ~20 Visa-related requests.
HOT: ~14 Visa-related requests.
OSMF travel grantees: ~ 11 Visa-related requests.
Please note that not all Visa applicants managed to get a Visa, and that some of the OSMF travel grantees were also connected to YouthMappers or HOT. There might be a blog post or diary entry in the near future dedicated just to the SotM 2022 travel grants provided by the OSM Foundation.
Upcoming regional State of the Map conferences
Was State of the Map 2022 too far for you to travel? One of the upcoming regional State of the Map conferences might be closer and at least one of them is also online. These regional conferences are organised by local communities and not by the OSM Foundation. The current information is:
State of the Map Nigeria 2022, 1-3 December 2022, Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
State of the Map Japan 2022, 3 December 2022, Kakogawa Chamber of Commerce and Industry Centre, Japan.
State of the Map Asia 2022, 21-25 November 2022, Legazpi City, Philippines.
State of the Map Tanzania 2023, 20-22 January 2023, Dar es Salaam and online.
State of the Map Africa 2023, 6-8 December 2023, Yaounde, Cameroon.
…or you might be interested to organise a regional State of the Map event with your local OSM community. In this case please remember to submit the State of the Map quick licence form 🙂
Next international State of the Map
The decision about the host country of the next international State of the Map is pending. Watch this space.
Do you want to translate this and other blogposts in another language..? Please send an email to communication@osmfoundation.org with subject: Helping with translations in [language]
The State of the Map conference is the annual, international conference of OpenStreetMap, organised by the OpenStreetMap Foundation. The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation, formed in the UK to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development, and distribution of free geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project. The State of the Map Organising Committee is one of our volunteer Working Groups.
OpenStreetMap was founded in 2004 and is an international project to create a free map of the world. To do so, we, thousands of volunteers, collect data about roads, railways, rivers, forests, buildings, and a lot more worldwide. Our map data can be downloaded for free by everyone and used for any purpose – including commercial usage. It is possible to produce your own maps which highlight certain features, calculate routes, etc. OpenStreetMap is increasingly used when one needs maps that can be very quickly, or easily, updated.
Ten years ago today we changed the license of OpenStreetMap’s data. For those who remember it, you’ll know it took a lot longer than a day. It was slow and painful process, but we published our first ODbL-licensed “planet dump” on 14th September 2012!
In the run up to that moment we spent several years working with the Open Data Commons organisation to create the Open Database License, reaching broad community agreement upon it, then seeking formal acceptance from every data contributor, and carefully redacting data where this acceptance was not received. All of these steps required vast effort from volunteers, culminating in the switch-over moment. In fact even after the big announcement (on this blog) it took a couple more days before we were able to publish the data ten years ago today!
In those ten years we’ve seen spectacular growth, not just in data and community, but also in users and uses of our data under ODbL. You can read more about the license change reasoning and process here, but if you’re interested in using OpenStreetMap data … download it. It’s free and open licensed!
Cake for OpenStreetMap’s 18th anniversary, celebrated by OSM Bangladesh at BSMRSTU (Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Science and Technology University). Photo by Sawan Shariar, CC-BY-SA 4.0
This Sunday, 7th of August 2022, we are celebrating 18 years of OpenStreetMap!
Celebrations started the previous week and will continue for one more week. So, how do you plan to celebrate? 🙂
Planning to organise an online or in-person event? Please add your event to the OSM wiki! If wiki editing isn’t your thing, email communication@osmfoundation.org with your event details and we’ll add it 🙂
You could post why you love OpenStreetMap 🙂 Remember to use the hashtag #OpenStreetMap18 on social media.
Posting photos of celebrations? If your photos are accompanied with the text “CC-BY-SA 4.0” (or another open license), we can add them to the OSM wiki (or feel free to add them yourself! ~ register here).
Or you could post a photo of yourself holding a written message 🙂
You can use your video room even after the birthday, for any OSM-related event.
Community members in low-bandwidth environments may benefit from using BigBlueButton’s low-bandwidth settings.
Please add your event to the OSM wiki! If wiki editing isn’t your thing, email communication@osmfoundation.org with your event details and we’ll add it 🙂
Join us!
Observance of the anniversary of the creation of OpenStreetMap is held on or about the 9th of August, which is the anniversary of the registration of the OpenStreetMap.org domain name. The concept of OpenStreetMap predates the domain name registration, but that seems a suitable anniversary date 🙂
Do you want to translate this and other blogposts in another language..? Please send an email to communication@osmfoundation.org with subject: Helping with translations in [language]
OpenStreetMap was founded in 2004 and is an international project to create a free map of the world. To do so, we, thousands of volunteers, collect data about roads, railways, rivers, forests, buildings, and a lot more worldwide. Our map data can be downloaded for free by everyone and used for any purpose – including commercial usage. It is possible to produce your own maps which highlight certain features, calculate routes, etc. OpenStreetMap is increasingly used when one needs maps that can be very quickly, or easily, updated.
