The following post was put together by several members of Czech OSM community, and the main contributor was Mikoláš Štrajt. OpenStreetMap Česká republika z.s. is one of the OSM Foundation Local Chapters.
OpenStreetMap Česká republika z.s. association was founded in 2018 with a primary aim to have a stable entity for ownership of already existing website of the local community on domains openstreetmap.cz and osmap.cz. Since 2020 the association acts as a local chapter of OpenStreetMap Foundation in the Czech Republic.
automatically, address points (operated by poloha.net project),
semi-automatically, buildings (from the RÚIAN database) and fields and meadows (from the LPIS database) using the JOSM plugin called Tracer,
we are updating post boxes according to open data by Česká pošta (Czech Post) and we report any discrepancy found,
as needed, we sometimes do collective edits. Recently, we have been for example improving the tags about recycling containers or controlling if we do not have telephone booths, which were cancelled the other day, hanging in the map.
organise the State of the Map CZ+SK conference (as part of wider OpenAlt conference or standalone action), and we are publishing video recordings of the speeches,
quarterly, call for a personal meeting of mappers – so-called “quarterly beer”,
organise mapathons,
clean up after vandals operating in the area of the Czech Republic, communicate with the newbies, state offices, and commercial subjects.
Members of our community operate their own projects, e.g.:
– MTB map – a map for mountain bike riders, – tourist maps for Garmin, other Garmin maps, – maps of the Czech Republic for applications based on the mapsforge library, – POI importer used to easily import various datasets into OSM, – Osmose backend for CZ,PL,DE,FI,DK,AT, – Taginfo for the Czech Republic, – OsmHiCheck – QA applications for hiking routes, – Archive of extracts of OSM data for the Czech Republic with very old versions, – Monthly generated map tiles for the Czech Republic starting 04.2006.
Do you want to translate this and other blog posts in another language..? Please send an email to communication@osmfoundation.org with subject: Helping with translations in [language]
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. It has no full-time employees and it is supporting the OpenStreetMap project through the work of our volunteer Working Groups.
OpenStreetMap is open data, available to all for free on https://planet.openstreetmap.org. We release six large files, totaling 428 GB every week. These files contain the complete OpenStreetMap data, including files with the full history of OSM.
To make it easier to share the load of downloading these files, we also supply BitTorrent files, which allow spreading the load across multiple web servers as well as using peer-to-peer file transfers.
mnalis has recently implemented RSS feeds which announce when the torrents come out. This allows users to automatically subscribe to sharing new planet files as they are produced, thus reducing the load on the planet.openstreetmap.org servers, which are bandwidth-limited.
Do you want to translate this and other blog posts in your language…? Please email communication@osmfoundation.org with subject: Helping with translations in [your language]
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, such as the Operations Working Group. Please consider becoming a member of the Foundation.
The following post was written by Freemap Slovakia, one of the OSM Foundation Local Chapters.
OpenStreetMap is represented in Slovakia by Freemap Slovakia (NGO Freemap) which was founded in 2009 and became recognized as Local OSM Chapter in 2021.
We have 13 regular and 4 registered members. Apart from the organized members, there are several hundred active mappers in Slovakia.
Over the time, we contributed to OSM in many ways and we continue to do so.
Community
General OSM discussion forum related to Slovakia
We maintain osm_sk google group, available to everyone, where all OSM contributors that deal with Slovakia in OSM are welcome to ask questions and discuss ideas.
Mapping Parties
Once, or twice a year we organize mapping parties, one of which serves as a meeting for our NGO. The parties are always held at different places in Slovakia.
In an effort that has been going for several years we continuously perform supervised bulk import of buildings and addresses from the Cadastre of Real Estate of Slovakia. For this purpose we built a JOSM plugin that allows users to visually inspect batch-imported data and upload it subsequently into the OSM database.
Marked Hiking Trails
Slovakia is a mountainous country and has one of the most elaborate systems of marked hiking trails in the world with more than 100 years of history (shared with Czech Republic).
We cooperate with the Klub Slovenských Turistov (Association of Slovak Tourists) which maintains the physical trails and markings, to make sure all changes are captured in OSM as soon as possible.
Cycling Infrastructure
Slovakia enjoys steady growth of cycling infrastructure, both in physical means (e.g. dedicated cycling paths) and in terms of trail marking. We make sure the latest changes in the “physical world of Slovak cycling” are captured in the OSM database.
Rivers and streams
Rivers and streams are hard to be properly mapped by “survey”, therefore we imported most of the waterways from the Cadastre of Slovakia, open data sources of Slovak Cartography Office of Slovak Republic, INSPIRE dataset and recently from more precise Aerial Laser Scans of Terrain performed by the Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre Authority of the Slovak Republic.
Software & Hardware
Freemap.sk Web Portal
We develop and maintain web portal freemap.sk that provides a number of features:
Source code of the portal, backend servers and many utility repositories are Open source.
Custom Map Styles and Renderers
Due to the specific appearance of the hiking trail marking in Slovakia, we developed several custom map styles which we also render and provide publicly as tiles.
Legacy Hiking Style
This raster map style was used for many years until we developed a more recent, hi-res “outdoor style”. Some people still consider this legacy style a pinnacle in terms of balance between colours, information and general aesthetics, and therefore the style is still available in the portal.
Recent Outdoor Style
A new hi-res raster map style has been in development since 2019, with a more “busy” appearance, as it displays hiking, cycling, cross-country skiing and horse riding marked trails all at once.
We empower users of freemap.sk to upload and view photos. Our photo gallery contains almost 300 000 photos, including more than 10 000 photos of hiking and cycling guideposts.
Rendering Maps and Hosting Tiles
We render our own map styles and expose the map tiles for public use. This way, anyone can easily use our raster map tiles in their websites, or smartphone apps.
We also provide offline vector maps for the Android smartphone app Locus and other devices:
Garmin Exports
Twice a week we export the freemap-style map into a format suitable for Garmin devices.
Other
Printed maps
We create custom vector maps for large prints on information boards. Freemap.sk users can also easily export their own raster maps in print quality through the Export Map feature.
OSM License Compliance
Maps generated from the OSM data are frequently used by various NGOs in Slovakia on information boards and printed maps. When we encounter OSM-based maps missing appropriate attribution, we communicate with creators of those maps to make sure the text is included. In almost all cases such the situation is caused by lack of knowledge and not by malicious intent and the problem is usually resolved by adding a sticker to the board containing the attribution text.
Awards
The Openstreetmap Foundation Greatness in mapping award was granted to our member Martin Ždila in 2016.
Funding
Our largest expenses are for hosting the freemap.sk portal and the map rendering servers. These costs are covered with income from annual fees paid by our members, by donations, and via the Slovak government-run 2% income tax donation schema.
Vision for Upcoming Years
In the near future we will be busy with the following:
we believe that as a community, we succeeded in creating the best outdoor map of Central Europe, with an unmatched level of detail, precision, and frequency of updates. We plan to continue in this effort
grow the OSM community in Slovakia and make the existing tools more accessible for non-English speaking mappers.
as mostly technology-centric group of people, we realize the need for recruiting new members, who could help us put a more human face on our effort through social media, or by organizing mapping-propagating events for lay people
continue importing data into the OSM database from datasets published by various Slovak government agencies. This also includes cleanup of data that was previously imported from less precise datasets.
work on further development of the freemap.sk web portal, the outdoor map style and a custom routing service, most likely based on GrapHopper
try to raise more funds, which would allow us to grow the area covered by our map even further
oma.sk – partner portal build on top of OSM data and Freemap.sk maps
nabezky.sk – partner portal for cross-contry skiing using Freemap.sk maps
If you would like to contact us
Write us via osm_sk google group, or through Facebook page, or send us an email to freemap@freemap.sk
Do you want to translate this and other blog posts in another language..? Please send an email to communication@osmfoundation.org with subject: Helping with translations in [language]
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. It has no full-time employees and it is supporting the OpenStreetMap project through the work of our volunteer Working Groups.
Would you like to provide feedback on decisions that the OSM Foundation board made in 2020 and on current topics? The board has prepared a survey and is asking for your input in order to set priorities.
You can see a copy of the questions in English here.
The survey is available in18 languages so far. Image by D. Kazazi, CC-BY-SA 3.0. Official OSM logo by Ken Vermette, CC-BY-SA 3.0 & trademarks apply.
Languages
Thanks to volunteer translators, the survey is available in eighteen languages so far:
If you would like to provide a translation to a language not on the list, or to suggest a correction in one of the translations, please email allan@mustard.net
If you would like to help with translations of non-English answers to English, future surveys or blogposts, please send an email to communication@osmfoundation.org with subject: Helping with translations in [language].
Practical
You need to provide an email address (to receive a token) and solve an equation in order to access the survey.
There are 18 questions, most are multiple-choice and mandatory.
There is an optional section with demographic questions.
There are several sections. You cannot go back to the previous section but you can resume later.
Please note that pages with background information linked from the survey are in English.
If the pages are on the OSM wiki, you are welcome to translate them.
If they are on the OSMF website and you would like to provide translations, please email the Communication Working Group at communication@osmfoundation.org with subject: Translating OSMF pages in [language].
Feedback
There is discussion about the survey on the “talk” mailing list, where you are welcome to provide feedback. You can register to the talk mailing list here. All past messages of the list are available here.
The answers can be accessed by current board members and the administrative assistant and will be processed by the board.
The email addresses and names (if provided) of participants won’t be published after the survey ends.
Results
The general results will be published after the survey ends. Past surveys are listed here.
Deadline for participation: 14 February 2021.
Even if you don’t participate, it would be appreciated if you spread the word about the survey.
Thank you in advance 🙂
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. It has no full-time employees and it is supporting the OpenStreetMap project through the work of our volunteer Working Groups. Please consider becoming a member of the Foundation.
If you contribute significantly to the OpenStreetMap project you should have a voice in the OpenStreetMap Foundation, which is supporting the project, and be able to vote for the board members of your choice. There is now an easier and costless way to become an OpenStreetMap Foundation member:
The volunteers of the OSMF Membership Working Group have just implemented the active contributor membership program, where you can easily apply to become an Associate member of the Foundation and there is no need to pay the membership fee.
What can I do as an OSMF Associate member?
You can vote for the board candidates of your choice at the board elections.
You can vote on some issues during General Meetings (but not all).
You have the option to receive a single daily digest, containing all the emails of the day.
Feel free to email in your language 🙂
You can proudly say that you are an OSMF member 🙂
How does it work?
We will automatically grant associate memberships to mappers who request it and who have contributed at least 42 calendar days in the last year (365 days).
Not everyone contributes by mapping, and some of the most familiar names in our members list barely map. Some are very involved, for example, in organizing conferences. Those other forms of contribution should be recognised as well. If you do not map at all or less than the 42 days, then we expect you to write a paragraph or two about what you do for OpenStreetMap. The Board will then vote on your application.
How can I find out how many mapping days I have?
You can get an estimate from tools like Pascal Neis How did you contribute, which should be accurate enough for most purposes.
If you are technically versed and wish to verify your mapping days yourself, use the changesets API of OSM to query your changesets. Then you can collect all unique dates in the created_at attributes of the changesets, and count how many unique days you have in the last 365 days.
I would like to become a member via the active contributor program!
● If you qualify based on mapping activity (at least 42 mapping days in the last 365 days) please fill out this form to get your active contributor membership
Your email address (where ballots for voting will be sent and will be the email address associated with participation in the OSMF members mailing list, if you choose to subscribe)
How long is this membership valid?
Just like paid membership, membership under the membership fee waiver programme must be renewed annually. You will get a reminder, and you then can request the renewal, similar to the initial application. The check for mapping at least 42 calendar days in the last year will be carried out at the time you request the renewal, or alternatively you submit again a paragraph or two about what you do for OpenStreetMap.
What else do I need to know?
By law, every member of the OSMF can inspect the membership register (we ask for the purpose before handing it out and generally distribution by the recipient is not allowed). Who joined under which program is not revealed. The name, country, email and one of the OSM account names will be shown.
Why does this active contributor membership program exist?
By inviting more active community members to join the OSMF, we become more resilient against take-over attempts through massive signups. We believe that even mappers for whom £15 is not a lot of money would be more willing to join, if they are invited to a free membership due to their good work. Also, active contribution to the project is easier to assess than financial hardship and does not require the applicant to disclose personal information. The potential loss of individual membership fee income is not a threat to our financial stability. In fact, there are quite a few members who like to donate more than just £15. Those donations need not be tied to any membership.
Why 42 mapping days?
Mapping days is not perfect, but we need a benchmark that is objective, easy to verify, and simple for us to measure and implement. Why 42 days? If we measure contributions in mapping days by OSMF members who map (83%), roughly half of them map more than 42 days per year. We would expect a “slightly exceptional” contribution in terms of mapping days.
How are my changes divided into days for measuring 42 mapping days
For measuring the mapping days, the created at time stamp of each changeset is used. Typically, all changes in a change set have the same time stamp. A day is defined in UTC from midnight to midnight.
Does paid mapping count?
The “active contributor program” is there to measure your engagement towards the project. In the first place, we think this is shown by volunteer activities for the project. If you do organizing or mapping for OSM as a part of your paid job, that is not necessarily a show of engagement with the project. By default, we would not include these activities as qualifying for this type of membership. But feel free to explain your contributions, and the Board will have a vote.
Can’t this be cheated?
We also discussed abuse. When we receive an application, we contact the mentioned OpenStreetMap account(s) through the OSM messaging system to confirm they are owned by the applicant. You could of course make tiny contributions like wiggling a single node on 60 days, and maybe go undetected and get your membership. But that would be fraud, and the membership could be revoked if the OSMF Membership Working Group finds out that the contributions are not meaningful.
What happens to the old fee waiver program?
The Active contributor membership program is replacing the old “fee waiver” program (active from 2018 January onward) where the membership fee was waived in cases of financial hardship or lack of suitable money transfer ability. The change was made possible by a vote during the 2019 Annual General Meeting. The “financial hardship” and “Lack of suitable money transfer” rule will be dropped entirely because even today, we expect someone joining under those rules to demonstrate some sort of contribution, so they would likely be eligible under the new rule as well.
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 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. It has no full-time employees and it is supporting the OpenStreetMap project through the work of our volunteer Working Groups.
The 16th OpenStreetMap anniversary will be celebrated on the 8th of August, 2020!Image: Fictional map data rendered with the standard style of osm.org (osm-carto). CC-BY-SA 3.0, trademarks apply.
On Saturday, 8th of August 2020, we will celebrate 16 years of OpenStreetMap!
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 🙂
Other ideas
Post why you love OpenStreetMap. We will publish a collection of messages later 🙂
Post a photo of yourself holding a written message 🙂
If your photos are accompanied with the text “CC-BY-SA 2.0” (or another open license), we can add them to the OSM wiki (or feel free to add them yourself! ~ register here).
Do you have more ideas? Share them in the comments 🙂
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]
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. It has no full-time employees and it is supporting the OpenStreetMap project through the work of our volunteer Working Groups. Please consider becoming a member of the Foundation.
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.
Submit questions to the speakers, to be answered at the end of their talk. Questions are collected as the talk is streamed. Look for the “session pad” link, on every talk page and type your question there.
Discuss with other participants, either at a self organising session, on the IRC channel #osm-sotm-ct on the OFTC IRC server (join via this link or with a dedicated IRC client) or on other communication channels (e.g. Telegram).
Follow @SotM@en.osm.town on Mastodon or @sotm on Twitter. Use the hashtag #sotm2020.
The State of the Map Organising Committee is one of the volunteer Working Groupsof 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 and you can support it by becoming a member.
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.
Today we celebrate International Women’s Day, and while it would be nice to have no need for this day, we would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge the contributions of women OSMers.
Thank you for any contribution to the project – be it map data, code, organising mapathons, advocacy or other.
We do not know exactly how many women globally contribute to the OpenStreetMap project via mapping or other ways, however, it is known that the percentage of women in the OSM community – as in many tech adjacent communities – is low. The reason we do not know is because we do not ask for personal information such as name, gender or age when signing for an account on OpenStreetMap.org. Mappers can freely choose, and change, their username, and it is not mandatory that they respond to surveys, or map in a certain way.
All this doesn’t make the collection of demographic data easy, and figures mentioning percentages should be taken with a big grain of salt. Collecting data on why people aren’t joining us is even more difficult as absent people can’t answer questions. While it has been impossible, so far, to get a clear picture on why some people contribute more or less than others, hypotheses have been formulated throughout the years – the lower percentage might reflect aspects of societies such as that many women have less free time than men. We should also note that the percentage of women OSM contributors varies geographically. The majority of attendees at Albanian community events, for example are women. We also seem to see more women participating when there is a clear goal – for example in humanitarian mapping campaigns we often have an almost equal gender balance.
The under-representation of women has been often highlighted on community channels, as well as by initiatives like Geochicas. They raise an important message, and we are also thankful for the work of local groups that are raising awareness.
We -do- know that the reasons that bring people of any gender, origin or age to our project seem to be similar among contributors: it’s fun to make the map data a bit better and it’s rewarding when someone finds your work useful.
Renaming Belgium’s biggest tunnel Initiatives of individuals have effect, both in the representation of women as well as on OpenStreetMap. So, we would like to take this opportunity to share some news from the Belgian community: the longest tunnel in the country, which currently carries the name of Leopold II, will be renamed after a woman, who has not been chosen yet. What does that have to do with OSM you may ask (other that the change will be reflected on our map data as soon as one of eager and active contributors can update it). The name change came about after officials became aware of equalstreetnames – a project by the Belgian OSM community and the Feminist Collective Names Maybe Maybe, which colours streets differently on an OSM-based map, depending on whether the streets are named after a man or a woman. You can read more about the tunnel renaming here.
OSMF board’s answer to recent press enquiry The OSM Foundation board and the OSM Communication Working Group have recently been contacted by a Reuters reporter, enquiring about why the number of women in OSM is low and what is OSM doing to address the gender imbalance and encourage more women to contribute. You can read the full answer here. Excerpts follow:
“We would like to highlight that anyone can contribute to OpenStreetMap, irrespective of their gender/nationality/religion and other factors (which we do not ask). Having said that, yes – there are actions both from the OpenStreetMap Foundation, as well as from community members, to increase the participation of women, and all underrepresented groups. Note that the OpenStreetMap Foundation has a relatively minor role in the OpenStreetMap project. Core infrastructure is run by volunteers, but even our map style and our website are built by independent volunteers. Most things that happen in the OpenStreetMap environment are run by the community.”
“The OpenStreetMap Foundation is interested in increasing the diversity in general and to attract marginalized groups of people and people outside the gender binary, not just women.”
OpenStreetMap Foundation and community efforts Efforts by the OpenStreetMap Foundation and the OSM community mentioned in the press answer include:
Increasing diversity
The OSM Foundation has recently adopted a Diversity Statement which affirms support for expanding our diversity (in all its forms) in OSM.
The OpenStreetMap Foundation has also recently initiated a Diversity and Inclusion Special Committee. Its first task is to assist the Foundation (and hopefully the wider OpenStreetMap project & community) to identify imbalances in the community. To do so, it will gather and assess existing research, and collect any additional necessary data. It will then look at the causes, both internal and external, of imbalances, recommend actions to address them, and in due time evaluate their impact.
Mapping in support of women and girls
The community has created and maintains a page dedicated to mapping in support of women and girls. You can find it at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tagging_in_Support_of_Women_and_Girls and it lists some points of interest that are related to women’s health, safety or life that can be mapped. Lit roads, gynaecologists, toilets for females and vending machines that dispense feminine hygiene products are a few examples of things that can be mapped.
We would like to emphasize that OpenStreetMap is based on mapping freedom and anyone can map almost any object with geographical qualities that is verifiable. So, if someone is interested in a feature that has not been mapped yet, they are free to create their own tags and add it to the database (it might be a good idea to discuss the created tags on the tagging mailing list to get feedback for potentially better tag options).
Specific communication channels
OSM is large, and made up of many smaller (sub-)communities. Many groups have been formed for people interested in this topic, which helps encourage members of that marginalized group participate in OSM. Geochicas is one example of this. Other examples are the communities formed around the Telegram channels RainbOSM and Geoladies(there is some overlap of participants).
Ensuring safe and welcome participation at OSM events
The OSM Foundation organises the annual, international State of the Map (SotM) conference, which has rules ensuring that a wide range of participants feels safe and welcome.
There are local OpenStreetMap events run by community members with rules having the same aim.
Granting scholarships to the annual conference
The OSM Foundation has a scholarship program providing support to community members who cannot afford to travel to the international State of the Map conference. Gender is a core consideration in the selection process.
Electing women to the OSM Foundation board
Before December 2019, both the chairperson and the secretary of our Foundation were women. Board members are voted by the OSM Foundation membership.
Please note that OSM Foundation members constitute a small part of the community – you don’t need to be an OSMF member in order to participate in the OpenStreetMap project, you just need to create an account at www.openstreetmap.org. Having said that, we would like to see the OSMF membership becoming more diverse so please consider joining the Foundation. We are also trying to make it easier to join.
Raising awareness
Participation of women in OSM, and diversity in general, is a subject frequently discussed in community channels, has been highlighted in talks by community members in State of the Map conferences and has led to actions by the OSM Foundation.
Reach out and support
Various local groups reach out to women and engage them in introductory OSM workshop, offering support afterwards.
Recognising the contribution of specific women OSMers
For the past several years, the OSM community has nominated and selected individuals, groups and projects which have helped the project. One of the OpenStreetMap Awards is for “Expanding the Community”, which recognises growing and diversifying the OSM community.
Please note that the list above is incomplete, as there are many efforts by local communities. We invite you to share the contributions of your local group in the comments.
New article about female participation in OSM You can read Reuters’ article, which focuses on female participation in OSM and is based on conversations with OSMers such as Geochicas and the OSM Foundation Board at “Visible women’: Feminist mappers bridge data gap in urban design”.
We would like again to thank anyone who identifies as a woman for their contributions and would like to highlight that mappers don’t require permission, moderation, approval or votes by the existing majority in order to add new things, or to start mapping new features. Even small minorities can map what’s important to them. This openness, and flexibility, allows OSM to be welcoming to new, and unforeseen, types of contributions.
Are you an OSMer who identifies as a woman? Share with us in the comments what you are passionate about. If you would like to answer anonymously, feel free to send your answer to communication@osmfoundation.org and we will post it without your (user)name.
International Men’s day is on 19th of November. International Nonbinary Day is on 14th of July.
Do you want to translate this and other blogposts in your language..? Please send us an email to communication@osmfoundation.org with subject: Helping with translations in [your language]
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. It has no full-time employees and it is supporting the OpenStreetMap project through the work of our volunteer Working Groups. Please consider becoming a member of the Foundation.
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.
Congratulations to weeklyOSM for publishing its 500th online newsletter! WeeklyOSM is a community project which publishes news from the OpenStreetMap world every week. It is independent from the OpenStreetMap Foundation [1]. With the help of awesome volunteers across the globe, it is on its tenth year and is available in multiple languages, including:
You can subscribe to weeklyOSM’s newsletter via email or via language-specific RSS/Atom feeds (CZ, DE, EN, ES, FR, JA, TR). You can also follow them on Mastodon/Fediverse at @weeklyosm@en.osm.town or on Twitter @weeklyosm.
The content is released under the liberal Creative Commons licence CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Medium time commitment Help in translations of one of the already featured languages. Or help by proofreading articles and read the news before anyone else does 😉 Contact weeklyOSM.
Regular time commitment Are you and your friends interested in translating each weekly newsletter in your own language? Contact weeklyOSM. Translating is of course a big part, but proofreading is also very important. Please note that each language team is free to add their language specific news as well.
Congratulations and many thanks to the weeklyOSM contributors. 🙂
OSM Communication Working Group
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[1] 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. It has no full-time employees and it is supporting the OpenStreetMap project through the work of our volunteer Working Groups. Please consider becoming a memberof the Foundation.
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.
