Thanks to everyone who made it to the international State Of The Map conference in Brussels two weeks ago. With around 400 attendees from 52 different countries, this was a fantastic event bringing our community together.
Huge thanks to the team of organisers, and local volunteers in Belgium who helped make it such a success. We saw some of these people up on stage at the end of the conference:
…but also thanks to those working behind the scenes. A special thank you to Ben Abelshausen and Rob Nickerson who played leading roles in organising the event from on the ground and remote support respectively. There is a list of folks on the SOTM team page, but this will be updated soon because…
The early steps of organising the State Of The Map 2017 are in progress! We’ll bring you an announcement soon about the choice of host country for next year, and of course there will be an opportunity to help with organising and sponsorship. Start thinking about it. Earlier the better!
Video from all the main auditoriums at the Brussels conference can be found at the conference website. We’ll be bringing you the edited per-session versions of these talks soon. More photos from Brussels can be found in this set from Tatiana the official conference photographer, and also on the sotm2016 flickr tag.
We previously congratulated the winners of the OpenStreetMap awards. In addition to that, here are a few links to blogs by attendees with write-ups and ruminations about the conference:
- Geofabrik gave a general round-up “As always, State of the Map provided amazing insights into what goes on in the OpenStreetMap universe”
- escada wrote a diary entry about his first SoTM “Informative, entertaining and brought by passionate people. Something I have not seen in other (non-OSM-related) conferences”
- Mapilllary gave plus their “photo-walk” pictures, “Massive thank you to the organizing team at SotM. They seem to have thought of everything which allowed attendees to focus on getting the most of out of the three days”
- Melanie Eckle from Heidelberg University described SoTM, and also the HOT summit and other “maptember” events. “The presentations, workshops and ‘birds of feathers’ sessions in the State of the Map conference covered a great variety of topics”
- Mikel wrote up some notes on the Local Chapters congress, one of the activities at the conference (taking place out on the grass in the sunshine!)
- Finally SoTM organizing volunteer, Gregory Marler, described the Code Of Conduct of the conference, and some of the issues which came up. This gives a really interesting insight, and shows why it was an important and valuable step to introduce a clear code of conduct, as a way to encourage diversity at our conference. Just one of the many things our organisers and volunteers worked hard on, to keep us all happy at this great event!
If you attended the conference please check your inbox for a “State of the Map: Feedback Survey“ email. The organising team would appreciate your feedback to help make it even better the coming year.
During the conference we launched a new OpenStreetMap fundraising drive. In the past, the conference itself provided a significant annual source of funding for the foundation, but as the project grows we need more reliable funding sources. Your donations help will ensure continuity and continued independence of OpenStreetMap. Please help us reach our fundraising goal by donating and sharing the link: donate.openstreetmap.org, our fundraising site.
Finally if you couldn’t make it to Brussels for the annual international OpenStreetMap conference, remember there’s a whole range of events large and small happening all over the world (see the calendar). Just last weekend there was “State Of The Map Asia“, the second “local” conference for the asian continent, which took place this time in Manilla, Philippines!
The OpenStreetMap project is nearly 12 years old, and we’ve been very lucky to have a small team of talented volunteer system administrators doing a fantastic job over that time, spending donated money wisely and meeting some huge scaling challenges for the core infrastructure.
