OpenStreetMap birthday cake from the 8th OSM birthday party in Tokyo, Japan.
As part of today’s activities in Tokyo, foundation members met for an Annual General Meeting where the final votes were cast for the board elections. Congratulations to our new board members:
Frederik Ramm, and Simon Poole.
Congratulations also to Henk Hoff who has been re-elected to his seat on the board. And thanks to Alex Barth, and Kate Chapman for running in the election. Excellent candidates all round, and we enjoyed some stimulating discussion and debate on the members mailing list. Let’s translate these ideas into action. Not only the elected board, but the whole foundation organisation (including you!) has a part to play in making 2012-2013 a great year for OpenStreetMap.
The first day of State of the Map, each year is filled with anticipation. Anticipation of seeing old friends and making new ones, anticipation of inspirational presentations and discussions and anticipation of big announcements.
The opening session at State of the Map, 2012, was no different. In Tokyo, on Thursday morning, 06 September 2012, Steve Coast called Michael Collinson, chair of the License Working Group to the stage to make an announcement. And it was an announcement that we have been anticipating for quite some time.
The next OpenStreetMap planet published will be an ODbL planet.
Mr. Collinson also thanked the countless hundreds (or thousands) who aided immeasurably in the OpenStreetMap license upgrade to ODbL. He named a representative few including OSMF legal counsel Wilson Sonsini, OpenStreetMap community members Richard Fairhurst, Frederik Ramm and Francis Davey, author of the ODbL, Jordan Hatcher and posthumously, License Working Group member Ulf Möller.
There will be more details posted in the next days, but for now we’re excited to share this announcement with you.
Today voting has been declared open for the changing seats on the OpenStreetMap Foundation board. Matt Amos, Richard Fairhurst, Dermot McNally, and Oliver Kühn will remain on the board, and are not required to re-run for election this time around, however we have three seats to vote on since Henk Hoff is re-running for election, Mikel Maron is stepping down, and Steve Coast will serve in a new position as “Chairman Emeritus”.
We have five candidates to choose from listed here and candidate nominations are now closed.
If you are a foundation member you can vote for three of these. You can vote by email, and voting is now open through until Wednesday September 5th. Please follow the instructions in the above link. Alternatively if you are going to be in Tokyo for State Of The Map, you may prefer to vote in person at the Annual General Meeting. If you are not a member there is still time to join the foundation before voting, but please do this as soon as possible to allow time for processing.
To help you decide who to vote for, each candidate has written a manifesto, linked from the above list. There is also some interesting debate on the osmf-talk mailing list, and if you wish, you can put questions to the candidates here.
The Secretary of the OpenStreetMap Foundation announced today that the next Annual General Meeting of the OSMF and election for board members will be held at State of the Map – Tokyo. The original announcements reads:
To all members of OpenStreetMap Foundation,
NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the 6th Annual General Meeting of the OpenStreetMap Foundation will be held at the State of the Map 2012 conference, Komaba Research Campus 4-6-1, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, Japan, at 12:30 JST Saturday, 08 September 2012.
You do NOT have to join the conference to attend the meeting. Attendance of the AGM is free. However, if you would also like to join SOTM 2012, you can still register at http://stateofthemap.org/register-now/
OSMF AGM Agenda can be found here: http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Annual_General_Meetings/12
Nominations are also now open for three OSMF board positions at the AGM. Nominations close on Sunday, 26 August 2012 at 1700 UTC.
To add a nomination or your own name please see the instructions at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/AGM12/Election_to_Board or send an email to secretary at osmfoundation.org .
All (at the start of the AGM) paid-up members of the Foundation are eligible to stand for election to the Board. If you are not already a member of the Foundation then you can sign up via http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Join. If you have questions concerning your membership contact membership at osmfoundation.org .
All (at the start of the AGM) paid-up members of the Foundation are eligible to vote at the Board election.
Proxy voting by email opens on Monday, 27 August 2012 at 0900 UTC. Details on proxy voting by email can be found on the wiki at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/AGM12/Election_to_Board
The final vote will be taken at the AGM itself.
On behalf of the Board, I’m looking forward meeting you at our Annual General Meeting.
Henk Hoff
Secretary
OpenStreetMap Foundation
At the end of his term as Chairman of the OSM Foundation, the Board has unanimously granted Steve Coast, founder of the OpenStreetMap project, the honorary title of “Chairman Emeritus” of the OSM Foundation.
This honorary title is granted for the Steve’s achievements for the project and the Foundation, and (not least) for actually starting the project. The title also voices the Board’s intention to retain a close relationship between the Founder and the OSMF.
Therefore, the Chairman Emeritus has a standing invitation to all board and working group meetings and to all State of the Map conferences. He is explicitly invited to give advice to the Board and Working Groups.
The Chairman Emeritus is allowed to voice personal statements in public using his title.
With his distinct personal relationship with the OSM project, the Foundation may ask the Chairman Emeritus to represent the OSMF in public (e.g. in media and conferences).
The Board asked Steve to take this honorary title and is pleased with Steve accepting it. The Board is also very happy to see that his passion, vision and dedication for the OpenStreetMap project will be maintained.
With accepting the Chairman Emeritus title, Steve decided not run for re-election as a board member. He will no longer be an official director of the Foundation after the upcoming AGM.
For the avoidance of doubt, the Board checked that granting the title “Chairman Emeritus” is in line with the current Articles of Association.
Henk Hoff
Secretary OSM Foundation
The OpenStreetMap Foundation has learned of the death of our friend and colleague, Ulf Möller.
Ulf’s family have asked if we can help find Ulf’s killer(s)? Please see the photos of the murder suspects and help if you can.
Ulf Möller, 1972 - 2012
Ulf discovered OpenStreetMap in 2007 and mapped in Munich and Hamburg as well as in other countries. He was the first German elected to the OpenStreetMap Foundation Board in 2009/2010 and served on the License Working Group with attention to detail, concern for the German OpenStreetMap community and courteous persistence.
The OpenStreetMap Foundation Board offers sincere condolences to Ulf’s family on behalf of the OpenStreetMap community. We are saddened and shocked by his untimely death.
The family has requested privacy at this difficult time. Please use the comments in this post to share your memories of Ulf and condolences for the family. They will know where to find them when they are ready.
Ulf’s family has kindly provided the above photograph of Ulf as we will remember him; Smiling, happy, cycling, and apparently mapping with his GPS.
cc-by2.0 Patrick Hoesly on flickr
Back in August we announced the formation of the Engineering Working Group, tasked with trying to attract more developers by lowering barriers to entry. Since then we’ve seen some good technical coding work and other achievements in and around the activities of this group:
In addition to these, the Engineering Working Group has dived head first into the big tasks of improving technical documentation, and tidying up the bug tracker.
Clearly these are things which would happen anyway within the OpenStreetMap developer community, and the achievements are down to the hard work of individual people. But the Engineering Working Group lends a little structure, and provides a forum for taking a step back and looking at these kinds of meta-development. Development which helps development!
You can find out more about the Engineering Working Group on the OSMF site, and anyone is welcome to join in their discussions, which take place every Monday on IRC (details)
Perhaps you’d prefer to join in face-to-face? Come along to a “hack weekend”! EWG is also involved in this, and trying to get more developer events happening, in more locations. For the moment though we have one coming up at the end of the week…
See the London Hack Weekend details on the wiki (and sign up there)
Previous hack weekend at the same venue (MapQuest offices)
“An OpenStreetMap ‘hack weekend’ is a meet-up where we bring along laptops to an office space and spend the weekend doing some technical work to improve OpenStreetMap. This may be development of the “core” components, the editors, or any other side projects and pet projects we fancy hacking on. OpenStreetMap has development tasks sprouting from it in all directions. There’s work to do in almost any programming language, as well as tasks like documentation, and even some non-technical graphics design and translation tasks.
We mostly take a fairly unstructured free-form format. People turn up and start beavering away on something, or they turn up and see what they can help with. However we can also run more structured workshops if there is demand”
Whether you can make it to a hack weekend or not, we are always looking for more technical people to help with improving OpenStreetMap.
We’re planning the final stages of the switch over to the Open Database License for OpenStreetMap data. The OpenStreetMap Foundation Board discussed the license upgrade process and many other aspects of the project at their recent board meeting, and we’ll have more information about that from the board shortly.
One item that came out of the board meeting was the deadline to complete the license upgrade by 01 April 2012 and to publish the first OpenStreetMap planet file under the ODbL by 04 April 2012. The License Working Group supports this target date as a reasonable goal.
There are still many things to do before we are ready to publish the first OpenStreetMap planet file as an ODbL database. As always, community engagement and your participation are important. There will be more information and details on your favourite OSM community channels including the mailing lists and IRC. For now the process of contacting mappers yet to respond and remapping non-compliant data is still the priority.
There are various tools to help you get an idea of ODbL coverage in your country, or your local area. In particular, you can enable a view within Potlatch2 or install a plugin for JOSM to see the license status of elements.
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.
