State of the Map US, open for submissions

The deadline for session proposals for the State of the Map USA conference is on Friday, August 31, so submit your session idea soon. The conference will be made up for talks by community members on everything from tools and techniques to working with and contributing to OSM data to showcases of it in use by companies, governments, nonprofits, and everybody to bigger picture discussions of where OSM should be moving in the future.

The State of the Map USA conference will bring together people working with, adding to, and advocating for OpenStreetMap. Our community is filled with people doing interesting, cutting edge, and important work. This is your chance to share it with us all.

You can submit your session proposal here – we just need 200 words or less about what you want to talk about. If you have questions, email Martijn van Exel or hit us up on Twitter at @sotmus.

 

OSM Foundation AGM and board election

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

Board grants project founder the title of “Chairman Emeritus”

Steve CoastAt 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

Weekly OSM Summary #49

July 30th, 2012 – August 13th, 2012

A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) world.

  • On August 18th, 2012 the OSM project will celebrate its 8th anniversary.
  • A new version of Leaflet (version 0.4) has been launched and includes a lot of new features. Leaflet is an open source library for interactive web maps. A new plugin allows the creation of animated cluster marker groups. Another nice example shows an “Interactive Choropleth Map” for the USA.
  • Pascal Neis published a new journal paper about active contributors of the OSM project. The paper can be downloaded here.
  • The “Humanitarian Hack Box” is a VirtualBox image with a number of humanitarian server applications. Read more about it here.
  • You will find a summary of the work by the “lost mappers task force” here. Their plan was to contact as many contributors as possible who didn’t respond to the license change yet.
  • The Royal Mail of Great Britain uses an OSM basemap for their “Gold Postboxes Finder“.
  • Martijn van Exel created a redaction map for the entire USA.
  • Frederik Ramm and his ideas “About Leadership” of the OSMF.
  • A presentation by Ed Freyfogleabout “What’s next in online mapping?“
  • The Quadratum WordPress plugin shows all Foursquare checkins on an OSM map.
  • The Barnes & Noble Nook tablet will support OSM basemaps. Read more in this article.
  • The Map Compare website at bbbike.org increased the number of maps that can be compared. In total there are 52 maps to choose from now. Check it out here.
  • A new version of Maperitive has been launched. Read about all the new features and about MBTiles support here and here.
  • A “how to” on displaying OSM relations in OpenJump can be found here.
  • A new repository for OpenBuildingModels has been launched.

Did we miss something? You can contact us via weekly.osm@googlemail.com

Authors: Pascal & Dennis – (thx @ “Wochennotiz”)

Weekly OSM Summary #48

July 16th, 2012 – July 30th, 2012

A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) world.

  • The State of the Map (SotM) schedule, which is going to take place in Tokyo (Japan), has been announced.
  • The automated redaction bot process is complete, you can read more here.
  • The OSM Inspector (a web based debugging tool for OSM users) has a new layer which shows the data which has been edited by the license redaction bot.
  • A request of the Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) to “Help mapping non-mapped areas of Tajikistan“.
  • The latest version of osmconvert (a tool to convert and process OSM data) can create csv files. Read more about the tool and several other options in the wiki.
  • A new website shows in which areas members are looking for new OSM contributors. You can create your personal contributor feed too. You can also find the latest OSM contributors of the last two and seven days per country here.
  • A step-by-step tutorial for rendering SVG maps from OSM data.
  • Nathaniel Kelso created a plugin to load the Stamen maps into the QGI. Read more in the following blog post.
  • MapBox introduce a new Open Source Javascript API to create your own browser maps.
  • GraphHopper is a new and open source routing engine for OSM road networks. You can find the project on github.

Did we miss something? You can contact us via weekly.osm@googlemail.com

Authors: Pascal & Dennis – (thx @ “Wochennotiz”)

Automated redactions complete

Over the past week the license change redaction bot has made automated redactions, sweeping across our entire worldwide dataset. The whole globe was covered yesterday. There has been substantial technical effort involved in developing and running the software to make those changes, and a fair degree of uncertainty about how long it would take, so this is a significant milestone. Congratulations and thanks are in order to all those who helped achieve it, and especially to Matt Amos, Andy Allan, Gnonthgol and MonkZ who carried out most of the coding work.

The data now in the live OpenStreetMap database is largely in a state where it can be declared ODbL licensed, however the license hasn’t changed yet. We will be posting a further update when this is imminent.

More than 99% of the data has been retained, and in most places, the difference is barely noticeable. There are, however, some areas of our map where the redaction was concentrated, in particular Poland and Australia. Though we would of course have preferred to retain this data, we do respect the original contributors’ decision, and we thank them for their past involvement in the project.

Fortunately the OSM community’s response in these areas has been magnificent and we believe we will be back to having a high-quality dataset in these areas in a short space of time. If, as an OSM mapper, you would like to help – by using aerial imagery and other sources, or ideally, from personal knowledge and survey – then please do get involved. Essentially we’re left with some new blank spots on the map, and can respond with the process we know and love. Use your favourite mapping techniques, go explore and fill in the blanks. (Note that you must not copy from CC-BY-SA datasets or map views based on the pre-redaction data; please treat this like you would any other incompatibly copyrighted map data.) We can begin this process in earnest now while final preparations for license changeover are made.

Weekly OSM Summary #47

July 2nd, 2012 – July 16th, 2012

A summary of all the things happening in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) world.

  • The ODbL redaction process has been running since Wednesday, July 11th. Past Sunday the bot started working on Western Europe. You can find a really nice webpage, created by Harry Wood, with more information on the current status here.
  • You can find a new OpenGoeData blog post about “Building a friendly editor for OpenStreetMap in JavaScript” by Richard Fairhurst here.
  • Martijn van Exel developed OSM “Staleness” Maps. More information can be found here.
  • The new RSS feed, created by Pascal, informs you about new Mappers in your area. You can check it out here.
  • The fastest OSM route planner supports alternative routes now too. Try it out here.
  • MapATag is a new OSM tagging game for smartphones: Read more about it here.
  • Jan March developed “OSM Buildings“, a JavaScript library that visualizes 3D OSM building data on interactive maps. You can find his source code on github.
  • The current weather as an overlay on an OSM map: http://openweathermap.org
  • A new blog post by flickr: “Making a Better Map: four months of @OpenStreetMap with @MapBox & @foursquare“. Also a blog post about “Designing an OSM Map Style“.
  • GDAL has an OGR driver that can read OSM data from *.osm and *.pbf files. Read more about it here.

Did we miss something? You can contact us via weekly.osm@googlemail.com

Authors: Pascal & Dennis – (thx @ “Wochennotiz”)

Redactions progressing well

In the past week the redaction bot has progressed well. After the intial Ireland test, it has proccessed the UK and is now finishing off the ‘Western Europe’ area. Spain, and Italy are fully proccessed, France is very nearly complete, and the bot is (at time of writing) getting to work on some densely mapped regions such Germany and the Netherlands. You can see its progress on the redaction bot progress map

As you’ll see, the internal checks of the bot and the API occasionally throw up errors which cause a region (1 degree square) not to be fully processed. The developers working on the bot managed to track some of these failures down to specific bugs, meanwhile others are caused by temporary glitches in the API. The bot has been re-run in several areas for this reason.

You’ll also notice many yellow “current” regions being processed. These are parallel instances of the bot processing code. Although we’re not really in a hurry, we have a big dataset to get through. Running in parallel like this is proving to be a little faster.

There is still time to perform remapping ahead of the bot reaching your part of the world, though you may wish to refrain from editing in a region where the bot is actually runnning, to avoid any unnecessary complications. If you’re in a green area there is now a new kind of remapping to do. This is easier and clearer in many ways. Head out and remap those patches where the bot has redacted data.

Remember the license has not changed yet. Even in areas where processing is complete and redactions have been made, the license remains the same until we declare otherwise.

Follow the rebuild mailing list for more details and discussion.

Building a friendly editor for OpenStreetMap in JavaScript

It’s been an amazing year for OpenStreetMap and it continues to get better. New users from Foursquare to Apple to Wikipedia to Esri, TV and press coverage around the world, innovative releases from MapBox, MySociety, Skobbler, Stamen, and a thousand others. More people are using OSM data than ever before.

More people are adding to it, too. Our data has grown by 43% in just one year. Most of this is added with two tools: JOSM, the offline editor (Java), and Potlatch, the online one (Flash). Launched in 2006 and 2007 respectively, they’re mature, stable, and enjoyed by thousands of users – the tools that have built the best map of the world.

But how do we harness the knowledge of millions of casual users who are now seeing a ‘Data by OpenStreetMap’ credit for the first time? How do we get people editing on the move, using phones and tablets that can’t run Flash or Java? Can we build something that doesn’t have the power of JOSM or Potlatch, yet is easier for the first-time user to grasp?

Hell yes!

Id_prototype

iD is a new project to build a simple, friendly editor for OpenStreetMap – an editor designed entirely for the first-timer to quickly add their street or their local cafe. It’s not a new Potlatch or a new JOSM: it’s ‘an editor for the rest of us’, a stepping stone into OSM.

It’s written in JavaScript: things that required a plugin just a few years ago, modern browsers can do natively, and fast. And with powerful frameworks that even out the differences between browsers, JavaScript can be a joy to program in.

Development is at its really early stages. It doesn’t do much yet: no tagging, no save. It’s not very pretty. That’s where you come in. OSM needs the best, most intuitive map editor there is, and you can help. Coder? Designer? UX specialist? Get involved.

You can read the project introduction, fork the code on github, and read the live docs. Check out the code, play to your heart’s content – tear it up and make it drastically different if you want – and let’s build something to take the OSM editing experience up another notch.

New OpenStreetMap maps website with state-of-the art features by skobbler

Iegidhgg

OpenStreetMap is the best map when it comes to attention to detail. However, the experience of the map sometimes lags behind when compared to commercial implementation of the web-based maps. skobbler made an attempt at a new web-based map powered by OpenStreetMap: http://maps.skobbler.com.

There are some innovative features that were always missing with other solutions:

  • Auto-positioning via HTML5 browser positioning in Firefox and Chrome (if the user allows it)
  • Internationalised style in Germany and the US (coming to many more countries)
  • Drag & Drop Route calculation (just move the pins where routes should be calculated)
  • Multi-line address search
  • POI layers

Performance is very effective due to use of:

  • Modern and Fast map JavaScript Engine based on Leaflet
  • High-performance map tile loading due to worldwide big chunks of pre-rendered tiles (not only in the US)

Furthermore, there is a new map style with a good compromise of details and clarity. The address search for route calculations is temporarily based on a 3rd party geocoder (in default mode), but allows a single line address entry and very effective address coverage. 

Give it a try: http://maps.skobbler.com