Ulf Möller

Posted on January 18, 2012 by RWeait

The OpenStreetMap Foundation has learned of the death of our friend and colleague, Ulf Möller.

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.

Posted in OSMF Board | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Tokyo host for SoTM 2012

Posted on January 3, 2012 by HarryWood

The SoTM organizing committee have just announced the winning bid for the 2012 International conference for OpenStreetMap. This year we’re going to…

Tokyo, Japan!

Tokyo by Night

‘Tokyo by Night’ photo CC-BY-2.0 user JeHu68 on flickr

The annual event will be held September 6th-8th 2012.

From the stateofthemap.org blog:

There were five proposals to host the leading international OpenStreetMap conference: Aveiro (Portugal), Havana (Cuba), Lille (France), Tbilisi (Georgia) and Tokyo (Japan). “We’ve received several strong bids. Deciding on the best location for State of the Map is always one of our biggest and toughest decisions.” says Henk Hoff, chairman of the SotM organizing committee. With the crisis Japan had to face the past year, the Japanese OSM has grown intensively; making Asia an important part within the OSM community.

“We strongly believe that holding State of the Map in Asia will widen and strenghten the international community as a whole, like it has done in Europe and North America in the past” commented Tiachi Furuhashi of OpenStreetMap Japan.

2012 will host the sixth annual international conference, attracting over 250 people in attendance. Previous editions of this conference were held in Manchester (UK), Limerick (Ireland), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Girona (Spain), Denver (USA). Sponsorship details, volunteer opportunities and more information will be available in the near future.

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Mappy New Year

Posted on December 31, 2011 by RWeait

Mappy New Year, everybody! May your year be filled with good GPS reception, legible survey notes, and prompt changeset uploads.

Sydney Opera House Fireworks 2006 photo by Rob Chandler is licensed CC-By-SA

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Mappy Christmas!

Posted on December 25, 2011 by HarryWood

…and thank you to all the generous donors who helped us reach our fund-raising target! Some time yesterday (just in time for Christmas!) the donation tracker hit 100% meaning we have successfully raised £15,000 to pay for a new database server. We’ve placed the order, and we’re expecting a big box to arrive some time in the first few days of January. So to all the people who gave us this awesome Christmas present, we say a heartfelt thank you.

(If you missed it, of course you can still donate at donate.openstreetmap.org)

And now let’s wish a very merry Christmas to all the people who have administered the servers, developed the software, translated the documentation, constructed the websites, built the mobile apps, to all the people who have used our maps in all their weird and wonderful forms, and an extra mappy Christmas to the thousands of people who have helped map the world in 2011!

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Top Ten Tasks

Posted on December 17, 2011 by RWeait

Contribute to the OpenStreetMap developer community by getting involved in the Top Ten Tasks!

OpenStreetMap is huge, with an extensive and varied community. Our data is used in applications for specialty and general audiences, for devices common and rare. The infrastructure that we rely upon, as members of the OpenStreetMap community is continually improved in ways more- or less-visible and with more or less celebration.
As an example, we’ve improved our friends recently. This is a small, visible improvement in the OSM web site. You might just think, “Wow, how did we go so long without this function?” If you are logged into the web site, now you can view the recent changesets by the contributors that you have added as your friends.

http://openstreetmap.org/browse/friends

This new feature sprang from a discussion on the talk@ list two weeks ago. Toby Murray made the suggestion. Mikel Maron liked the idea so much that he wrote some code[1] and Tom Hughes refined Mikel’s patch then merged it into the rails port so that we can all use it.

There are many other ways, large and small, for developers to contribute to OpenStreetMap. The Engineering Working Group, has updated the Top Ten Tasks list with some eagerly anticipated projects. There are projects that involve Rails, javascript, flash, flex, python, django and others. If you have always wanted to dig into a substantial project, with other top-notch developers, these are the projects for you.

Photo ©R.Weait, used by permission.

Posted in OpenStreetMap, osm.org | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Languages and OpenStreetMap Foundation

Posted on December 8, 2011 by RWeait

Photo by R. Steven Rainwater

In March 2011 the Communication Working Group tried to make the OSMF accessible to more people by posting in more languages. As a test we added German and French to the OSMF Blog. We’re still working on improving this by making each article available. But this experiment is already a success based on the feedback that we are getting from you.

It has been successful because of the volunteers who add the translations. Thanks go to Daniel Begin and Michael Schulze for helping us reach out to more mappers in French and German.

Shortly we’ll add Russian translations as well thanks to Eugene Usvitsky. Our web statistics tell us that Russian speakers are the next-most-frequent visitors to the OSMF site. The OSMF wants to reach out in other languages as well. Would you like to help? The workload is irregular and you can work from home. :-) If you are interested, contact the Communication Working Group at communication@osmfoundation.org

We will consider adding translations to the site for any language except perhaps Klingon; we’re undecided on Klingon. If you can help with some of the languages that are more-frequently used in OpenStreetMap, please let us know.

If you would like to test us out first, and see how you like working with the Working Groups on a smaller, temporary project, the License Working Group has a small translation project that you can help with right now. Contact legal@osmfoundation.org if you would like to help with Czech, Chinese, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, Hungarian, Romanian, Norwegian, Slovakian, Greek, Korean, Turkish or Croatian.

Klingon photo by R. Steven Rainwater on Flickr is licensed CC-By-SA

Posted in OpenStreetMap, OSMF | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Funding drive – Improving OSM reliability and performance

Posted on December 1, 2011 by HarryWood

Pound Coins
Pound Coins photo by William Warby CC-BY-2.0


OpenStreetMap is growing fast. We’ve recently welcomed our 500,000th signed up user, and we’ve logged our 10.000.000 th update to the map. Over the next few weeks we’re running a fund-raising drive while we invest in server infrastructure to improve reliability and performance of OpenStreetMap. If you’d like to support the project in this way, or you know anybody else who would like to give OSMers an early Christmas present, visit our fund raising site:

donate.openstreetmap.org/server2011

You have the option to include your name on the donors list. We’re aiming to raise £15,000 (~ 23,000 U.S. dollars).  Let’s see how quickly we hit the target!

We wanted to run another fund raising drive, because last time we had a big one was back in 2009 (old blog post) and we were blown away by how quickly we raised the target amount. It seemed as though people were looking for an outlet for their generosity and goodwill towards the project. Since we’re planning to buy a new server, now seems like a good time to do it again.

The Operations Working Group, which has the important role of keeping core OSM services running smoothly, plans to invest in a new server. This will provide us with a database replica. This improvement is at the very core of the OpenStreetMap infrastructure, giving services greater resilience. It means we’ll bounce back quicker and easier in the event of a hardware failure. In time the new server will also bring about some performance improvements.  We have a wiki page with more technical details and plans for the new hardware.

We hope you’ll agree that, although these improvements are very much behind-the-scenes, they are important. Please give generously to help make them happen!

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

SotM 2012 Call for Venues is now open

Posted on November 30, 2011 by RWeait

We’ve had 5 great State of the Map conferences. Manchester, Limerick, Amsterdam, Girona and Denver. Big question is: where are we going to be in 2012?

We would like to have your help with finding a great venue for the largest annual OpenStreetMap conference.

Would you like to have the 2012 edition of State of the Map in your city? Submit your proposal on our Call for Venues page on the wiki. More details about criteria and the information we would like to have from you can also be found at that wiki page.

We hope to announce our 2012 venue in the beginning of the new year.

Posted in OpenStreetMap, OSMF, SOTM | Comments Off

Engineering Working Group + Hack Weekend

Posted on November 22, 2011 by HarryWood
743 - Cogs - Pattern

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:

  • OpenStreetMap is now rolling with rails version 3, thanks largely to the hard-working Tom Hughes. Besides deploying it, and ironing out a few nasty problems with sessions, he did the work of porting the code over. The website and API code needed to take account of differences and new features of rails 3, particularly the use of AREL for database querying.
  • Kai Krueger has packaged this rails code, and also Mapnik and mod_tile, into an unbuntu PPA. This packaging system offers a very simple way to install these tools (and keep them up to date) on ubuntu/debian . We’re currently testing this, and hope it’ll make it much easier for developers to hack on the code for openstreetmap.org.
  • Working with Mike Migurski we have a more attractive, and more helpful page sitting at planet.openstreetmap.org, the OpenStreetMap data downloads site. Mike, and stamen design, are also now providing “metro extracts” – more manageable (smaller) files for OpenStreetMap data, one city at a time.

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)

London Hack Weekend – 26th, 27th

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

ODbL progress

Posted on November 16, 2011 by RWeait

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.

Posted in OSMF, OSMF Board | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments