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

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

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.

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.

Tile image by vidalia_11 is licensed CC-By-SA

We’ve had to block some uses of the OpenStreetMap Foundation tile servers. This article describes what is happening and why. This article also describes how you can adapt if you are affected.

We’re really proud of the increased popularity of OpenStreetMap. We’ve seen seven-plus years of project growth in every measurable area. As the project has grown we’ve learned and adapted in many ways. The use of our tile server has grown faster than every other aspect of the project. One way that we are adapting now, is by restricting how our map tiles may be used.

Slow sign by DaveCrosby is licensed CC-By-SA

You’ll still be able to use our tiles in creative and interesting ways but the volume of use will be limited. We need to limit access to our tile server to only those users who don’t overburden our resources.

Those users who make large demands on our tile server will be slowed down by our throttling mechanism. This throttling mechanism is rarely triggered by mappers.

Problematic applications may show this image instead of a map.

Those applications which make exceptional demands in aggregate from their users will be blocked. The tile usage policy is on the OSM wiki.

So what can you do about this? How can you get the wonderful OpenStreetMap tiles for your mobile device?

• You can run your own tile server and serve tiles for yourself or your users.
• You can use an application from a developer that provides a tile server for you.
• You can use tiles created from OSM data, provided by a server that permits bulk downloading.
• You can buy tiles from a commercial provider.

You’ll find more advice about potential tile source alternatives on the wiki.

Read on if you would like to know more about the history of the OpenStreetMap tile server.

OSM tile server background

We started creating rendered images of our map data as a way to encourage our data contributors. Mappers enjoy seeing the results of their surveys on the OpenStreetMap web site, and they can be inspired to map in their neighbourhood the things they see other mappers surveying in other places. Mappers loved the tile server when it first appeared. Potential users often looked at the map in 2006 and said, “Hey, why is there a huge blank spot where my town should be?” Some of those potential users became the long-time contributors that we all know and love.

As more contributors mapped more neighbourhoods, more blank spots started to fill in. More potential users became actual users, and OpenStreetMap tiles started to appear in more places. The tile server became even more popular when rapid updates were enabled. Rather than updating the map every week, parts of the map could update as contributors added data. If you remember the weekly updates you also remember that funny tingle you had the first time you mapped something and it appeared on the map immediately; it seemed like magic, didn’t it?

The OpenStreetMap Foundation has had a tile usage policy for some time. From September 2008 it has been explicitly stated that bulk downloading of tiles was discouraged. OpenStreetMap kept growing. More people came to understand the awesomeness of OSM tiles.

Also in 2008, the Ordnance Survey started serving map tiles to users through their OS Openspace program. In July of 2011, Ordnance Survey served their one billionth tile to a user.

OpenStreetMap serves a Billion tiles every eleven days.

So we know a thing or two about providing awesome maps to users. We do it all with the crowd-sourced data from our contributors around the world, the volunteered time of our sysadmins who keep our servers running, and the generous donations of servers and bandwidth and funds.

We’ve had to become more restrictive of the use of our tile server over time. We’ve limited how many tiles you can consume in a period of time. These restrictions only affected the most-demanding of tile consumers. The everyday mapper never ran into a problem getting tiles to add data to OSM. That allowed the growing number of users to continue to have access to OpenStreetMap tiles without our resources being monopolized by one or two bad actors.

More and more mobile applications started using OpenStreetMap tiles. Many of them included a bulk downloading method so that tiles could be saved on the device at home, rather than downloading tiles at a punitive data rate. That bulk-downloading has always been problematic for OpenStreetMap because a single user will consume hundreds of times the resources of an average user. There are so many applications using OSM tiles, with so many users making unreasonable demands on our resources that it is affecting the quality of service for the average user. And that’s not fair.

So we’ve started blocking the applications that are causing us the most trouble, in addition to blocking users with problematic specific behaviours. We regret it, in a way. After all, we map because we want people to be able to use our data. But our resources have to be used in a way that everybody can share. We can’t have a small number of people consuming all of our resources.

So that’s why some people have started to see the “prohibited” tiles on their maps. Overuse. Or mobile applications that are causing overuse by a group.

State of the Map 2011 group photo

The fifth annual OpenStreetMap conference, State of the Map, wrapped up in Denver, Colorado recently. Even if you were not able to join the fun in Denver, you can still enjoy parts of the event. Conference sessions were recorded by our friends at FOSSLC and many of those recordings are already available. You’ll also find audience video for some of the sessions.

Tagging a conference

If we were tagging SotM11 to add it to the OSM database, we might consider tags like:

• conferencename = State of the Map, 2011
• attendance = 273
• attendance:prepaid = 258
• attendance:walkin = 15
• attendance:attendee_countries = 34

State of the Map 2012

The call for venues for State of the Map 2012 is expected in November 2011. The SotM 2012 venue will be announced early in 2012.

Dragon sculpture on the Dragon Bridge in Ljubljana. Photo CC-By-SA, dani_7C3

The web front-end servers, soup and fiddlestick, replace puff and fuchur who had performed that role since 2008. Web front-end servers in OpenStreetMap provide the data browser and data layer, as well as user diaries and other “social” functions.

Eustace will debut in a new role for OpenStreetMap by collecting web statistics. The OpenStreetMap Foundation wants to know more about how users experience the OSM web site in an effort to improve the way that OSM services are delivered.

[1] Character from The Clangers, a UK children’s TV programme.
[2] Strangewood (1999): Fiddlestick, a small musically emotive dragon.
[3] Turns into a dragon in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Chronicles of Narnia) after slipping on a gold bracelet.

Zark, during installation.

Zark is the newest OpenStreetMap server. Give Zark a warm welcome. Continuing the in the tradition of naming OSM servers after dragons, the name “Zark” is taken from the Eidolon Chronicles/Shadow World books by Jane Johnson.

The first task for Zark will be to serve as a trial / evaluation server for the OWL – OpenStreetMap Watch List service. OWL’s popularity on the dev server has lead to performance problems and long update delays. After more than a year of development and increasing popularity of OWL’s ability to follow local changes without distracting “Big” changesets, moving OWL to Zark will make this service even more effective for mappers.

Many thanks to bitfolk.com for donating this server.

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.

Board elections

There are four board seats up for grabs, so this represents a considerable change of faces leading our organisation. As was announced previously, we’ll be taking votes by email from 1st September. Before that though we need a finalised list of candidates. The candidates for election (so far) are listed on this wiki page.

Some good candidates but we’d like some more. We have four board seats to fill, and it’s clearly a more healthy democratic situation if we’ve got a bit of a choice. We’re looking for people who can lead our organisation to success in 2011 and going forwards. We’d like to see dedicated OSMers, people who are engaged with the community, but perhaps also people who are in a position to reach out beyond the community. We’d also like to see geographic diversity. The relative importance of these factors will be up to the voters.

If you have ideas for people who fit the bill, now is the time to have a whisper in their ear and persuade them to run for election. Ideally candidates will ensure there is a description of themselves on their wiki user page, and preferably also an election manifesto, before adding themselves to the list. But don’t forget nominations close on Wednesday 31st in time for voting to commence the day after.

To run as a candidate, and also to take part in voting you need to be a fully paid up member of the foundation, so be sure to join the foundation now if you haven’t already.

Management Team

Another recent change has been the introduction of a new “Management Team”. This new group is made up of representatives from the various working groups and (as detailed on the Management Team page) is tasked with regular feedback from/to the working groups, scoping of working groups, and decisions around implementing the budget. One of the main reasons behind this is to ease the workload of the board by taking care of some of the day-to-day trouble-shooting issues. There are various potential downsides to this idea, which people have raised on the osmf-talk mailing list. It remains to be seen how well it will work, and nothing is set in stone, but hopefully this will make life easier for board members new and old, and free them up to do more strategic decision-making.

Engineering Working Group

Also announced recently, we have a new “Engineering Working Group” with the task of assisting and guiding the community-driven development of OSM-related source code and tools. Again it remains to be seen how well this will work, and this is very open to some more keen participation. To be clearer about separation of concerns here, the “Technical Working Group” has been renamed as the “Operations Working Group”. You can find definitions of all of these teams, their membership, and their meeting details linked from the Working Groups page .