Archive for the ‘Openstreetmap’ Category

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OSM-F Update: Local Chapters are Coming

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

The Local Chapters working group met earlier this week. We reviewed some comments to the current Local Chapters agreement that came from early consultation with some OpenStreetMappers around the world. Based on early consultation, we’ve set up a provisional timetable for completing the process of setting up local chapters which is included in this post.

What are the issues?

The idea of local chapters is quite simple: an official body can become a federated member of the OSM-Foundation and can represent the OSM-F on official business – things like talking to journalists, dealing with local or national Governments or companies, or organising conferences and mapping parties.

The part of the agreement that needs the most attention is around termination. The OSM-Foundation is granting the right to use its name, its standing and its reputation to a local group. Though unlikely, the Foundation needs to be able to revoke this right if the local group starts jeopardising the reputation of the Foundation by acting illegally or unethically, or if the Local Chapters acts against the aims of the OSM-F. For example, it is the opinion of the OSM-F that tracing roads from Google Maps constitutes copyright infringement and also breaks the terms of service. This view is not unanimously shared within the geo community and the OSM-F would not want a Local Chapter to be infringing copyright and breaching Google’s TOS under their name.

The challenges faced by OSM-F are not unique. Community organisations like the Java Community Process, or Mozilla have dealt with similar issues.

If you’ve been involved in an open source project or another organisation that has dealt with these issues, please get in touch.

For reference, here’s an FAQ I mailed to the OSM List this morning.

What are local chapters?

A Local Chapter is an official group of OSMers within a specific territory that is able to officially represent the OSM-F.

Why do we need local chapters?

Over the last 12 months many OSMers, especially those outside of the UK, have expressed interest in setting up official, local groups so that they can represent the OSM-F when talking to journalists, dealing with companies and governments, arranging mapping parties and conferences. From the Foundation’s point of view, establishing Local Chapters will help to spread the load of work and will lead to the growth and development of OSM in new territories.

Who can set-up a local chapter?

A Local Chapter will have a similar organisational structure to the OSM-F. It will consist of a board of directors who should be democratically elected by the memebership. We’ll let you know more details as they are decided, but for now if you are interested in setting up or being involved with a local chapter, please drop me an email (nick@osmfoundation.org)

What is the timeline for setting up local chapters?

All dates are approximate and depend on the number of review cycles the agreement goes through.

* Draft Local Chapters agreement in place for OSM-F viewing by 22nd Dec (OSM-F Board Meeting)
* First draft available for public comment in early Jan
* Review comments Jan-Feb
* Present revised edition to OSM-F for approval – Feb
* Setting up of first local chapters, driven by local chapters themselves- Feb

Who is in the Local Chapters Working Group?

Nick Black (Chair) – nick@osmfoundation.org
Mikel Maron – mikel_maron@yahoo.com
80n – 80n80n@gmail.com
Henk Hoff – henk.hoff@osmfoundation.org
Simone Cortesi – simone@cortesi.com

Want to help out? Got something to say?

Please email nick@osmfoundation.org or reply to this thread.

Posted in Openstreetmap, osm-foundation, osmf-work | 1 Comment »

OSM-F Update: Local Chapters

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

I’ve been doing some research as part of the Foundation’s goal to establish a framework for local OSM chapters to be Federated to the Foundation. The idea is that a local or special interest group will be able to set up a formal relationship with the OSM Foundation, allowing them to hold local mapping parties, events, conferences and so on under the broader banner of the Foundation. Federated groups or chapters will also be able to represent themselves to other official bodies – Governments and media organisations being two examples.

Quite a bit of work has already been done on this by the OSM-F Board, lead by 80n, so I’m not starting from cold. Most of the research I’ve been doing today has been into the Mozilla Foundation, who have been recommended as a good template for a central Foundation with federated members. The next step is for me to contact some local OSM leaders and present the OSM Foundation’s current proposal to them to get some feedback – I’ll be doing this over the next 7 days.

More info on the OSM Wiki. As always, if you have questions or would like to be involved with the work of the OSM-F, get in touch

Posted in Openstreetmap, osm-foundation, osmf-work | No Comments »

Call for Venues for the State of the Map 2009

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

We’ve just released the call for venues for the State of the Map 2009. The conference will be held on the 11th – 12th July 2009, so book you time off now. We want this years conference to be even better that last years, which is why the Foundation started working on the organisation in September.

If you would like to host this year’s event, take a look at this post. I’m going to be on holiday next week, so I won’t be doing any Foundation work. I’ll be catching up with Foundation emails as soon as I return.

Posted in Openstreetmap, osm-foundation, osmf-work | No Comments »

OpenStreetMap Foundation Work Updates

Monday, October 6th, 2008

One of the things I emphasised when standing for election to the OSM Foundation Board was the need for transparency and communication of Board activities to the membership. This is something I’m going to be working on consistently over the next 11 months. This post is the start of the first phase of the work. I’m going to keep a record of the work I do for the Foundation and try and communicate my work as clearly as possible. A lot of the work happens in bits and pieces – I grab 20 mins on a train or plane to read and write emails, draft press releases and so on. I’ve also set aside 2 hours on Thursday mornings for OSM-Foundation related work, so I’d anticipate these updates following those session.

Lets get going. Today I’ve been working on:

  • Drafting a press release for the GPStoGO program’s first unit loan. I’m aiming to get the release out by the end of the week.
  • Drafting an announcement for the call for venues for the State of the Map 2009. The announcement should be out by the end of the week and will invite proposals for venues to host the 2009 event.
  • Catching up on Foundation emails, particularly regarding the License work, which is an ongoing effort for all of the Board members

Upcoming actions next week include getting up to speed on the process of setting up local OSM Chapters. I have a call with some other Foundation members tomorrow, after which I’ll be getting in touch with some OSM people around the world with the aim of getting local OSM chapters set up.

You can subscribe to my posts about my OSM-F work by clicking on this link.

For all Foundation related requests or info, please email me at nick@osmfoundation.org

Posted in Openstreetmap, osm-foundation, osmf-work | No Comments »

OpenStreetMap Foundation Elections

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

I’m standing for election to OpenStreetMap Foundation this year, here is a manifesto of sorts, what I want to achieve as part of the OSMF and how I’ll go about it.

I’ve been part of OSM for about 2.5 years and over that time I’ve been involved with lots of aspects of the project including mapping, coding, salvaging servers, administering websites, helping to organise the State of the Map conference and representing OSM at conferences and exhibits in Europe and North America. This year I want to become more deeply involved with the day to day work that goes on to make OSM run smoothly, so I’m standing for election to the OSMF board.

Over the last 18 months my main role within OSM has been helping to organise the SOTM conferences, along with other OSMF board members. I was involved with the planning of the most recent conference, starting in January 2008, taking the specific role of finding speakers, timetabling their sessions, collecting presentations and generally making sure everything ran smoothly. Organising the conferences has been hard, challenging work, but lots of fun too. With OSM growing so quickly, both in terms of absolute numbers and the number of countries covered, next year’s conference will become bigger and require more organisation from OSM volunteers. As an OSMF board member I would volunteer myself to look after the organisation of the conference – from the call for venues to the conference itself. Having an OSMF board member who is committed to helping organise the conference will help to make SOTM09 even better than the previous two year’s events, promoting OSM within the a wider community of open source and open data projects and attracting new mappers to our project.

Of course I would also be involved with OSMF’s other projects and activities which include promoting OSM, dealing with legal issues and funding servers and hosting. I’ve been deeply involved with the geographic industry for the last 5 years, giving me a lot of exposure to the mapping world. Working in surveying, GIS and software development has taken me to conferences, jobs and events around the world where I’ve loved promoting OSM to anyone who will listen.

Here’s a summary of what I would aim to achieve over a year as an OSMF board member:

  • State Of The Map organisation. Help the conference grow by supporting the community in choosing a venue, organising logistics, helping with call for papers, helping with website set up and anything else needed by the hosts
  • Accountability for OSMF. Helping OSMF to be more accountable to its members, publishing updates on the main things being worked on by the Foundation
  • Promoting OSM. Representing OSM at conferences, shows and developer events around the world and most importantly helping to support other OSMers in their promotion of the project

If you have any direct questions, drop me an email or on Skype.

The OSMF Wiki Page has the following information about the elections:

Nominations for this election will close on Monday August 25th, 2008 and the vote for each position will be called and counted at the AGM on August 30, 2008.

If you want to vote, you need to be a member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. You can join the OSM Foundation here. Membership costs just £15 for a whole year and entitles you to vote in the elections as well as helping to support the Foundation in its work.

Finally, thanks to TomH and Dutch for proposing me.

Posted in Openstreetmap | No Comments »

ZXV and the Week of OpenStreetMap

Monday, January 21st, 2008

This week, we’re going to be working on OSM, all week long. Check out the ZXV blog for more details.

Posted in Geodata, Opensource, Openstreetmap | No Comments »

South East London Mapping Party

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Come map the streets of South-East London:

South-East London Composite Map

The OSM South East London mapping party will aim to fill in the blanks in the OSM map of the area. Greenwhich, Lewisham and Blackheath are all well covered by Yahoo!’s aerial imagery, so lots of roads have been filled in but most of them don’t have a name and there’s lots of mistakes with junctions not joining up properly and so on. We’ll also be collecting point-of-interest data; schools, hospitals, shops, pubs and restaurants all make OSM’s map richer and more useful.

There’s more details on the OSM Wiki. As always, OSM Mapping Parties are open to everyone – if you are interested, get in touch or add your name to the wiki.

Posted in GPS, Geodata, Openstreetmap | No Comments »

FOSS4G OpenStreetMap Slides

Sunday, September 30th, 2007

Incase you missed the talk, here are the slides:

To accompany the slides, here’s a condensed version:

Some guys with GPS units on vans donated their traces to some other guys who made a collaborative map. This was cool, so lots of people joined in, collecting lots of traces, making nice maps and writing software tools to edit the map. The project is now growing very quickly and a Foundation has been set up, which does things like fundraising and organising conferences.

The most valuable thing to OSM are the people. But people are often disparate and hard to organise. For OSM to work the people need to be motivated by incentives other than money. The people won’t do stuff unless its fun, they trust the organisation and they see the results of the hard work.

Geo-data in the UK is very good, but very expensive and is sold by the Ordnance Survey. OSM’s data is not as good as the OS’s data, but its free. As OSM’s data gets better, the OS’s data will get cheaper. When OSM’s data is good enough for 80% of uses, proprietary vendors will be forced to compete on a margin of 20% of use cases. This will lead to more innovations in the mapping industry and more price cuts.

Some people say that OSM’s data is crap. Others just get on with making free maps.

Posted in FOSS4G2007, Free, GPS, Geodata, Openstreetmap, neogeography | 8 Comments »

Map my Scooter

Saturday, September 29th, 2007

Teleatlas have the van and now OSM have the scooter:



Scooter mapping has a lot of potential – you are able to rapidly stop and start, scooters have a small turning circle, you can take voice notes, easily pull out a camera and even stop to make notes. Efficiency compared to cycling is pretty impressive:

Saturday – by bicycle

nick_am_traces.gpx
av speed: 6.03 km/h
distance: 25.56 km
time: 04:14

Sunday – by scooter

nick_am_sunday_trace.gpx
av speed: 16.86 km/h
distance: 28.32 km
time: 01:40

The average speed is so low on the Saturday morning because of the stopping time – I stopped for a coffee half way through the morning and left the GPS running. I decided not to adjust for my stopping time though, as the coffee break time was time I could have been mapping had I not been nackered.

Posted in FOSS4G2007, GPS, Geodata, Openstreetmap | No Comments »

Neogeography and the AGI: Have they got the wrong idea?

Saturday, September 22nd, 2007

(continued from the last post

The fact that organisations like the AGI are trying to get to grips with neo-geography is a good thing. Their members have amassed a serious amount of experience working with geoghraphic information and neo-geographers can learn a lot. But in order for this to be a successful two-way exchange, both parties need to understand what neo-geography is. A good starting point would be Andrew Turner’s O’Reilly Shortcut: Introduction to Neogeography. I’m going to try and address a few of the misconceptions and confusions surrounding neo-geography that I noticed at the AGI 2007

Neo-geography is not the same as open source

There’s a lot of cross over between the worlds of neo-geography and the worlds of Free and open source software (FOSS) and neo-geography, but they are not the same thing. FOSS applications exist that fill every space of the geo-stack – from heavyweight databases to desktop GIS to rendering engines. I talked about FOSS for geo-informatics at UCL earlier this year and have a brief list of applications here. FOSS exists to provide free alternatives to proprietary software and to create new software that might not exist if a proprietary form. FOSS projects usually have a focus on democracy and equal access and are based on the fundamental principal that everyone should have access to the source code.

There is no such belief within neo-geography. Projects like OpenSteetMap, which license all of their data under an open license are few and far between. Look through the listings of this year’s Where2.0 conference and you won’t find many open source projects – most companies do not want to give their data away. What you will find is a lot of innovation, ranging from visualisation to 3D modeling. The flagships of neogeography are neither open source nor open content. Applications like ShapeWiki, which lets users derive polygons by tracing over Google Maps do provide their content under open licenses, but are built upon a proprietary platform – Google Maps.

Further more, sites which allow a user to place a pin on a map, or draw a line or polygon on a map, may or may not be infringing the copyright of data-providers. Case law surrounding these issues is far from convincing, but the lack of clarity is enough to question exactly how open the content of sites likes these can possibly be.

Neo-geography is about pragmatic solutions to real problems

Neo-geography represents the democratisation of access to geographic tools and geodata. Before the release of Google Maps in 2005, the options for the amatuer geographer were limited by the barriers to entry to the use of geographic software and in many countries, geographic data. An Arc GIS or MapInfo license is simply too expensive for most people. FOSS alternatives like GRASS exist, but are not easy to use. The proliferation of geo-apps that has characterised the rise of neo-geography has been facilitated by the fast code-fix-deploy cycle that applications like the Google Maps API, and programming languages like Javascript, Ruby and Python provide, combined with the network effect of developing web-based (as opposed to desktop or server) app.

Neo-geography’s reaction against the built-in complexity of traditional GIS has caused a penetration of sectors of society that would be unimaginable using traditional GIS tools. The often voiced criticism that neo-geography is too simplistic represents the divide between the providers of traditional GIS and the consumers of neo-geography. People like neo-geographic apps because they are simple, because they solve a few targeted problems at a time.

Building complexity to ensure exclusivity

There’s also a darker side to the complexity of traditional GIS. The fact that someone needs a masters degree in GIS, to work as a GIS Technician should set alarm bells ringing. By maintaining the complexity of GIS, vendors like ESRI or Oracle are able to justify the costs of their products and consultants are able to justify their high fees and trade organisations justify their existance. Meanwhile, many individuals and businesses that could be using geographic information to make better decisions and operate with increased efficiency are strongly discouraged from doing so. Geographic information will not save the world unless the world’s citizens have access to both the information and tools with which to use it.

Posted in AGI, Cartography, Geodata, Opensource, Openstreetmap, neogeography | No Comments »

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