Candidature for State of the Map 2020, HSR Rapperswil, 19-21 June 2020

Posted on by

Update
The SotM 2020 will be in Cape Town. We congratulate the team from Southafrica and look forward to the conference next year.

We would like to inform you about some recent developments. Every year the OpenStreetMap community meets at the international conference “State of the Map” (SotM). This year the event will take place in Heidelberg.

Up to two weeks ago no applications for the SotM 2020 event had been received by the SotM working group. In light of that situation we, the HSR Hochschule Rapperswil and the association SOSM, were asked if we could submit a bid, which we have now done.

We see this as an opportunity to expand the Swiss community and to present ourselves as a cosmopolitan host.

Please reserve the 19-21 June 2020. We hope for an active participation, and that some volunteers will contact us as helpers as soon as it is clear which location will win the bid. The decision is expected by the end of September. 

2018 Activity Report

Posted on by

At the annual general meeting end of March we presented our yearly activity report. Some of those activities were already reported in this blog:

osm.ch Website

Keen visitors may have noticed, we’ve re-launched our osm.ch site. Thanks to Flavio and Claudia and Michael for making the website more modern and professional looking. Comments on the new site are always welcome. Either here in the comments, as a mail to us, or by opening an issue on github or even a pull-request.

New logo and stickers

With a new logo designed by Roman, we finally came around to produce stickers. We distributed one sticker to each member with the invitation to our annual general meeting. In case you would like to get some stickers, just ask. We will gladly send you a couple of them.

Plans for 2019

  • Get a second hosting location operational
  • Further development of OpenSchoolMaps

Burgen-Dossier – Eine Kooperation von Wikimedia und OpenStreetMap (Schweiz)

Posted on by

Wikimedia und OpenStreetMap wollen in der Schweiz enger zusammenarbeiten. Den Anfang soll ein gemeinsames schweizerisches Burgen-Verzeichnis mit Karte, Fotos und weiteren Informationen machen.

Für den Samstag, 27. April 2019, ist ein Arbeitstreffen beider Communities und weiterer Interessierter auf Schloss Lenzburg (AG) geplant, um die verschiedenen Arbeiten zu koordinieren und sich gegenseitig die verschiedenen Projekte und Unterprojekte näher zu bringen.

Wikipedianer und weitere Interessierte erhalten eine Einführung in OpenStreetMap. Mapper und weitere Interessierte bekommen Wikipedia-Projekte nähergebracht. Am Nachmittag stellen Experten die Projekte OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia sowie Wikivoyage, Commons (Fotos) und evtl. Wikidata näher vor. Sie werden zeigen, wie man editiert, und stehen für Fragen zur Verfügung. (“Ask Us Anything”)

Das Ziel ist die vollständige Darstellung aller Burgen und Schlösser auf OpenStreetMap (OSM) und Wikipedia (WP), angefangen mit den Kantonen Aargau und Zürich.

Weitere Informationen und Anmeldung zur kostenlosen Teilnahme auf dieser Wiki-Seite.

Allianz faires Urheberrecht

Posted on by

Der Vorstand der SOSM hat diese Woche beschlossen, die Allianz für ein faires Urheberrecht in der Schweiz zu unterstützen.

Auch wenn wir von der am meist diskutierten vorgeschlagene Änderung, die “Linksteuer” nicht direkt betroffen wären, scheint es uns nicht sinnvoll Regelungen einzuführen die, zugunsten von einzelnen Unternehmungen, versuchen die Zeit zurück zudrehen, und in diesem spezifischen Fall auch noch handwerklich katastrophal sind.

Die weniger besprochene weitere Änderung, die Einführung eines Äquivalents des Lichtbildschutz, den wir aus anderen europäischen Ländern kennen, betrifft uns aber direkt.

Bisher hatte die Schweiz eine sehr hohe Hürde, die überwunden werden musste um einen urheberrechtlichen Schutz einer Fotographie zu erhalten (Bundesgerichtsurteil “Meili Foto” ). Dies wird nun ins Gegenteil gekehrt, mit dem Resultat, dass man davon ausgehen muss, dass auch automatisch und mechanisch aufgenommene Bilder in Zukunft geschützt sind (also Luftbilder, StreetView, Mapillary und so weiter) und ebenso daraus abgeleitete Werke nur noch mit der Erlaubnis des jeweiligen Rechteinhabers erstellt werden dürfen. Der Bundesrat schliesst dies zwar in seiner Botschaft zur Revision aus, der Gesetzestext selber scheint aber dazu im Widerspruch zu stehen.

Auf jeden Fall ist die Rechtssicherheit für uns bei der Benutzung solcher Quellen nicht mehr vorhanden, was nicht in unserem Interesse sein kann.

2019 Swiss OpenStreetMap Association Annual General Meeting

Posted on by

The 2019 AGM will take place in Basel on Saturday March the 30th, 11:00.

The venue is at the

BORROMÄUM
Clubzimmer
Byfangweg 6
CH-4051 Basel

The event will follow our proven formula with a roughly one hour formal part starting at 11:00, with lunch following and a fairly unstructured mapping party as the activity in the afternoon from 13:30 onwards.

Guests, including such that simply want to learn something about OpenStreetMap, are welcome to both parts.

Could however both members and guests indicate to info@sosm.ch if they plan to attend, particularly for lunch, so that we can inform the restaurant how many guests they can expect.

Looking forward to seeing you in Basel.


Agenda for the 2019 Swiss OpenStreetMap Association Annual General Meeting

Agenda der Generalversammlung der Swiss OpenStreetMap Association 2019




Saturday, March 30th 2019, 11:00,
Samstag, den 30. März 2019, 11:00,


BORROMÄUM, Clubzimmer, Byfangweg 6, CH-4051 Basel

1. Opening and Welcome / Eröffnung und Begrüssung
2. Election of the minute taker and vote counters / Wahl des Protokollführers & der Stimmenzähler
3. Adoption of minutes of the 2018 AGM / Annahme des Protokolls der GV 2018
4. Activity report 2018 / Tätigkeitsbericht 2018
5. Financial results 2018 / Jahresrechnung 2018
– Presentation by the treasurer / Bericht des Kassiers
– Auditors report / Bericht der Kassenprüfer
6. Discharge of the Board / Entlastung des Vorstandes
7. Membership fees 2019 / Mitgliederbeiträge 2019
8. Budget 2019
9. Elections / Wahlen
– Board / Vorstand
Candidates for all positions are welcome.
Kandidaten für alle Positionen sind willkommen.
– Auditors / Kassenprüfer
10. Any other business / Varia

Newsletter September 2018

Posted on by

SOSM Activities

We were at the State of the Map in Milano with a table. We had contact with many mappers from all over the world. In particular, we have also made contact with the Italian-speaking community.

sosm table at State of the Map Milano. We offered some Swiss choclate to the conference attendants. cc-by-sa 4.0 Manfred Stock

Are you already a member of OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF)? Although the SOSM is an official local chapter, the SOSM members are not automatically OSMF members. By paying membership fees, the OSMF remains financially independent. As a member you can participate in the voting and thus have a say in the future of the project. Membership costs £15 per year.

Help sought

SOSM newsletter

At the last meeting, the wish for a newsletter was expressed. Here, help would be welcome in translating content and designing an appealing HTML mail.

osm.ch homepage

We would like to rework the homepage osm.ch: Make it more informative and visually appealing. We have already collected some content, but JavaScript and CSS styling are still missing. If you have some experience with this, your help would be very welcome. The current status can be found at https://osm.ch/next/osm-ch.html A design concept is available here.

Translations for sosm.ch

Thanks to the active help of an Italian mapper we now also have an Italian translation of sosm.ch. It would be nice if in the future, we also had multilingual blog entries. We would be glad about German, French and Italian translators, who would also translate the blog posts in each case. That’s about 10 posts per year.

vector tiles

If someone would like to deal with this topic, we would also like to offer Vector tiles on our servers. We are happy to support, but the whole topic is too time-consuming at the moment for our technician Michael to do that, along with the recurring maintenance of all other services.

 

10. Micro Mapping Party Rapperswil, August 17th 2018, HSR

Posted on by

The Geometa Lab of the HSR and the association (SOSM) invite to the next Mapping Party in Rapperswil/SG by the lake! The integrated OSM meeting also includes an Ask-Me-Anything. There will also be a micro hackathon.

The Micro Mapping Party is a casual outdoor event for capturing OpenStreetMap data with subsequent editing in the computer lab, followed by bbq and drinks (offered by the HSR). The Ask-Me-Anything and the Micro Hackathon take place inside.

The party is open to everyone, especially beginners. More than a dozen participants are expected. The start is at 2 pm in the lake building 6 of the HSR campus (right next to Rapperswil/SG station). You can also join us later, for example after work. Registration is requested so that sufficient food and drink can be organised.

Information and registration: https://giswiki.hsr.ch/Party

Follow the party via the Twitter-Account von SOSM and with the hashtags #OpenStreetMap #MappingParty.

OpenSchoolMaps.ch – Promotion of open maps in the classroom

Posted on by

OpenSchoolMaps.ch is a new initiative to promote open maps in geography and computer science lessons in Switzerland. Teachers at secondary and grammar school level are the main target groups. To all who know teachers in geography and computer science: Pass this news on, www.openschoolmaps.ch!

Both the maps (data) and the materials are made freely available (so-called “Open Educational Resource”), so that everyone can contribute to them, use them freely and pass them on – even outside the classroom. Mainly free data from OpenStreetMap is used.

This small project was initiated by Stefan Keller, SOSM board member and professor at the Geometa Lab of the HSR. It fits to the two focal points, school and tourism, which the association has set itself this year. The SOSM also owns the web domains openschoolmaps.ch and openschoolmaps.org.

The content on OpenSchoolMaps.ch is just the beginning. We are looking for contributors who want to take part in the project, be it with feedback, translations or software tools. Interested parties can contact the project managers as described under OpenSchoolMaps.ch > “Weitere Unterrichtsideen”.