“Fina and the Maps” – a new children’s book with a difference

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“Fina and the Maps” is a children’s book that aims to get children excited about collaborative cartography. The authors and translators hope that some of them will take part in the community project OpenStreetMap, which maps the world and makes the data available to everyone – similar to Wikipedia. The book is intended to promote open education and the development of collective knowledge and can be downloaded for free as an eBook (PDF). The recommended age range is 8 to 12 years.

The colorfully illustrated children’s book (“Fina e os mapas”) about cartography and collaborative maps was originally written by Pablo Sanxiao in Galician and Spanish. It has already been translated into English, French, Italian, Catalan and (Brazilian) Portuguese and is now also available in (Swiss) High German. It can be translated into other languages in the spirit of open education and is therefore also available in raw text (Markdown).

Here is a summary: Fina is a girl who loves technology and often visits her grandmother by bike to enjoy her exciting stories and delicious cookies. When the power goes out one day, her grandmother shows Fina old atlases and tells her how maps used to be drawn by hand, sparking Fina’s interest in cartography. Inspired, Fina discovers the OpenStreetMap project, starts entering places digitally with her grandmother and becomes a digital cartographer herself.

Share this! Website and download: https://finaeosmapas.ghandalf.org/

New colocation sponsor Nine

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At the end of 2024, we had to give up our server hosting in Winterthur due to reasons beyond our control and that of our former sponsor. Some readers may have seen our announcement on this topic last year.

Thankfully, Nine very promptly agreed to support the Swiss OpenStreetMap community and SOSM with their colocation infrastructure. As a result, we relocated from Winterthur to Zurich in mid-December.

With the two servers we operate, we offer a variety of services that enable the OpenStreetMap community to improve the map and make valuable contributions. One of these servers is now hosted at Nine, and we would like to take this opportunity to express our heartfelt thanks for Nine’s generous support.

The colocation sponsorship allows us to operate the services on our own hardware in Switzerland. The second server remains with our longstanding colocation sponsor, Adfinis.

A big thank you to Nine and Adfinis—for their sponsorship, trust, and support!

OSM Birthday Party on August 11 at Badi Rheinau

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The plan for August 11 is becoming more concrete: We will meet at Aquarina 4 in Rheinau. In the Badi for cooling off. I hope for good weather.

My idea is to do some mapping on the way there, like a star hike: Each person or small groups will walk the last few kilometers, mapping as they go.

Arrival between 1:00 PM and 3:00 PM, birthday cake around 4:00 PM.

Here are two suggestions for hikes:

Hike A

Very beautiful!

Rüedlinge → Rheinau Time: 2-3 hours

Route:

  • Start at the Flaach/Rüdlingen bridge (newly built, needs to be updated in OSM), bus: Flaach, Ziegelhütte
  • Follow the west side upstream along the Rhine
  • At Ellikon am Rhein, take the ferry across the river
  • Possible stop at Rhygarte Node 356692523 (not Restaurant Schiff, same building at the front side)
  • Follow the east side upstream along the Rhine to the lower auxiliary weir Way 39763717

Hike B

Also beautiful, with the Rhine Falls.

Rheinfall → Rheinau Time: 2 hours

Route:

  • Start on the Zurich (south/east) side of the Rhine Falls, train: Schloss Laufen am Rheinfall
  • Follow the east side downstream along the Rhine to the main weir in Rheinau

Many thanks to Loremo for helping with the planning and the hike suggestions!

Please share your route on the wiki or forum so not everyone maps the same area.

The Swiss OSM Jubilee Tour 2024

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This tour is a series of events to celebrate the 20th anniversary of OpenStreetMap (OSM) and its impact on communities around the world and in Switzerland. Participants will learn about the versatility of OpenStreetMap and its central role in supporting sectors such as tourism and emergency services. Join us as we celebrate two decades of collaborative mapping, innovation and the transformative power of open data. Some events will take place online, others onsite – with a “grand” finale on the actual birthday around August 9, 2024!

Three onsite events at which Swiss OSM was a guest have already taken place, namely Wikipedia Day 2024 on April 27, 2024 in Bern, the workshop “OpenStreetMap for Research and Geospatial Analysis” on May 16, 2024 at the University of Zurich and the “Sozial- und Umweltforum Ostschweiz” (SUFO) on May 25, 2024 in St. Gallen.

The online webinar series on “OpenStreetMap for fire departments and other interested parties” (in German) on May 14 and 23, 2024 was also very successful. Next up is the webinar series on “OpenStreetMap for tourism – using POIs correctly” (also online and in German) on June 19 and June 25, 2024.

Share these events! Contact me (Stefan Keller) for any questions about this tour.

Website: https://wiki.osm.org/Switzerland/The_Swiss_OSM_Jubilee_Tour

“Mapper in Residence” bei der Stadt Winterthur im November 2023

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Stefan Keller von der OST Ostschweizer Fachhochschule und SOSM-Vorstandsmitglied wird “Mapper in Residence” bei der Stadt Winterthur für vier Freitage im November 2023 (*).

Als Mapper in Residence (MiR)…

  • dient er als Bindeglied zwischen einer Organisation – in diesem Fall der Abteilung Geoinformation der Stadt Winterthur – und der OpenStreetMap (OSM) Community.
  • fördert er das Verständnis für OpenStreetMap unter den Mitarbeitenden der Organisation, z.B. durch Veranstaltungen.
  • fördert er die Verbesserung von OpenStreetMap-Inhalten und -Prozessen durch die Community.

Ein:e Mapper in Residence initiiert bzw. stärkt letztlich die Partnerschaft zwischen der Organisation und der OpenStreetMap-Community. Das kleine Projekt ist inspiriert von “The Wikipedian in Residence”.

Stefan Keller wird unter anderem Daten und Prozesse identifizieren und Werkzeuge verbessern und spezifizieren. Dies um mehr offene Daten der Stadt Winterthur in OpenStreetMap zu integrieren und um diese in OpenStreetMap aktuell zu halten. Dies könnte auch zu einer Verbesserung und Erweiterung des “Leitfadens für Dateneigentümer” (**) von 2021 führen.

(*) Siehe auch diese Mitteilung auf LinkedIn der Stadt Winterthur vom 30. Oktober 2023.
(**) Hitz-Gamper, B. S., & Stürmer, M. E. (2021). Daten in OpenStreetMap integrieren – ein Leitfaden für Dateninhaber. DOI: 10.48350/159438. Download (PDF).

Benches are a social institution – like OpenStreetMap!

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The project of the month Switzerland (PotM CH, see below) from August 2022 is about the registration of benches in OpenStreetMap. Benches are a social facility for young and old – just like OpenStreetMap! A change simply counts as adding or changing from the tag amenity=bench and optionally other tags like color. The data is updated hourly.

A dashboard (no. 23) shows the changes of this PotM CH since the beginning of August. The time period can be adjusted in the filter at the bottom right. To display the benches, one can use standard map style on OSM.org, zooming in all the way. A useful webapp is also the OpenPOIMap.

More information about this PotM CH can be found on this Wiki page, where by the way also own projects (“Challenges”) can be proposed.

Benches in OpenPOIMap around Bellevue, Zürich (Switzerland).

P.S. The “Project of the Month Switzerland” (PotM CH) is about working together on a specific OpenStreetMap topic. This way, mappers can be made aware of a topic and/or newcomers to a topic can be introduced to OpenStreetMap. It is also used for targeted data improvement.

XKCD #636 (Licensed under CC BY-NC 2.5).