On Saturday SOSM had its first regular Annual General Meeting. To make it a bit more interesting we combined it with a mapping party in Moutier and surroundings, a slightly undermapped region in the Bernese part of the Jura. More on that later.
The highlight of the AGM was the election of three new members to the board replacing Stéphane Henriod who is extremely busy with HOT related activities and is most of the time in far away countries and Thomas Ineichen. A big thank you to both for the work they did in the first half year of SOSM.
The newly elected board members are
- Pascal Mages (treasurer)
- Philipp Schultz (assessor, press)
- Patrick Stählin (press)
They join the incumbent boad members, Sarah Hoffmann and myself, that were duly reelected, as were the auditors Otto Wyss and Arthur Bonino.
The assembly passed a budget that includes funds for a leased server for SOSM services and we expect to announce what will be available in the immediate future.
Detailed minutes will be available in short while on this site.
Back to the fun stuff.
Half of Moutier has been mapped for quite some time, however aerial imagery for the 2nd part and for the villages in the same valley just became available early this year.
Prior to Saturday we did some armchair mapping resulting in this:
Screenshot from qa.poole.ch, red are mostly roads that were traced from imagery. As you can see a number of the villages didn’t actually have anything mapped. Nothing to feel all too bad about:
The picture shows what commercial navigation data was for the village Belprahon roughly in the year 2000, everybody starts small as you see. With the data gathered on Saturday the valley looks like this
Most of the remaining red is due to roads not being signposted or not having names in the first place, not to forget that the house numbers seemed to be really small on average making them extremely difficult to read. The result is not perfect, but a lot better than before and the village of Belprahon now looks like this in OSM
Again thanks to everybody that participated!