Newsletter September 2018

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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

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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

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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”.

Map on osm.ch now includes contour lines

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The default style on osm.ch now includes contour lines and is updated to the latest version of the openstreetmap-carto style sheet.

(c) OpenStreetMap contributors

Elevation data created from a mash-up of SRTM and ASTER GDEM data. ASTER GDEM is a product of METI and NASA. Post processing was kindly provided by Yves Cainaud from opensnowmap.org.

SOSM Annual General Meeting April 7th 2018 Solothurn

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The 2018 AGM will take place in Solothurn on April the 7th, 11:00. The venue is at the

Amt für Geoinformation
Rötistrasse 4
4501 Solothurn

Many thanks to SOGIS for supporting us

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.

Agenda for the 2018 Swiss OpenStreetMap Association Annual General Meeting

Saturday, April 7th 2018, 11:00,

Amt für Geoinformation, Rötistrasse 4, 4501 Solothurn

1. Opening and Welcome

2. Election of the minute taker and vote counters

3. Adoption of minutes of the 2017 AGM

4. Activity report 2017

5. Financial results 2017

– Presentation by the treasurer
– Auditors report

6. Discharge of the Board

7. Membership fees 2018

8. Budget 2018

9. Elections

– Board
Candidates for all positions are welcome.

– Auditors

10. Any other business

Planned Power Outages 16th of January and 6th of Feburary

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There are two planned power outages:

  • 16th of January, 04:30 – 08:30 AM CET
  • 6th of February, 04:30 – 08:30 AM CET

Due to construction work in the building where the SOSM servers are located. All SOSM services are unavailable during that time:

  • sosm.ch and osm.ch websites
  • Swiss overpass and overpass-turbo instances
  • Swiss routing services
  • Swiss umap instance
  • DIDOK comparison map

DINAcon Awards – Open Source Hero

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On Friday October 20th, a delegation of three members of the Swiss OpenStreetMap Association had the pleasure to receive the DINAcon Open Source Hero Award for OpenStreetMap long term contributors.

Picture of the DINAcon 2017 Open Source Hero Award für OpenStreetMap Langzeit-Mitwirkende. A glass block with the inscription DINAcon 2017 Awards 2017. OpenStreetMap Longterm Contributors

DINAcon 2017 Open Source Hero Award for OpenStreetMap Longterm Contributors.
Picture: Simon Poole

In its laudation, the jury acknowledged that the work on OSM is a continuous process and a lot of manual work, and that a lot of persistence was needed to get the project to the state it is today. This award was accepted in the name of the whole Swiss OSM community and the OSM community world wide.

Updates to overpass-turbo and routing

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 overpass-turbo is an easy to use data mining tool for OpenStreetMap. To reflect the continued improvement of the tool, we have updated this software on the SOSM servers to the latest version. Thanks to Martin Raifer who is the developer of this tool.

routing.osm.ch also got an improvement: Now the link to the debug map works correctly and shows the routing speeds and turn weights used by the currently selected profile.
To access the debug map, click on this icon  in the lower left corner: rectangle with magnifying glass