SOSM 2016 Annual General Meeting

Agenda for the 2016 Swiss OpenStreetMap Association Annual General Meeting

Agenda der Generalversammlung der Swiss OpenStreetMap Association 2016

Saturday, April 2nd 2016, 11:00,

Samstag, den 2. April 2016, 11:00,

Hotel Am Spisertor, Moosbruggstrasse 1, 9000 St. Gallen

  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 2015 AGM / Annahme des Protokolls der GV 2015
  4. Activity report 2015 / Tätigkeitsbericht 2015
  5. Financial results 2015 / Jahresrechnung 2016
    •  Auditors report / Bericht der Kassen
    • Presentation by the treasurer / Bericht des Kassiersprüfer
  6. Membership fees 2016 / Mitgliederbeiträge 2016
  7. Budget 2016
  8. Elections / Wahlen
    • Board / Vorstand
      • Candidates for all positions are welcome. Pascal Mages will be stepping down as treasurer and will have to be replaced.
      • Kandidaten für alle Positionen sind willkommen. Pascal Mages tritt als Kassier zurück und muss ersetzt werden.
    • Auditors / Kassenprüfer
  9. Vote on the OSMF Local Chapter agreement / Abstimmung über den OSMF Local Chapter Vertrag
  10. Any other business / Varia

Missing Crosswalks – A MapRoulette Challenge

Take part of this MapRoulette Challenge which is about checking if there’s a pedestrian street crossing (crosswalk) or not. This verification goes on until it’s all done. MapRoulette is a kind of gamified website and a mapping campaign similar to MapZen’s targeted editing series.

image

Once integrated in OpenStreetMap (OSM), crosswalks are shown in web maps (e.g. OSM Cycle Map/OSM Radfahrerkarte/OpenCycleMap, OSM France and OSM2World). And they are useful for pedestrian navigation apps (like OsmAnd).

So help OpenStreetMap to improve this missing information!

image

Figure 1: Cycle map from OpenStreetMap main page showing pedestrian street crossings (crosswalks) as yellow dot markers.

A crosswalk node needs to be placed as part of a way. It requires the tag highway=crossing (search for “Crossing” e.g. in built-in online editor “iD”). For the capture of other attributes like the existence of islands or traffic signals see Key:crossing on OSM Wiki.

Important notes: When using editor “iD” the presets suggest tag crossing=zebra. This tag is mainly used in UK. Since this challenge is in Switzerland you can delete this tag. Finally: When saving, a changeset comment is needed. You can use there e.g. “Missing Crosswalks Challenge”.

image

Figure 2: A “Street Crossing” node shown in the online editor “iD” built-in OpenStreetMap main page.

The street crossings (crosswalks) in fact are coordinates our automated process found in aerial images by using a parallel image detection algorithm. This new software works mainly with yellow crossings of Switzerland on aerial images with certain quality at zoom level 18.

The coordinate data around eastern Switzerland has been extracted at December, 2nd. 2015. This covers about a tenth of the total area of Switzerland.

Contact us if you have questions or ideas around this hot topic.

Happy mapping!

This article was originally published on geometalab.

Translating osm.ch

new_osmch

Thanks to efforts of Michael (datendelphin) the move of the SOSM
provided services to the new SOSM servers in Bern is nearly complete.

See http://sosm.ch/wikimedia-donates-old-toolservers-to-sosm/ and
http://sosm.ch/adfinis-offers-hosting-location/

As part of the move I’ve updated the osm.ch portal a bit and added the
ability to pull translations from transifex. Up to now the portal was
only in German, I’ve added an English version leaving French, Italian
and Romansh to do.

The transifex project can be found here
https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/osmch/

Given that there are currently only 43 strings, I fully expect that we
will have the missing three languages covered tomorrow :-).

On a more serious note we are always looking for people that can help
with the translation of content on sosm.ch which is currently
predominantly German and English. If you want to help send us a mail to
board@sosm.ch

Update: translations for all aditional languages were done by Friday the 24th of April!

SOSM 2015 Annual General Meeting

Agenda for the 2015 Swiss OpenStreetMap Association Annual General Meeting

Saturday, April 18th 2014, 11am,Lago Lodge, Uferweg 5, CH-2560 Nidau

  1. Opening and Welcome
  2. Election of the minute taker and vote counters
  3. Adoption of minutes of the 2014 AGM
  4. Activity report 2014
  5. Financial results 2014 –
    • Presentation by the treasurer
    • Auditors report
  6. Membership fees 2015
  7. Budget 2015
  8. Elections
    • Board (candidates for all positions are welcome.)
    • Auditors (note Otto Wyss will no longer be available)
  9. Trade registry registration
  10. Application for OSMF Local Chapter Status
  11. Any other business

Just 20’000 left to go …

Two years and a couple of months back I started running daily street name completeness checks for Switzerland. See my original article for more information, information on the changes for 2014 (this article points out some of the quality issues with the GWR) and http://qa.poole.ch/ch-roads/ for the daily updates.

On the 12th of March we passed the 100’000 street name mark implying that in 27 months we have added nearly 40’000 names that were previously missing or unverified, leaving roughly 20’000 to go.

GWR 2014-12-01* OSM 2012-11-01 OSM 2013-12-27 OSM 2015-03-12 %
Roads 121’041 62’258 87’759 100’012 83%
Other 63’673 14’101 8’598 12’465 20%

* the GWR values are corrected for the issues discussed in the December 2013 blog post and are not the raw numbers. This is the reason for the decrease in numbers of non-road objects.

Naturally I do not expect to reach the 100% mark any time soon. There is quite a high number of municipalities that do not sign post their roads, making independent verification very difficult to impossible (this is not the same as not having street names in the first place which is not a problem) and naturally these places don’t tend to be where hot spots of OSM contributors are. On the other hand there is still a lot of very low hanging fruit which simply needs verification. Low hanging in this case means that the roads in question can already be found in OSM, but there are simply spelling differences that we need to investigate (see the original article on how to handle differences between the GWR and reality).

Please don’t forget the 2015 SOSM Donation Drive to enable us to continue to operate this and other services.

 

March 2015

December 2013

January 2013

 

Wikimedia Germany donates old Toolservers to SOSM

New serversOn Friday we drove 870 km to Haarlem in the vicinity of Amsterdam to pick up three servers. Wikimedia has decommissioned their two year old toolservers and donated the hardware to SOSM. Thanks to Wikimedia Germany and Wikimedia Switzerland for making this possible.

This will enable us to run our services on our own hardware in Switzerland. Support the move by contributing to the SOSM donation drive 2015.

2015 SOSM Donation Drive

umap_screenshotDear friends of OpenStreetMap and SOSM

As you may know, SOSM provides a range of services for the Swiss OpenStreetMap community. Currently this is financed for a major part out of our regular membership fees, this however limits some aspects of our operations quite considerably. All services are currently run on a single, small leased server in Germany.

In 2015 we would like to

  • move all services to a hosting location in Switzerland
  • provide better performing and redundant hardware for our most popular services (map tiles, uMap and routing)
  • expand our OSM data and imagery hosting offerings (for example the current imagery covering the Canton Aargau)

While we have the prospect of a number of in-kind donations to support the above, more on that soon, there is still the need for additional funds to cover cash outlays. Example: while we have a computer hardware donation arranged, the hardware will have to be imported and VAT on its value paid, just this single item would be substantially outside of SOSMs current annual budget.

To support the plans for this year SOSM board has therefore decided to explicitly ask for donations to SOSM in 2015 with the goal of collecting at least CHF 5000 over the course of the year.

Donations can made to

Postfinance account
85-53542-9
IBAN CH54 0900 0000 8505 3542 9

Swiss OpenStreetMap Association
Heitersbergstrasse 1
8962 Bergdietikon
Switzerland

Please note 2015 DONATION DRIVE on the payment. By default we will be publishing the names of all donors, if you don’t want to be mentioned, please add that either to you payment information or send mail to info@sosm.ch.