Tag Archives: SOTM

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.

 

SotM 2014 in Buenos Aires: Dinner and (skipping) night life

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I skipped on the pre-event on Thursday night, because I was still too jet-lagged that evening and went to sleep early. So someone else will have to report on that.

Friday night, after the first day of the conference, we met an online acquaintance of mine who by chance is also currently spending time with his family in Buenos Aires and joined the SotM crowd in the Post Street Bar. Three of us left there early, so my acquaintance could take us to La Americana, a fast food restaurant serving empanadas, baked or fried bread-dough dumplings, with a variety of delicious fillings, often with ground beef, but also vegetarian ones. Afterwards we went to a café to have some drinks. While the others chose tea with lemon, I had a ‘submarine’: Hot mild in which one dissolves a dark chocolate bar to get something resembling hot chocolate. We made our way back to the hotels around 0:30, the time the Niceto club would have opened that was announced as the place-to-be for after the Post Street Bar.

Yesterday (Saturday) us German-speaking attendants and speakers decided to get some of the famous Argentinian steaks for dinner. The locals were about to lead some other SotM participants to a bar and we tagged along, as they promised to show us a fine restaurant on the way to there. Arriving there, all that were with us ended up in the same café, and even more arrived as the location had been tweeted as the official SotM dinner meeting place of the evening. The locals ordered us a variety of regional starters, and several rounds of that, so we ended up full without having had steak.

Tonight (Sunday), though, it will be steak, we decided: “Not negotiable.”

SOTM day three: Simon Poole elected to the OSMF board

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The topic of the third and last day of SOTM was the community. For example, Peter Miller presented his very numerous speciality maps, or Bob Barr had a heart-warming talk on weather open street mappers are rather pirates or pilots. There was also a presentation on OpenStreetMap addiction and how to diagnose and treat it. I personally enjoyed Kinya Inoue’s presentation very much. He talked about his mapping of historical places in Japan (and how that suddenly brought him in a quite dangerous situation).

During lunch time, there was the annual general meeting of the OSMF, the worldwide OSM organisation. During this meeting, the OSMF board was elected, and we congratulate Simon Poole, the current president of SOSM, to his election as an OSMF board member, together with Henk Hoff and Frederik Ramm.

View from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building

And now it’s time for me to travel some more around Japan. Tokyo is huge (see picture, view from the metropolitan government building) but there are also other places to visit apart from the capital.

SOTM day two

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The swiss delegation on the night cruise

The Swiss delegation on the night cruise

The second day was focused on routing and navigation. A lot of companies are interested in this topic. Some of them requested to include auxiliary information into OSM which would not be about physical objects, e.g. identifying the extent of big junctions or whether a turn should be announced at a bifurcation. Over lunch a group picture has been taken.

The evening was spent with causal talk and drinking: We had delicious Japanese food on a night cruise. We went on the boat in Kachidoki and did a tour around the harbour to the landmark building of a TV station. During the whole cruise many different dishes were served, so we got a broad culinary overview.

SOTM 2012: ODbL planet announced

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Tokyo by night

Near studio Alta in Shinjuku

Right now the State of the Map 2012 is taking place in Tokyo. This is an impressive city, and sometimes you feel like you jumped right into the (very crowded) future. The first day of SOTM was mostly about humanitarian and crisis mapping. (There were also some talks in Japanese, though I can’t judge those.) Today, there are more technical talks.

The most important announcement for all mappers was at the opening of the conference from Michael Collinson: The next planet will be ODbL licensed. So the redaction period is finally completed!