Fellow Nestordammers!
Last weekend Mike and I had the pleasure of attending
State of the Map, the annual gathering of the
OpenStreetMap community, in Amsterdam. Congratulations to the organisers for putting on a fantastic event, and the the OSM community for the amazing progress over the last five years. The past year specifically has seen great advancements from OpenStreetMap on difficult topics like the data license, rolling out a new API, and the general technical problem of rapidly scaling the number of contributors and users.
The conference addressed many of these topics and much more. There we many great talks, and it was a great chance to learn about the ever expanding OSM ecosystem. OSM founder Steve Coast rallied the crowd with his keynote about “OSM 1 Million”, Aaron Cope from flickr talked about how they’ve used OSM to enhance their user experience, and Mike Migurski from Stamen showed off some of the beautiful things that are possible when you have access to the raw geographic data.
But these are only a few examples of the many good talks, and I advise you to
check out the talks yourself. Thanks to the organisers for recording everything.
While the technical talks were interesting, the most innovative use of OSM data surely had to be the delicious OSM cake maps.
photo thanks to flickr user rhodes
The diversity of the crowd was striking, with representatives from well over 20 countries. Many countries took the opportunity to present, and some of these talks were the most interesting of the weekend. The diversity of challenges the OSM community is taking on is considerable; from countries like Egypt, Palestine and Cuba where political considerations impact the mapping process to developing countries like Pakistan and Moldova, to countries like France and Canada where much of the nation’s geodata has been donated and volunteers now face the nontrivial task of importing it into OSM.
It was great to catch up with old friends (and it was pleasing to see how many of the speakers were past Nestoria interviewees!), and to meet new ones. But of course there was also work to be done! On Sunday I had the chance to address the crowd about some of the lessons we’ve learned about how users search on Nestoria, and how this might be applicable to OpenStreetMap.
There’s also a
podcast available here.
I was pleased that the talk generated the desired healthy discussion, which will now continue over on the newly created
OSM geocoding mailing list. If you’re interested in geocoding (and really, aren’t we all?), please get on the list and start contributing.
Finally, a big thanks go out to the organisers of SOTM09 for putting on a great event from start to finish. The facilities and hospitality were excellent and we’re already looking forward to the next major OSM event:
FOSSGIS 2010 in Osnabrück in early March.
