Jesus Holy Mother ZOMG amazing level 5 priority 3 DEFCON 7 amazing awesome.
This made my year, it’s super turbo incredible stupendous.
I will personally buy a bottle of champagne for anyone who brings anything half as good to the party on Saturday! So, watch this:
The OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF) has it’s annual elections coming up this weekend. Here’s the fun facts:
Check out the AGM wiki page and especially the crucial election of board members. The entire OSMF board is up for election as well as some new faces. Each has a manifesto, lists their affiliations, race and pet cat ownership. Who you vote for ultimately helps set the direction of parts of the project and continues to support almost all aspects of it, from the SOTM conference to running the servers.
Then afterward, we have the 5th anniversary OSM meetup with much food, drink and merryment!
Please do come, and note down yourself on the wiki page because it’s going to be at least 23% more awesome than any other OSM event you’ve been to!
But this is an international effort so be sure to check out the Toronto party and run your own near you if you can’t make it!
Check out this article in Berner Zeitung BZ here (if you speak German 
)
I’m at WhereCamp5280 in Denver, Colorado. 5280 refers to the number of feet in a mile since Denver is the mile high city. There are some great talks here and the conference is free and extends to tomorrow, Saturday 16th August so come along.
I did a talk about OSM of course and then Peter organised a group discussion on OSM in the USA (see above). It was really quite something as it was the first time we had a group of people who are already doing things with OSM. People from USGS, ESRI, universities and companies who are using the data and running events like mapping parties. Of course we’ve had impromptu groups like this in Europe for the some time, and BOFs at things like Where 2.0 in the US. But, from my experience so far the ones in the USA have mainly been people new to the project. So, it’s a milestone for the US community, and it’s great!
Unlike some crowdsourced projects that have fizzled, OSM has managed to attract a large following of enthusiastic contributors who constantly “trace” routes they take by car, bike or foot. Users tag points on their routes, and share the resulting places of personal interest on the maps with other users. Some of the bigger map providers also offer such geo-tagged metadata, like Google’s MyMaps.
Check out the webmonkey article over here.
Check out Best of OSM (bestofosm.org), a site highlighting areas where the map isn’t just insanely great, but super turbo awesome level 5.
…which I don’t understand, but hey it looks good! Look here
Thus, three strategies are now in play in India: a high quality solution which is a public goods effort (Openstreetmap), a good solution which is owned by a corporation (Google) and a poor solution which acts like a corporation (Survey of India). The users of maps are flocking to Google, Nokia and Openstreetmap.
Read the article at Financial Express via Directions Mag
Catch the podcast of me on FLOSS weekly over here. You can also watch the video over here but beware it didn’t play for me.
Cool post:
Like I promised few days ago, here is the demo that shows tile-based OpenStreetMap rendering on Qt/S60. If you never heard of OpenStreetMap before, it is “a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world” (from its Wikipedia entry). You can try it at www.openstreetmap.org. It might not be as complete as other maps solutions, but surprisingly, OpenStreetMap coverage for many world big cities are detailed enough for most users.