weekly – semanario – hebdo – 週刊 – týdeník – Wochennotiz – 주간 – tygodnik – Page 515 – A summary of things happening in the OpenStreetMap world

21.10. – 27.10.2014

Election to Board of the OpenStreetMap-Foundation

Frederik Ramm, the secretary of the OSM-Foundation, announced the resignation of Simon Poole from his OSMF board position. The reason, explained Frederik on talk-de, is because of the announcement by Steve Coasts, the “big old chair”, to run for the board.
On the OSM-Talk mailinglist you can read a discussion about the current state of the OSM board.
Based on the discussion about the attempted comeback of Steve Coast as a candidate for election to the Board criticism was reaped.
In the above discussion one of the criticisms was that the financial reports of the OSMF will be published only with a delay of over a year and even the boards (CFO excluded) didn’t known this. To remedy this, the financial report for 2013 has been published. Also please note the comments on the list OSMF Talk.
Richard Fairhurst, the developer of the editor Potlatch, commented in his blog about the current discussion prior to the OSMF elections.
Simon Poole, who resigned as CEO of OSMF with immediate effect, explains his resignation in a series of interesting blog posts.
Questions to the candidates along with their answers can be found on the OSM wiki.
Frederik Ramm, one of the candidates, explains in OSMF talk why he does not believe in face-to-face meetings of the board. The discussion also covers fundraising and server costs.

OSM can apparently be used as a dating portal. At least there is one user who does. If it worked and is fixed, we recommend the way to the registry office.
The OpenCage Data blog published interviews with Maggie Cawley von Boomerang Geospatial, with the Basque mapper Gari Araolaza and the Indonesian mapper Emir Hartato.
The “Geography Awareness Week” takes place from 16th to 22nd of November.
Dalek2point3 tried to find out from the HTTPArchives where resp. how often osm.org-Tiles and the Webmapping-APIs from Google and Mapbox are used.
As part of the further development of the Wikimedia Tileserver and geoinformation related services the Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a developer with OSM experience.
Mapping doesn’t serve just the community, bdhurkett says in his diary.
Simon Poole reports in his User Diary about a welcome message for new mappers in Switzerland.
Matt Toups intends to import buildings in New Orleans.

The British company GeoLytix has released a map with 6872 British supermarkets, unfortunately it comes without an OSM-compatible license.
MapBox commissoned a White Paper “The ODbL and OpenStreetMap: Analysis and Use Cases” (PDF 282 kB) at the Centre of Spatial Law, which summarizes the problems of ODbL license. This is why MapBox wants a license without publishing under the same conditions (Share-Alike). In the comments to Alex Barths User Diary you can read some criticism of the methodology and the content.

A Video about how to map buildings with iD.
The British newspaper, The Guardian, reports about the Missing Maps Project.
Jay Cassano writes in FastColabs about the HOT activities in the Ebola epidemic.
Golem talks nearly correct about HOT and Ebola. Of course, we can not use the maps from our market companian.
The HOT-Tasking Manager uses a new feature of iD – pre-fill changeset comments.
Harry Wood and Pierre Bėland talk in an interview with BBC World News about the cooperation of HOT OSM and the Red Cross.

[1] CheckAutopista created by k1wi, a very useful QA tool, is now available worldwide and in different languages.
The drone-fly zone map Don’t Fly Drones Here from Mapbox includes now Temporary Flight Restrictions, TFRs in the USA.
A beekeeper map is in development on Umap.

… the monthly reports by the OSMF Operations Working Group?
… BikeMaps, the crowdsourced data collection for bicycle traffic and bicycle accidents?

The Open Source Routing Machine is available in version 4.4.0.
The crowdfunding campaign “Automated testing for QGIS” (see: weeklyosm # 221) has reached its goal ahead of schedule. Congratulations.

Nokias Karten-App “Here” is now available for Android devices running Android version 4.1. The app contains a navigation solution and maps and a transport assistant. The quality of the data is not considered as being good..
The summer in the northern hemisphere is just over, already we are talking about next summer 😉 . As in previous years, projects for the Google Summer of Code can apply by February 9, 2015.
Six companies received permission to make movies with drones from the US Federal Aviation Administration.
Look what you can find on aerial images. 😉
The years 2015 and 2016 will be “International Map Year”. wow…
Apple starts Mapsconnect.
Wired: “Every once in a while, something happens in a remote part of the world, where even Open Street Map has no data.” … then … The New York Times springs into action.
Timetabling shares his mind map “The Map Companies Map” and asks for additions and corrections.