11/12/2018-17/12/2018

OSMF Board Elections

Tobias Knerr, from Germany, and Joost Schouppe, from Belgium, are the two newly elected board members of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. They take over from Peter Barth and Martijn van Exel. and 681 of 1041 eligible voters cast their votes (61.5%).The final result was determined by Single Transferable Vote.

Rory McCann sought the opinions of OSMF board election candidates on the reversal of the DWG decision on the status of the Crimea.

Frederik Ramm, OSMF Treasurer, has published his financial report for the AGM. This was discussed on the OSMF-Talk mailing list. There was specific criticism for not exchanging the entirety of the Bitcoin donation into currencies in which the OSMF incurs liabilities.

SunCobalt has published his report as auditor of the OSMF for the period 1st January 2017 to 31st December 2017.

Kate Chapman has published her report as Chairperson of the OSMF board.

Mapping

OSMyBiz (OpenStreetMap My Business), a website where business owners can add, correct, or update their business details in OSM as easily as possible, has been launched by the Geometa Lab of the University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil, Switzerland.

As announced on the tagging mailing list, Warin61 has reworked his proposal for ephemeral water. Ephemeral in this context means a very short duration of water flood that occurs infrequently.

François Lacombe has started the voting on his proposal for additional attributes on pipeline and water valves.

Leif Rasmussen is proposing to add intervals of public transport schedules. On the tagging mailing list he announced the start of the voting.

The French OSM community has mapped police stations in November as “Project of the Month”. Noémie Lehuby and Donat Robaux present the results on osm.fr. (automatic translation)

(automatic translation) Quartz reports that Grab collect geodata themselves in order to optimise the distance of passengers to their pickup point. The article does not mention that Grab’s subcontractor GlobalLogic was and still is making controversial OSM edits in Thailand and Indonesia.

The International Date Line at +/- 180° longitude is causing many oddities. Unselectable nodes in JOSM, neighbouring elements that are thousands of miles apart in editors and maps, unroutable roads that cross this line and many more. A user opened a thread in the forum as he wasn’t sure if it is right to span a way over this invisible border as the way is considered as crossing the globe. However, he solved the issue on his own by splitting the way, half of the way is now in the Eastern and half in the Western hemisphere.

Community

The Zürich OpenStreetMap meetup is celebrating its 100th occurrence with a special cake.

Three members from the OSM Mali community went to the eastern city of Koutiala to organize, alongside with Saliou Abdou (International Volunteer from Francophonie deployed since January as OSM activist), a three-days training camp called KoriMapCamp in NGO AMEDD’s headquarters, for the benefit of a dozen of people previously trained in August. The program included: field mapping with Field Papers and StreetComplete, JOSM teaching and a one day mapathon. This camp got some financial support from Cafdo (Francophone Africa community for open data).

CouwelierTim has started to publish a weekly summary on openstreetmap.be and the forum on what has been discussed by the Belgian community on IRC or Riot, an instant messenger service coupled to it.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

The passionate debates for HOT US Board elections have moved in the last two years to OSMF Board elections. Three previous HOT Board members/Executive director who lead the re-orientation of HOT are currently on the OSMF Board.The controversy from last year’s OSMF election surged again this year with two HOT members standing for election. For some OSMF members, the relation between HOT US, OSM and the OSMF, the role HOT plays in the OSM universe and if the influence of leading HOT members to the OSM project should be limited. Nicolas Chavent, co-founder and former Board Officer and Programs Director of HOT, pointed to the growing number of OSMF board members with a HOT background.This started a long and sometimes emotional discussion on the list, in which many discussion threads with new side aspects were started. Frederik Ramm, for example, suggested a Humanitarian Working Group within the OSMF, to break the current synonymous usage of HOT and Humanitarian OSM. Rory McCann criticised how HOT’s Code of Conduct is enforced – or not enforced – as the last HOT summit was in a country where same-sex sexual activity is illegal. One repeating topic is the manifesto of Tobias Knerr, who suggested to limit the number of OSMF board members to one per organisation.

DWG has published its report for the third quarter of 2018.

The minutes of the SotM Working Group meetings of the 8th and of the 29th of November 2018 have been published.

Events

Until January 3rd, 2019, scientists and other academics can apply as reviewers for the program committee of the academic part of the State of the Map 2019 in Heidelberg.

The event website for the SotM 2019 in Heidelberg just launched.

Humanitarian OSM

Kathmandu Living Labs has partnered with HOT US and mapped buildings in 7 homogeneous zones in Kathmandu based on new satellite imagery provided by USAID’s GeoCenter. The aim of the effort is to understand the exposure and minimize the risks from natural hazards. New imagery was used to add new buildings and to fix the quality problems created by the crowd-mapping response to the 2015 earthquake and poor quality imagery at the time. Pierre Béland compares the situation there to the current response for Butembo and deplores the similar ‘Tsunami of Mapathons Hit+Run Newbies’.

HOT will launch a fundraising campaign during December to raise $40,000 for 10 new micro-grants in 2019.

The 5th HOT Summit will take place in Heidelberg University, Germany September 19th and 20th of 2019. This is just before the State of the Map at the same location, so you have the chance to enjoy 5 days of interesting OSM related talks.

Chris Eshun, a third-year Geomatic Engineering student, provides his experience on working with the community mapping team in Ghana as part of HOT’s Open Cities Accra project.

Maps

The Wikimedia servers tiles.wmflabs.org and wma.wmflabs.org, that are providing OSM based tiles and a mini atlas, are still running on Ubuntu Trusty and will be shut down by the end of this year if no one volunteers for maintaining the servers. A Phabricator ticket lists some more details.

[1] The web art developer Hans Hacker has created a remarkable new online service. With just a few clicks, anyone can create a poster of the buildings available in OSM and download it for free. The poster shows a geographical fingerprint of the settlement of a region. You may want to browse through his other projects too.

Open Data

On Twitter Richard Fairhurst points to opentransportmap.info, a website aiming to provide data and visualization of estimated traffic volumes for the whole EU. The road network of OSM is used as the primary source.

Software

Fabian Kowatsch from Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology explains how to visualize the historical evolution of OSM buildings of your city using the ohsome platform for OSM History Analytics and QGIS.

Programming

Jochen Topf released the Osmium library 2.15.0, the Python bindings for Osmium PyOsmium, 2.15.0, the Osmium command line tool 1.10.0, and the OSMCoastline 2.2.1 program recently. The new Osmium library uses a lot less memory, with savings up to 50 percent. PyOsmium now uses PyBind11 internally to connect the C++ Osmium library instead of building on Boost as before. Jochen explains further enhancements on his blog.

Releases

JOSM is now available as Flatpak on Flathub, a software deployment utility with a sandbox environment and permission management in which you can run applications in isolation.

Other “geo” things

Twitter user Ash shows his greatest invention: the Mercator Globe.

Le Point stresses out the increasing importance of digital tools in Africa, as they help citizens to get involved and weigh in on political matters. An OSM based electoral map from Senegal is used as an example of citizen engagement.

Andrew Douglas-Clifford created with OpenStreetMap , LINZ and NIWA data a Far From Any Road map, showing New Zealand’s hardest-to-reach places. Some more information can be found at Reddit and NewsHub.

Upcoming Events

Where What When Country Alice PoliMappers Adventures 2018: One mapping quest each day 2018-12-01-2018-12-31 Pristina Kosovo Meetup / Takim në Kosovë 2018-12-20 Rennes Recensement des panneaux publicitaires 2018-12-23 Leipzig OpenStreetMap assembly 2018-12-27-2018-12-30 Düsseldorf Stammtisch 2018-12-28 Greater Vancouver area Metrotown mappy Hour 2018-12-28 Biella Incontro mensile 2018-12-29 Lyon Rencontre mensuelle pour tous 2019-01-08 Dresden Stammtisch Dresden 2019-01-10 Berlin 127. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch 2019-01-10 Rennes Réunion mensuelle 2019-01-14 Toulouse Rencontre mensuelle 2019-01-16 Karlsruhe Stammtisch 2019-01-16 Salzburg Maptime – Stammtisch 2019-01-16 Freiberg Stammtisch Freiberg 2019-01-17 Montpellier State of the Map France 2019 2019-06-01-2019-06-03 Heidelberg HOT Summit 2019 2019-09-19-2019-09-20 Heidelberg State of the Map 2019 (international conference) 2019-09-21-2019-09-23 Grand-Bassam State of the Map Africa 2019 2019-11-22-2019-11-24

Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM. Please check your event in our public calendar preview and correct it, where appropriate.

This weeklyOSM was produced by Laura Mugeha, Nakaner, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, SeverinGeo, SomeoneElse, Guillaume Rischard, SunCobalt, derFred, jinalfoflia.