OpenStreetMap US

The License Change is coming, time to pitch in!

Richard Welty — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 20:39:28 +0000

The cutover to the new ODBL license will occur on April 1st. Details are still being worked on, but there is much to do if we want to avoid having gaping holes in the map when contributions of those who declined the new license are removed.
The first step is to use tools like the GeoFabrik Inspector and Cleanmap to see if your area of the country is ok. More on how to do that in a moment. If your area needs work, then Toby Murray has some good tips here: .
If your area is clean, then head over to the talk-us@openstreetmap.org mailing list and see if anyone is asking for help. If you area needs massive amounts of work, you may want to head over to talk-us@openstreetmap.org and ask for help.
Now, about determining what work needs to be done:
The GeoFabrik Inspector shows nodes and ways that are at risk. Here’s an example from Salt Lake City Utah, where I’m lending a hand with I 15 right now: http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=wtfe&lon=-73.80515&lat=42.74861&zoom=14&opacity=0.46&overlays=overview,wtfe_point_modified,wtfe_line_modified_cp,wtfe_line_modified,wtfe_point_created,wtfe_line_created_cp,wtfe_line_created
Red indicates nodes and ways created by someone who has not agreed to the new license; yellow indicates nodes and ways edited by someone who has not agreed.
Cleanmap is also useful, it has Cleanmap and Badmap base layers which allow you to see the map as it will become, and what’s at issue. http://cleanmap.poole.ch/?zoom=16&lat=40.71374&lon=-111.9033&layers=B00
If you are a JOSM user, then the history dialog is very helpful; for a selected object, it will give a history of edits and indicate whether an editor has accepted, declined, or simply failed to acknowledge the license change.
The JOSM license change plugin is useful too: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JOSM/Plugins/LicenseChange

State Of The Map US 2012 Call For Bids

Martijn van Exel — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 18:45:23 +0000

After a successful State Of The Map (SOTM) US conference in Atlanta in 2010, and having the worldwide SOTM in Denver last September, the US Chapter has started planning for the next SOTM US with the opening of the Call For Bids (CFB):

Call for bids to host the second State Of The Map US Conference

The OpenStreetMap US Chapter is currently soliciting bids for 
hosting and organizing the State Of The Map US 2012 conference
(SOTMUS12), to be held in the second half of the year. We invite
you to put in a bid for SOTMUS12, considering the criteria
outlined on the OpenStreetMap wiki - see the links below.
The US Chapter board will work closely with the selected bid team
to make SOTMUS12 a success.
Please enter your bids as a sub-page on

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_Of_The_Map_U.S._2012/BIDS/

The bid criteria are here:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_Of_The_Map_U.S._2012/BIDS/CRITERIA

The deadline for entering your bid is 31 January 2012. The winning
bid will be announced by the SOTMUS12 committee on 10 February 2012.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact the bid
committee through Martijn van Exel, mvexel@gmail.com

We look forward to receiving your bids!

The SOTMUS12 bid committee and the OSM US Chapter

election results for 2011-2012 board

Richard Welty — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 01:40:37 +0000

The election for the new board for the US Chapter has been completed. The new board consists of the following members:

Updated 11/13/2011 with the roles.

Martijn van Exel – Secretary
Randy Hale – Treasurer
Jim McAndrew – At Large
Michal Migurski – Vice President
Richard Welty (returning) – President

Roles within the board (President, Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary) have ~~not yet~~ been determined.

Big Baseball Project

Ian Dees — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:47:15 +0000

Help add baseball diamonds to OpenStreetMap! This is a really easy type of map editing which anyone can get involved in; so give it a go and tell a friend! You can start by looking for baseball diamonds near where you live, but these things are easy to spot in the aerial imagery. This means everyone can help, from wherever you are in the world. You can even contribute to the free world map while you’re
watching the MLB playoffs on TV!

We’re tracking baseball edits to bring you a rolling edits display and user rankings, but you’ve only got until October 27th to become an OpenStreetMap baseball champion!

You’ll find more guidance on the wiki, plus a short .

OpenStreetMap goes to School: NCSU Mapping Party

Steven Johnson — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 21:05:12 +0000

A significant portion of US Chapter activities consists of education, outreach, and community development. Engaging high school and university students, as well as youth organizations is an both an effective way to develop interest in the OpenStreetMap project and give young people a tangible means to interact with geography. Their geography.

Last month, I was asked to give a guest lecture at North Carolina State University introducing OpenStreetMap, and hold a mapping party with the same students the very next day. The students were enrolled in Dr. Heather Cheshire’s Environmental Technology course, an introduction to spatial technologies, and part of the curriculum in the Department of Forestry & Natural Resources.

The goal for this mapping party was to map all of the bicycle racks on the NCSU campus. To insure complete coverage, Dr. Cheshire’s and her team of students had divided the campus into grid cells prior to the mapping party. Each cell was capable of being covered by one team within an hour’s time. For the field data collection, the students were paired off, assigned a grid cell, and each team provided with a hand-held GPS unit.

Upon return, the students downloaded the GPX tracks and waypoints and uploaded to OpenStreetMap. They then traced the tracks and digitzed waypoints using Potlatch2. Tagging was done through the presets, with some additional tags added for data source and date acquired. The results were presented the very next day at the North Carolina GIS Conference, by one of the participating students.

In order to encourage readers of this post to work with students, I want to share some of the factors that went into making this mapping party a success. First, we had plenty of regular communications between me and Dr. Cheshire well in advance of the mapping party to familiarize the teaching staff with OpenStreetMap, data organization and editing methods. Secondly, Dr. Cheshire and her teaching assistants familiarized the students with the GPS units and data gathering techniques prior to the mapping party, including how to download GPX tracks from the GPS units. Third, Dr. Cheshire and her team focused on collecting one feature (bike racks) and insured that all students tagged these features consistently. You might not be able to control all of these factors for your next mapping party, but by controlling for some, your mapping party stands a better chance of success.

One CPU at a Time: TopOSM

Ian Dees — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 22:45:04 +0000

As part of our drive to get more hardware going for projects that help move OSM forward in the US, I’ve asked community members to write about their experiences. The first to respond was Lars Ahlzen of TopOSM. Please visit our donation page to give towards our hardware fund.

TopOSM is a project that aims to create a complete, high quality, online topographic map – with hillshading, contour lines and detailed cartographic features – based on OpenStreetMap data.

The map is currently used for such diverse applications as outdoors and recreational planning, displaying amateur radio stations and in mobile applications for aviation.

The initial version featured the state of Massachusetts, using free data from MassGIS to provide elevation. More recently, the project was expanded to cover the entire contiguous United States, using additional data from USGS.

Like most online maps, TopOSM is pre-rendered in tiles. Because an explicit goal for the TopOSM project has been to create as high quality a map as possible, the rendering process is computationally expensive (read: slow). As a consequence, with the hardware that is currently available to the project, we simply cannot render the higher (more
detailed) zoom levels of the map, which limits its usefulness. We also cannot re-render map tiles as frequently as we would like when data in OpenStreetMap is updated.

With additional hardware resources, we could provide both a much more detailed map with additional zoom levels, and near real-time updates as new features are put on the map. Furthermore, given enough resources, we would be able to provide a worldwide map – one of project’s most frequent requests. Any contributions to the project would be greatly appreciated and will have a very direct effect on the usefulness of TopOSM and the project’s future.

Browse the map at: http://toposm.com/
Examples, more info and technical details at: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TopOSM

OSM US Working Groups

Steven Johnson — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 20:46:05 +0000

Discussions at the inaugural US State of the Map conference showed that there is energy and interest in the community for working on specific issues to insure the long-term success of the OSM project in the United States. These issues include communications, outreach, tagging, rendering, computing infrastructure, APIs, and more. To carry out this work, we’d like to help establish working groups along the lines of those established by the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

The notion is to have each working group dedicated to a specific issue. We expect that most of the activities would be community-driven, with assistance from the US Board. Some working groups have been proposed:

Marketing and Communications
Education and Student Outreach
Technical and Imports
Community Events & Mapping Parties

You can find more information about these WG’s on the US Local Chapter wiki. If you see a group you’re interested in joining, please add your name to the list. And if you see a need for a new working group, please add it to the list.

Furthering OSM in the US: One CPU at a Time

Ian Dees — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 02:25:13 +0000

One of the goals I have as the chair of the Technical & Imports Working Group of OpenStreetMap US is to match technical resources with developers who are interested in building systems that help spread the use of OSM in the United States. To start with, Wikimedia donated 12 of their retired systems and Visi generously donated 5U of rack space. The three systems I built using this hardware have been working hard to spread OSM: this website (openstreetmap.us), Lars Ahlzen’s TopOSM, and (coming soon) tiled OSM data feeds are all being created and served from these systems.

But I’d love to see it go farther! Not only is there more space to fill in the data center but there are upgrades to be made to the existing hardware. That’s why I’m asking you to help support OSM in the US by donating to OSMF-US’s hardware fund through the PayPal link below. Please feel free to contact me at ian@osmf.us if you have any questions.

OSMF US Officers for 2010-2011

Richard Welty — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 22:46:19 +0000

I announced the results on talk-us, but I really should have posted them here as well. The Board/Officers for 2010-2011 is as follows:

President
Kate Chapman

Vice President
Richard Welty

Treasurer
Thea Clay

Secretary
Ian Dees

Member-at-Large
Steven Johnson

Mapping Party in Raleigh, Cary, Durham, NC

Steven Johnson — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 01:20:34 +0000

Yep, we’re hitting the road on 2-3 October to meet up with a super-energized group of folks in the Raleigh, Durham, Cary area of North Carolina for a mapping party. We’re going to concentrate on adding lots of local features to the map in downtown Raleigh, NCSU, JC Raulston Arboretum, Hemlock Bluffs Park, the American Tobacco Trail, as well as helping build the local OpenStreetMap community in North Carolina.

If you’re in the Triangle area on 2-3 October, consider participating. Register here: http://trianglemapping.eventbrite.com