OSMF Request for Proposals: Data Centre 2018

The OpenStreetMap Operations Working Group is interested in establishing a server set-up in another European data centre. Although people do offer hosting to OpenStreetMap fairly often, we have a number of requirements in order for this to be truly useful.

Have a look at the details in this blog post, and if you are in a position to offer space in a data centre the Operations team would love to receive your proposal:

https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2018/02/19/osmf-request-for-proposals-data-centre-2018/

Target reached – Thank you!

https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2015/06/24/target-reached-thank-you/

Today we’ve reached our fund-raising target: £56,000 !

The Operations Working Group set out their detailed plans for the server upgrades they’d like to do: A big new database server, new tile servers and an imagery server. Thanks to your generosity, we now have the funds in place to make that a reality.

This has been our largest fund-raising target, but given the scale, reach and impact of OpenStreetMap, £56,000 is a small amount of money. For the thousands of data consumers, and millions of map end-users viewing OpenStreetMap, or the mega-corporations our maps are compared against. Don’t we deserve more? Lots of interesting discussions around this topic, but I will just say for now… Yes we do! And of course you’re very welcome to donate more:  donate.openstreetmap.org

The OpenStreetMap Foundation remains open for donations. If you have ideas on how to get more recognition and big donations for OpenStreetMap, this is always welcome too!

For now though, we want to say a big Thank You again to Mapzen and Mapbox who made big donations to kick things off, to various other organisations who made donations to support us, and to all the individuals (more than 1200 of them!) who generously chose to put their personal money towards the OpenStreetMap cause.

Announcing SotM 2016

https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2015/06/20/announcing-sotm-2016/

We are delighted to announce that State of the Map 2016 will be held in Brussels, Belgium.

Thank you to all teams who submitted a proposal. The quality of the bids was fantastic and it was pleasure reviewing them.

We are very much looking forward to working with the Brussels team to organise a successful Sate of the Map 2016. See you in 2016 in Brussels!

For more info please follow stateofthemap.org

Events in 2015

Can’t wait to 2016? There are a number of upcoming OSM-centered conferences in 2015, including SotM-LatAm in Chile in September, and SotM-Scotland in October. There are also many webinars, mapping parties, coding events and socials planned for 2015.

In what is turning out to be a busy 2015, these follow earlier events: SotM-FR in Brest, France; SotM-US at the UN’s New York headquarters in New York City; and HOT Summit in Washington DC.

All these events are organised by the wider OpenStreetMap community. Thanks go to the relevant organising teams for hosting these events.

Announcing the first SotM LatAm

https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2015/06/20/announcing-the-first-sotm-latam/

After the success of the global State of the Map 2014 conference realized last November in Buenos Aires, the Latin America OpenStreetMap community is organizing its first continental conference.

The State of the Map Latin America will take place in Santiago, Chile, on September 4th, 5th and 6th. The conference will gather the Latin American and global mappers to share community and  entrepreneurial knowledge, techniques and experiences in OpenStreetMap. The official languages for the event are Spanish and Portuguese, with some talks in English as well.

Santiago is the capital of Chile, its financial heart and biggest city,  concentrating approximately 35% of the population of the country (6.5  million people). The event will take place on the days before the AbreLatam (September 7-8) and ConDatos (September 9-10), two of the biggest Open Data conferences in Latin America.

You can already register for the conference and submit a talk proposal on the website: http://sotm.openstreetmap.cl/

The SOTM LatAm is organized by the Fundación OpenStreetMap Chile.

Fundraising drive 2015 - update

https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2015/06/17/donate-36k-raised-20k-to-go/

We’re seeing a steady flow of donations large and small coming in. At £36,052 we’re well over half way to our fund-raising goal. A big thanks to Mapzen and Mapbox who kicked off in style, each with a donation of US$20,000!

With awareness spreading quickly now, we’ve doubled the number of people donating just in the past 24 hours! Each supporter can choose to be named on the donations page, and leave a message to us, so if you didn’t do so already, make a donation now!

Find out all about the server funding drive and donate on:
donate.openstreetmap.org

Don’t forget you can also support OpenStreetMap by becoming a member: as an individual or as a corporation.

Fundraising drive 2015

https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2015/06/06/fundraising-drive-2015/

It’s upgrade time! OpenStreetMap is growing, servers are projected to hit capacity by mid 2015. OpenStreetMap is a global community of dedicated and resourceful people, giving their time to make the best map of the world. Those mappers’ contributions are the largest part of the project. However, contributors need infrastructure such as a repository to share their contributions and services that help them make the map and talk to each other. We are raising funds to keep these services running and improve them, so that everyone else can continue making an amazing map.

The Operations Working Group of the OpenStreetMap Foundation manage the core servers of OpenStreetMap and plan server upgrades to scale for our growing community. They make purchasing decisions around server hardware with the budget they have available. With your help, we can continue to grow the OpenStreetMap infrastructure to support the growth of the community and map. See the FAQ for some answers to frequently-asked questions, or get in touch to start a discussion.
What else can we do to support OpenStreetMap?

Join us! Aside from funds to upgrade our hardware what we need most are people. Whatever your background – technical or not – you can help OpenStreetMap. Here are just a few of the many possible ways to get more involved:
For individuals:

If you have contributed data to OpenStreetMap, or time to helping organise mapping activities: thank you for everything you’ve already done!
OpenStreetMap only survives because of the work put in by thousands of hard-working and selfless volunteer contributors. If you are one of these people, then you are already doing a great thing for the project.

If you would like to do more, then you can:

 - Join the Foundation and support the body which supports (but doesn’t control) the project. By being a part of the Foundation, your voice can be heard in discussions about how the Foundation is run.
 - Join a Working Group and give your time to solving those issues which require greater commitment. Being on a Working Group, as the name suggests, is hard work and requires diligence, but can make a huge difference to the project.
 - Donate money to the hardware funding drive. Whatever you can spare will be gratefully received and put towards hardware which is necessary for the continued growth and success of the project.

For companies:

Whether you use OpenStreetMap data in your products and services, or are just interested in helping, corporate sponsorship of OpenStreetMap events and hardware helps the project to keep going and be inclusive.

If your company would like to help the project grow and succeed, then you can:

 - Join the Foundation as a corporate member. Your support of the Foundation will be greatly appreciated and publicly lauded.
 - Donate time. Some of your employees might jump at the chance to be more involved with OSM, so why not give them a “20% time” to join a Working Group or contribute time to a project which helps OSM?
 - Donate money to the hardware funding drive. Any contribution will help and is gratefully received.

OpenStreetMap tile CDN continues to grow

https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2015/03/24/openstreetmap-tile-cdn-continues-to-grow/

Since the last additions to our OpenStreetMap tile serving network in December, there has been a lot more server set-up going on.

The German tile cache server tabaluga is now retired and is no longer serving tiles. This may sound like bad news, but quite the opposite! Tabaluga has been replaced with a new server, katie, which has taken over its job.
The new tile cache server katie is still located in Falkenstein Germany, and still hosted by Hetzner.

More good news: There are two tile cache servers in Germany now!
The second tile cache server, konqi, is located in Jena Germany, hosted by EUserv.

The Russian tile cache server gorynych just had a memory and SSD upgrade, and with this it can deliver even more content.

There is another new server in Hungary. With this Hungary becomes one of 12 countries hosting OSM CDN servers.

Tile cache server sarkany is located in Budapest Hungary, hosted by szerverem.hu.

With all of these, the CDN (Content Delivery Network) server count comes to 16 active servers.

Tabaluga was running, thanks to Freerk Ohling, at Hetzner since May 2013, and served its last tiles in January. Freerk approached us back in April 2013 to suggest we implement EDNS client subnet support (implemented in December 2014) and to offer us a sponsored tile cache server. Now he has also kindly sponsored new tile cache servers in Germany.

Tabaluga primarily served traffic to visitors from Germany. Approximately 56 million map tiles per day. (avg 652/sec, peaking at 1245/sec). Serving close to 1TB of data per day. It was the highest traffic OSM tile cache server.

OpenStreetMap tiles are free for everyone to use, but should be used with moderation. If you are a high traffic site you should look at switch2osm.org to find out how to use the data and keep the tiles available for everyone.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation seeks additional distributed tile servers. If your organisation would like to donate a tile server and hosting, please see the Tile CDN requirements page on the wiki. You can also support OpenStreetMap by donating to the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation, formed in the UK to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project.

Two million OpenStreetMap contributors!

https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2015/03/12/two-million-contributors/

The two millionth account was registered this week, marking another milestone in the continuous and phenomenal growth of OpenStreetMap.

Two million contributors are surveying their neighbourhood, and contributing to the open map of everything. We aren’t done yet. There are still neighbourhoods where we need more mappers, the goal is a mapper on every block.

Celebrate this milestone with a neighbourhood survey to improve your local data. Celebrate further by introducing a friend in another town to OpenStreetMap and teach them how to contribute data from their neighbourhood. We’re still growing. The data is still improving. We’ll get to four million in no time at all with the help of our
friends.

Call for Venues for State of the Map 2016

https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2015/03/10/call-for-venues-for-sotm-2016/

The state of the map working group are delighted to announce that the call for venues for 2016 is now open!

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_Of_The_Map_2016/Call_for_venues

This is much earlier than in previous years which means that you are free to propose any dates within 2016. If there is an exciting event going on in your city that OpenStreetMappers may be interested in, then why not align the conference to this.

The State of the Map working group is here to help you. We’re an expanded team compared to the last few years and are looking forward to receiving your bids. In 2014 we were south of the equator in Buenos Aires, in 2016 we could be in your home country! So lets celebrate hitting 2 million registered users*, share experiences and ideas, and plan for the next 10 years of OSM.

See you in 2016…
— State of the Map, working group

* don’t worry – you won’t have 2 million people turning up on your doorstep looking for somewhere to stay!

OpenStreetMap events in 2015

https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2015/02/25/openstreetmap-events-in-2015/

The OpenStreetMap Foundation has been organising the annual State of the Map (SotM) conference since 2007. These events have proved popular with our community and beyond, and have grown from a few dozen attendees to a high of 300 attendees at SotM 2013. This year we had two good bids to host SotM 2015, but issues beyond our control caused concerns about whether we could make this into a success. The SotM working group, with the support of the OSMF board, has therefore agreed that there will be no OSM Foundation organised conference this year.

As the OpenStreetMap community has grown over the last 10 years, so has the conference scene. Even without OSMF organising a conference this year, there will still be a number of OSM-centered conferences, including SotM US at the UN’s New York headquarters in June, and SotM-Scotland in October. There are also many webinars, mapping parties, hack events and socials planned for 2015.

The StateoftheMap Organizing Committee has taken on a number of new members to support our efforts in 2015, 2016 and beyond. We are currently drafting a proposal on the future of SotM in which we are looking at the role of SotM within the project and how the OSMF SotM relates to the various regional events. We already have some views but we encourage you to share yours in the comments below.

Preparations for State of the Map 2016 will be starting soon and we encourage local groups who may be interested in hosting SotM in their home country to contact us early.