[OSM-talk-be] OSM Belgium

[Ben Abelshausen]

Hi Marc,

On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 6:48 AM, Marc Gemis <marc.gemis at gmail.com> wrote:

> Any news on this front ? Funding ? Servers ? Impact on presence @ FOSDEM
> 2015 ?
>

Not a lot of news but some things have been happening behind the scenes.
Being part of OKFN has given me the opportunity to better represent OSM-be
at various occasions. A few things:

- There was a track at Day Days this year:
http://www.datadays.eu/session/open-steet-map-belgium/ and there will be
one again. This track was organized by myself and lead to very interesting
discussions about OSM with datausers, dataproviders, etc... I for one have
learned that OSM is still a complex project for people that aren't
completely submerged into it.
- I have been organizing meetups before summer and am now (next week)
starting again.
- I have been working on a proposal for people/companies that want to
sponsor our OSM-be working group. This may lead us to a situation where we
have a very small budget to organize some things. I was thinking about a
mapping party for the missing maps project, our own be-specific rendering
server, etc.
- At all the open-data and OSM related events/conferences I go to it has
become a bit easier to explain OSM-be now that we are a working group ;-)

Some other things I have been doing related to OSM:

- Atlas der buurtwegen.
- SOTM-EU.
- GeoONG conference with HOT: This one was awesome:
http://www.cartong.org/geong/2014/agenda/roundtables/volunteers
- Meeting with city of ghent on their cycle route planning system and
possible cooperation with us (OSM-be).
- Open-data day flanders in Brussels.
- managing the @osm_be twitter-account (but not doing a very good job).
- DWG (but not very active)
- CRAB-import (but not very active)

Things I want to do but still haven't happened for various reasons:

- 10 year OSM celebration
- MapRoulette Challenge for BE.
- Mapper of the month, but that seems to be happening now.
- Mapping party for the missing maps project.
- (a lot more!)

I would like to ask again if there is anyone here that is willing to
volunteer a bit and help out. Most of these things move very slowly because
it's mostly just me and my spare time.

There has been some movement again on the CRAB-import and the
mapper-of-the-month project. I really hope these things will start moving
forward.

I still believe that we are way too small and the only and sustainable way
to keep improving the map is to get more people involved. Strangely enough
we almost never work to improve our numbers.

Met vriendelijke groeten,
Best regards,

Ben Abelshausen
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