[Talk-us] Why you should attend a hack weekend

[Serge Wroclawski]

Folks,

This is a very large project, with over a million user accounts, and
tens of thousand of active mappers around the world, but we have a
relatively small developer community for such a large project.

If you've worked on some OSM related code, or are interested in
contributing code to OpenStreetMap, you should attend an OSM Hack
weekend. These events are unique in that they bring together other
developers in the same room. They provide an amazing energy and
opportunity that you just don't get online.

Last week, I was at the OSM Hack Weekend in London, and I learned
about several new projects, including one to help Humanitarian
Mapping, one to help with bicycle routing, one to help with data
conflation in Potlatch, and an amazing OSM router developed in C# used
 to help delivery people find the most efficient route to deliver
packages (ie to solve the traveling salesman problem).

In just one month, there will be another OSM Hack weekend in Toronto:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Toronto_Hack_Weekend_March_2013

I realize not everyone from the US can take the time/spend the money
to go to London, but Toronto is practically right at our doorstep, and
I'd like to encourage folks to attend.

- Serge