[Openstreetmap] update

[SteveC]

Hi all

Thanks for your patience, here is an update of what I've been doing.

First, the Isle of White. I'm working on this but there are a lot of
variables. Cost depends on dates, peoples dates depend on costs,
feasability relies on number of people and so on.

So to pin it down, please enter all the dates you can come in to this:

http://www.meetomatic.com/respond.asp?id=KF05JJ

It willl magically figure out the best (perhaps long) weekend to run
it. From that I can get quotes on accomodation and car rental and we can
see if it can fly.

Hosting.

I've been speaking to various people and companies, including people on
this list about hosting. None of them are definite yet. It's not nice to
persue multiple routes but I don't think they'll all succeed. We need
hosting (physical location for the computers), bandwidth and then actual
computers. There is a glimmer that all three will be available from
different sources.

We have one success. Bytemark.co.uk have very kindly donated one of
their VM's for our use. Whilst this won't host the entire operation, it
can host the wiki, mailing list, svn and so on. The 'little bits'. It
may seem more sensible to keep them with the main site but
architecturaly it's good to spin them off. The mailing list needs
python, the wiki php and so on which just bloat Apache as OSM doesn't
need them. It also immediately frees processing on bat, the machine that
runs all these things and OSM.

So the competition is now open for what to call the mailing lists.
openstreetmap at openstreetmap.org anyone? Links to the wiki, news and so
on will magically work as I move things over.

Foundation.

I've had legal and financial advice from qualified people and from some
people who've been running companies for a while, and from those running
non-profits. It's clear that a charity in the UK is a very difficult
thing to set up and maintain. I have secured the legal help required to
set the official articles of association if we go down a non-profit
route. In any case it's very little or no cost to do.

There is an issue of where and how to set this up. For example it's
twice been mentioned that the Isle of Man reduces any tax burden. US
corporations can be set up pretty cheaply and we could be some thread
coming off an existing linux group or someone like the os geospatial
foundation.

I'm (or will be) actively talking to people from ORG (UK based thing),
os geo and others to see what's possible. I'm slightly hesitant about os
geo because of the software focus, the fact we don't use any of it, and
the US focus where we're mostly EU here. But we'll see.

In any case there is a need for a body to be the owner of the domains
and copyrights for what we've created otherwise attribution of the map
means a massive list of 1200 people for anyone doing something with the
map.

I'm also taking seriously the offers

Architecture.

I'm pretty hesitant about just apointing people within a notional
foundation. It's a bit top down and we have 'open' in our name. On the
other hand we need people who'll actually do things. Therefore I'd like
to have a debate about this idea: Some roles are voted in from out top
(say) 100 editors. The database knows who's doing lots of work, so allow
those people to nominate a subset of their number for roles.

Once some of these things are settled a bit more we can have a first
meeting and / or IRC meetings. The Isle of White could be the venue, but
given the diversity of everyone here I'd think Europe (though CeBIT was
a nightmare for me when I last went) would be better. Perhaps around
another F/OSS conference.

License.

I'm concerned that nobody was much bothered about ideas of moving to
cc-non-commercial or putting google ads on the site. A-la Tom's comment
of becoming the delicious or flickr of maps, not the wikipedia of maps.
Is that the case?

It helps tremendously to be under cc-nc when talking to companies who'd
support us in exchange for things.

opengeodata.org

I'm the proud owner of opengeodata.org and I thought I'd do three things
with it. First, make it a generic site with multiple people blogging
about opengeodata. Second, make openstreetmaps unloved 'news' blog a
section within opengeodata.org. Third, open a blog there to all
registered members of OSM. This is somewhat inspied by
http://www.openstreetmap.org/wiki/index.php/User:LA2#Diary
and other people who'd requested the ability to do that.

Thoughts?

If I've missed something, apologies.

Lastly, a bit of fun: http://www.pintcast.net/

have fun,

SteveC steve at asklater.com http://www.asklater.com/steve/