[OSM-talk] LinuxTag report

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

   I was in Berlin at the "LinuxTag" event from Wednesday to Saturday.
We had a 10.5 sqm booth shared with OSGeo and GAV (GAV are the people
who run the FOSSGIS conference in Germany). But in reality the booth
was 95% OpenStreetMap - in terms of visitor interest and in terms of
personnel. And even when the GAV and OSGeo folks, with whom we're on
very good terms, were there they mostly answered OSM questions.

The booth was a huge success, we had tons of visitors but were staffed
with 3-4 OSM people all the time so we could handle them all. Many
visitors didn't know anything about OSM and we gave them an intro;
many had looked at a map and pointed out errors which we usually 
promptly corrected (to their surprise). Many had trouble in making
the distinction between OpenLayers and OpenStreetMap; they would 
ask questions like "so can I save my cycle tracks with OSM" when
in fact they only wanted to draw something on an extra layer or so.

Also, many license questions; most were surprised to hear that 
commercial use is possible.

My talk, although scheduled at 17:00 on Friday, was very well
received; at one time during the questions part someone asked
why we don't try harder to convince authorities to release their
data and I said the usual "you know we're sick and tired of 
begging and asking, let them keep their data, it's not better
than ours anyway, any OSMer would rather just get his GPS and
map the place instead of endless discussions", and I got an 
extra applause for that - it seems that many in the audience 
had had some experience with the unsuccessful polititcal route.

We also had considerable press interest (some results are on the
"OSM in the press" page in the Wiki), and Christoph Henkel of
the Berlin community has made a little video here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=HTEGextOenQ

The ZDF, one of the two big state-owned German TV channels, has
also asked for an appointment with the Berlin community to do a
TV report, possibly next week.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"