[OSM-talk] Partners sought for cycle routing project

[Tom Chance]

Hi Frederik,

Just quickly, I am interested and my employer - www.bioregional.com - could be 
a partner on the bid. We're using OSM as part of a municipality 
sustainability project so this would be right up our street. I will talk to 
the council about getting them on board too.

I've copied my work address in - on holiday today - so please reply to that 
address to take it further.

Kind regards,
Tom



On Sunday 11 May 2008 11:06:37 Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Hi,
>
>    I have been approached by the city of Munich, who want to apply for
> an EU grant to set up and operate a good cycle routing platform based
> on OSM data.
>
> What they currently have is a platform that uses only their own data
> which they spent (and spend) a lot of time to create and maintain.
> They have basic road data and have manually added information about
> the safety, suitability, and "green-ness" of routes so that you can
> get a routing that matches your requirements.
>
> What they now intend to do is expand this to encompass the rural areas
> around Munich as well, while at the same time delegating the data
> maintenance to the community. Of course the whole thing will be
> developed in a way that can easily be used for any other place (a
> major selling point for an EU project). They also intend to create
> incentives and processes for citizens improve the data.
>
> This will probably start with finding out (from their previous
> experience) what data you need to do proper bike routing, and then
> analyzing in how far this is already present in OSM, and where not,
> create/improve tools for people to see where the data is missing and
> fix it. Then there'll be the development of the routing platform,
> perhaps based on pgrouting, and then they'll want to set up processes
> for people to work with the data, e.g. also have a feedback loop into
> the planning offices so that they know where bottlenecks are and so
> on.
>
> It is not yet exactly clear what the plan is, but they are really keen
> on not only taking OSM data but also working with the OSM community
> and feeding everything back to OSM. Munich has recently been in the
> press for ditching Windows and switching all of the administration IT
> over to Linux, so they're probably the largest public entity in
> Germany to have "seen the light" of free software (and free data now
> as well).
>
> They're looking at a project duration of up to three years, and want
> to request appropriate funding from the EU under the IEE programme
> which, among others, has funds available for increasing the use of
> cycling.
>
> The project application has all the right keywords to go down well
> with the EU (application deadline is 20th June, but the decision will
> only be made in late 2008), but there's one catch: Any successful EU
> project needs to have a number of partners in different EU countries,
> and that's why I am writing this post: Munich doesn't yet have enough
> partners to get this through.
>
> Possible partners include city or regional administrations, cycle
> associations, even commercial entities like publishers who have an
> interest. Munich would be the "project lead", doing the deals with the
> EU, but since the project isn't that specific yet, partners will
> certainly have a say and their wishes be accommodated. Partners will
> get their share of the money if the project is accepted, and will be
> expected to co-operate in finalizing the proposal.
>
> As an example, a good partner would be a city administration that
> wants to roll out cycle routing locally, or an administration that
> wants to create cycle maps, or someone who intends to use the data and
> put it on mobile navigation devices, or even a public transport entity
> that intends to combine cycle routing with their traffice schedules or
> something like that.
>
> If anyone is interested, or has an idea about whom we should contact,
> please tell me. With roughly six weeks left until application
> deadline, we need partners who are flexible - someone who first has to
> be convinced that OSM is good would probably be too slow.
>
> (If it doesn't work out this year then they intend to apply next year
> but I guess until then OSM will have done all the work on its own.)
>
> We'd be especially happy to find partners in Eastern Europe (it seems
> that these make funding a project more attractive to the EU), but
> anyone else outside Germany is also fine.
>
> Bye
> Frederik