[OSM-talk] Extended SotM 2015 announcement
hbogner
hbogner at gmail.com
Wed Mar 11 11:57:40 UTC 2015
Message from the StateoftheMap Organizing Committee:
Dear all,
Following on from our recent announcement [1] that there will be no OSMF
organised State of the Map (SotM) conference this year, we wanted to
write to you to provide more information and set out our plan for the
coming year.
The SotM working group comprises a group of volunteers who, out of their
own good will, dedicate time to help organise each conference. From our
first conference in 2007 we have worked each year to organise venues,
accommodation, sponsors, catering, speakers and the conference programme
guide, merchandise and the website – all that you have come to expect at
an OpenStreetMap conference. Every year we have worked alongside our
amazing local teams (from the host city) to ensure the success of SotM.
We thank you for your support.
In the last few years a number of changes have occurred – we are now
joined by local events such as SotM-US and SotM-EU, and due to changing
priorities the number of permanent members in the SotM working group has
declined. This was recognised as an area we had to address, and as such
the SotM working group took on a number of new members in late 2014
including representation from local events.
One of the first decisions we made as a new team was to run parallel
workloads – we knew we wanted to hold a conference this year, but we
also recognised that there was a piece of work to be done in relation to
where the OSMF organised conference now sits, its aims and its
interactions with other events. This would be a challenge, but with our
expanded team we were confident and knew we were capable.
Despite being later than we wanted with our call for bids to host SotM,
we received two strong bids from Toronto and Venice. As a group we
settled on Venice as our preferred option. The factors behind this was
the closeness of Toronto to June's SotM-US event in New York and the
fact that we had not been to central Europe in several years. This is
not to say that the Toronto bid was weak – far from it, and we would
love to see a conference held in Toronto in the coming years as there is
clearly an ambitious OpenStreetMap community focused around the city.
The Venice team had already identified a venue, set out aims for their
local community (including working with public agencies) and had started
to look at accommodation and sponsorship options. The big issue to
address was the date. The original bid had proposed the last week of
May/first week of June. This caused two problems – it clashed with
SotM-US and it didn’t give us the time we needed to ensure that the
conference was a success. As such we asked the local team to look at
pushing it back to September/October. Unbeknown to us the world fair
“Expo 2015” has resulted in a severe lack of venue space and
accommodation in northern Italy, including in Venice. Finding a suitable
date and venue ultimately proved unachievable. Given the amount of time
it takes to reissue a call for venues and organise a conference the SotM
working group, in agreement with the OSMF board decided not to attempt a
rushed conference and to focus on our other workload.
In the coming weeks we will work alongside the OSMF board to establish
key principles for the future of SotM. These will reflect the role of
SotM within the project and how the OSMF organised SotM relates to the
various regional SotM events. We are also keen to get started on SotM
2016 and as such we will be opening the Call for Venues in March. This
means that host cities can propose a conference date anywhere within
2016 - perhaps linked with other exciting events in your city. As we
would like to provide greater support to our host cities from step one
in the process we encourage any OpenStreetMap communities that are
considering bidding to host SotM 2016 to contact us as soon as possible.
You can contact us on team AT stateofthemap.org
As noted in our announcement there are numerous exciting OpenStreetMap
events to attend during 2015. We cannot link to them all but many are
listed on the event calendar [2]. If you know of an event not on the
calendar please add it (or ask us to add it, if wiki editing is
problematic). We hope to see you at some of these events.
[1] https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2015/02/25/openstreetmap-events-in-2015/
[2] http://wiki.osm.org/Current_events
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