Kate Chapman, CTO
Frank and I are off to New York City this weekend for the annual State of the Map US Conference (SotM-US). SotM-US is the annual OpenStreetMap US hosted conference, and this year it’s being held at the UN Headquarters. While the venue excites me, the content is really what I’m looking forward to. For context, OpenStreetMap is an online project to create a free map of the entire world that anyone can contribute to. It works similarly to Wikipedia – and contributors are using the project for all sorts of incredible applications. This weekend we’ll be seeing some of these talks about building OSM communities, the technology behind it, related projects, and different use cases.
There are a few talks related specifically to land. I’m giving a talk entitled “When Data Doesn’t Belong in OSM: The Land Tenure Use Case.” Sajjad Anwar from MapBox will be talking about “OpenStreetMap Software for More than Just OpenStreetMap.” One of the projects in his talk, Moabi, uses a clone of the OpenStreetMap platform to map natural resources in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Here are some additional sessions I’m excited to attend:
- Dale Kunce will be presenting OpenMapKit as a fork of OpenDataKit, which promises to improve offline mobile collection, especially related to geographic information.
- Heather Leson and Ivan Gayton will be talking about “Your Neighbour is Mapping” and their views on how to bring the next million contributors to OpenStreetMap. They’ll share lessons in community building, from planning outreach to encouraging communities to document their informal land rights.
- Drishtie Patel is speaking regarding the “Missing Maps Project” which is a project to map vulnerable communities in OpenStreetMap.
- There are also many technical presentations which I hope to learn from and apply as Cadasta builds out our own platform.
If you are coming to SotM-US, we’ll see you there. If not, you can follow along on Twitter via the hashtag #sotmus.
Image via SoTMUS.
