Systeme D

19 July 2007

Mah fellow mappers

OpenStreetMap's first conference, State of the Map, was last weekend. Some highlights:

  • Luka Frelih's magic surveying bike, with a special dial that let you survey the Eiffel Tower in just one click. At least I think that's what it did
  • Ivan Sanchez Ortega relating how he's almost persuaded the Spanish equivalent of the Ordnance Survey to give us all their data. Holy cow
  • Google's EMEA Chief Geospatial Bloke and the founder of Multimap sitting on the floor listening to whatever madcap scheme was being expounded
  • Mike Calder's plan to vectorise the entire New Popular Edition, which easily out-madcapped anything else
  • Not dying on my feet during my presentation, or indeed the licence debate, which I was more nervous about
  • Etienne's stats appearing to show that OSM usage is doubling every five seconds, or something
  • About eight people coming up to me and saying: "I use JOSM, but my dad/brother/boss/dog uses Potlatch and loves it". Yay! That's the idea!
  • About eight zillion Potlatch bug reports and feature requests (of which I've just ticked off the first one... only 7.999999 zillion to go)
  • The general tenor of the conference: pretty much everything was interesting; and pretty much everyone was interested - the lecture theatre was packed most of the time
  • Namecheck for Geowiki in Steve's keynote. Aw, shucks
  • Looking at the shiny map of UK coverage on the wall and realising it's already out of date
  • Licence debate not ending in a fist-fight
  • Barry Crabtree's presentation aka OpenStreetMap On Crack

And here we all - well, mostly - are.

Comments

c328t

Posted by ma50zda on 19.10.07 01:42

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