Stamen and friends at State of the Map US
Last weekend Seth and I attended the State of the Map US conference in Seattle, to catch up on all things OpenStreetMap. We were joined by many Stamen alumni, partners, and friends who gave some very interesting talks as well. Here are links to videos of some of the presentations that Stamen had a hand in.
I started off the first day with a talk about OpenStreetMap’s past(s) and future(s) (previously on Medium):
Seth later spoke with Emily Eros of the American Red Cross and Nicholas Hallahan (of SpatialDev, and the lead developer of OpenMapKit), about their work on the Portable OpenStreetMap (POSM) project (introductory post):
The next day, Cadasta developer Lindsey Jacks gave a talk about her work improving Field Papers (as described on Cadasta’s blog):
Stamen alum and Maptime founder Beth Schechter talked about what happens when the hard work of running an open source community starts to drag you down:
GreenInfo Executive Director and Stamen alum Dan Rademacher talked about CPAD (the data that underlies CaliParks), PADUS, and the challenges of mapping parks data in OpenStreetMap:
(Also, check out Dan’s great summary post about State of the Map US)
Finally, although I only had a small part in this project, I’m extremely proud of the progress of the Los Angeles Building Import team (on GitHub, OSM wiki). After UCLA professor Jon Christensen joined Stamen as a partner and we opened our small LA office, we at Stamen hoped to help get LA’s buildings into OpenStreetMap as a gesture of welcome. As it turns out, the local community took off without much assistance and managed to complete the impressive task of adding all of the city of LA’s building footprints into OSM:
Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention at least some of our favorite new discoveries at the conference. For example, Seth was impressed by the talk by Derrick Nehrenberg (video) from JuicyTrails, specifically how the local trail management groups are using OSM to produce physical signs to help mountain bikers in and around Crested Butte. I was fascinated by Ilya Zverev’s talk (video) about the rapid adoption of the Maps.me app and the huge numbers of new contributors that it’s brought into the OSM community. And of course the entire conference was wowed by the demo by Anand Thakker (of Development Seed) about OSM data and machine learning (video). There are many more amazing-looking presentations that I missed, and I’ll be watching all of them later on the OpenStreetMap US YouTube channel. (Also check out the photostream from the conference!)
Finally, here are a few photos taken by a drone on the final workshop day of the conference. Seth and I and were very excited to see flight planning in action (using DroneDeploy), with a quadcopter photographing the Seattle University quad, and to learn more how to create proper orthophotos from these snapshots and integrate home-grown aerial imagery into tools like POSM using OpenDroneMap and OpenAerialMap.
As always, State of the Map is a fantastic conference, and we were very pleased with how many times Field Papers and POSM were mentioned throughout the weekend. We are proud to be part of such an important and energetic community, and we look forward to attending many more State of the Map conferences in the future!
