Here is a bit of a report about the OpenStreetMap Seattle Mapping-what-you-know Meetup. About a dozen people attended. Before we started mapping, we discussed a couple of things about the bid to host the 2015 State Of The Map-US Conference.

 

• Clifford Snow is currently the main coordinator. He started at the suggestion of Simon Poole, the Chairman of the OSM Foundation, who was very impressed with the OpenStreetMap's 10th Anniversary Event that OpenStreetMap Seattle organized.
  
  
• Clifford is grappling with finding a venue. He did explore UW, but found that the amount of paperwork involved would be too daunting.
  
  
• I indicated that several Cascadia Wikimedians, including myself, might be interested in working with OSM Seattle on the US Conference. The group was very receptive to this. Surprisingly, Clifford said that I was the first Wikipedia editor he has met.
  
  
• There was some disappointment that Cascadia Wikimedians bid for the WikiConference USA will be for 2016 instead of 2015. I think that there would have been a hope to do a joint conference, but I did explain that the 2015 WikiConference USA is slated for Boston.

 

We then moved quickly into the Mapping-what-you-know portion of the meetup. Some things of note:

 

• There was some talk about a proposal of loading 700,000 user IDs from en.wikipedia, which I believe was for the purpose of single sign on (SSO). I am unfamiliar with the proposal. OSM also uses OpenID.
  
  
• Bryce, creator of Go Map!!, an iPhone & iPad editor for OSM (see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Go_Map!! , was at the meetup & working on the next iteration.
  
  
• There was some interesting discussion regarding only using open source data, primary sources (web site for a location), or the knowledge of the editor. In particular, using Google or Bing for anything is strongly discouraged, even looking up an address or determining what is at a location by using Google Street View. Even data that one would think should be public domain, such as county or municipal data, might not be unless the jurisdiction has explicitly released it into the public domain. (See “GIS and Copyright Issues: Orange County, California,” http://transitgis.org/2011/02/03/gis-and-copyright-issues/).
  
  
• OSM has an arrangement with Bing Maps for the use of satellite images in edit mode. These satellite images do not display in the normal OSM view.

 

For the record, you can find some of my first edits at https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/302173422#map=19/47.75677/-122.24179. Although Seattle itself is well mapped, areas outside of the city need help. I chose 192 Brewing Co. in Kenmore, WA.

 

Yours,
Peaceray