Forwarding because some Cascadians are also interested in OSM and Wikivoyage.

Pine

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Laurentius laurentius.wiki@gmail.com Date: Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 2:36 PM Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Italia recognized as OpenStreetMap chapter To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

Dear all, after a long process, today Wikimedia Italia has been officially recognized as the Italian OpenStreetMap chapter!

OpenStreetMap is a collaborative project that shares the same value as the Wikimedia movement. It's not based on a wiki software and it's not in the Wikimedia family, but from many points of views, it's the project that is more similar to the Wikimedia ones; indeed, many wikipedians are mappers also, and viceversa.

Similarly to Wikimedia, there is an OpenStreetMap Foundation (based in the UK) and there are national OpenStreetMap chapters. In Italy, the OpenStreetMap community has been talking for years about the creation of a chapter. Most people felt that it was important, but also that founding yet another association was pointless. Associations are not built only on projects, but also, and mainly, on common values and on a common vision: Wikimedia and OpenStreetMap share both, and it's just natural to work together.

Wikimedia Italy officially started the process of becoming an OpenStreetMap chapter in 2013 [1]. The association has supported OpenStreetMap even before that (e.g., supporting the Italian OpenStreetMap conference), and in the last two years, thanks also to the work of many OpenStreetMap users that became members (and among them, Simone Cortesi, OpenStreetMap volunteer since the beginning and WMI's vicepresident), we have increased our efforts (as described also in WMI's annual plan [2]). The recognition process has been quite long, but today we've signed the chapters agreement, and now Italy is the second country (after Iceland) to have an official OpenStreetMap chapter! (but there are actually other unofficial chapters besides these two)

Lorenzo

[1]https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-July/127304.html [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round2/Wikime...

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