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/Wik…