Last weekend I attended State of the Map EU 2023. I had a lot of fun there! Some random things to remember:
- The OSM community is very friendly and welcoming. I made a lot of friends.
- Being at the event gave me some insights into the history of OSM and the future. An interesting development is the realization of many companies that creating and maintaining their own map is too expensive, they need OSM. At the same time, they have problems with the laisser-faire approach of OSM and there is a push for standardization and more professionalism.
- During the social night (loud music, drinks) I was able to whip out my laptop and receive an impromptu JOSM workshop, where I learned how to create relations with the venerable tool.
- Luke and I gave a talk on MapLibre. Contrary to our expectations, less than half of the people at the event knew about the project. So our advocacy efforts were not in vain.
- I met the delegation from Geovelo, they turn out to be MapLibre Native users.
- Antwerp has a pretty interesting bike-sharing system.
- I rode a Brompton for the first time.
- Organic Maps and OsmAnd are not competitors. This is not an original thought from me, but a conclusion made by the developers from both projects, who attended the event. OsmAnd has a lot features and is mainly for power users, Organic Maps has a focus on being easy to use.
- If I ever have a project that uses a certain tag, I can add that project to the list of projects that use that tag on taginfo, e.g. https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/building#projects
- OSM has a “shoestring budget” and has one full-time paid position (DevOps). Crazy (impressive)!