Last year I posted something on what’s happening around the OSM Poland association and haven’t posted any updates in English since then. Now SOSM (sosm.ch) has been registered by Swiss mappers (congrats!) with a similar purpose of functioning as a local chapter and it reminded me to give people an update on what’s happening with OSM Poland. We had our second AGM the last weekend of March and got around to summarise what we had been up to in the first year of the association’s work. I think we were all surprised at how many things the association had been involved with even though not much of that had been visible from outside. Activities involved 6 or so mapping parties organised around the country, presenting the OSM project at conferences of all kinds, workshops, acting as the contact point for a couple of local companies (at least three publishing companies, some taxi operators and a fleet monitoring company), setting up a locally hosted tileserver in one of Europe’s top data centers in Poznań (very futuristic inside!) with one new stylesheet and one borrowed form hikebikemap.de. We also responded to some government requests for comments on new proposed acts of law that we thought were relevant to the openness of geodata. At the time of the AGM we had over 40 individual members, one “honorary” member and one other NGO as a supporting member: the “Wspinka” mountain climbers association. Financially we barely had enough money to print some leaflets, but this hasn’t been an issue so far.

Since March there’s even more going on, we’re closing in on 50 members with one transportation company as a new supporting member. We have a new board and new auditors. In May we presented OSM at universities, schools, science fairs and various types of events. Some of those had been very successful (particularly those where we could talk specifically to geodesy or geography students, many of whom have interesting projects and ideas of their own) and some less so (e.g. one where the room allocation at a university failed and I got to explain OSM to those who arrived, in a corridor). In August we’ll have a stand at the Woodstock Music Festival in Poland together with the Wikimedia local chapter and one more free knowledge related organisation. There are some great ideas already on what activities to have at the stand, possibly we’ll also see members of the German Wikimedia chapter there as the festival is right at the country border. Last year Woodstock attracted 1.5 million folks and we had a mapping party right there, taking kite photography of the area, mapping and talking to people about OSM.

Since March we’ve also started seeing local governments, at what would be county or municipality level in an English speaking country, take interest in OSM and contact us.

Now perhaps the most interesting part is the 1st monthly POI contest that just finished today, organised with efforts from many OSM Poland association members. The idea is really simple: points are awarded for different types of POIs added in Poland and the mapper with the top score gets a prize (or two). The prizes include OSM tshirts, jerseys and gadgets from the Mio satnav manufacturer who will be launching two OSM based devices in fall this year and wants to help add more coverage of tourism-related features in OSM (we actually had a live teleconference with Mio at the March AGM - Mio also agreed to participate in travel costs for speakers for OSM talks/workshops in Poland).

The June edition of the contest could be tracked live through an (IMHO) very clear web interface at http://osmapa.pl/konkursy/poi/1/ (including total stats and hourly break-ups) and I believe you can now start picking up points for the second edition ending July 31st. The UI is in Polish but you’re welcome to participate from anywhere as long as you’ve collected some data in Poland first hand :) I ended up at a lousy 42nd place, but the top mappers scored POI counts of over a thousand. Additional fractional points are added for specific attribute tags. The board ended up awarding the top 3 mappers this month because they had put so much effort in this. All in all I’m positively surprised with the results. With the help from Mio Technology a cycling/hiking trail mapping contest is planned in the future.

I believe the whole idea came from a small campaign two months ago to add as many fire hydrants as possible, which caught some popularity through Facebook and apparently thanks to a nice website where you could track the counts of hydrants added. Why hydrant mapping became so popular I have no idea, although it is linked to some media affair earlier this year where (IIRC) the fire fighters stumbled on some non-functional and outright fake hydrants in an emergency. At the end of the campaign Poland had about half of all the fire hydrants in OSM (yay, I guess). I’m looking forward to the results of the upcoming contests and hope I’ll have some time to ramp up my score this month.