One week ago OSM was one of the projects present at the “Freedom Tent” at the Woodstock Festival. The festival was attended by about half a million people, and we had an incredible number of interesting people come over to talk about free software or free technologies, and take part in the workshops. Some got very excited about OpenStreetMap, in fact we had two fresh new mappers who after the first day’s workshop came on the next days to help us organise the same workshop again.

We only had four computers for the workshop use and we used one machine as a sort of terminal with a monitor and a keyboard facing out of the tent. It ran a small web application I made which shows the kite imagery of the festival that we made a year ago, georectified, as an OpenLayers slippymap. You could click the map and draw the outline of your tent if you remembered where you stayed, then describe it and leave your e-mail address if you liked. We had about 70 festival goers mark their tents on it in the last two days, the app can be seen at http://osm.trail.pl/woodstock.xhtml.

The workshops were a little chaotic but successful, almost everyone registered on OSM right away and added a couple of features. I was surprised to see at least half the participants actually read the full contributor terms before registering. Then there were also two who didn’t remember their e-mail passwords so we ended up using my gmail address. We also handed out lots of business card sized OSM leaflets, and we’ve got three new members in the OSM Poland association

Then on the day after the festival ended I was packing up my things among lots of people with heavy back packs leaving the camp and I saw two girls carrying, in addition to their backpacks, and a big 50cm globe with a political map from the 80s. They explained that the globe was their long time travel companion that they use to show people where they’re going when hitch hiking. I wish I had snapped a picture of it.