This weekend was OSM workshops again, this time we were at a sort of a travellers get-together / summit / festival thing in Boruszyn, Poland. This is a tiny village where Kazimierz Nowak set out for his 40000km bicycle trip across Africa in 1931. The village was mostly unmapped before the festival and there was no usable imagery better than Landsat, so we got to use the pool of GPSes that the OSM Poland association received from Mio Technology Ltd. They are some of the cheapest loggers available, Holux M-1000C, but they worked almost fine for us. The main downside for me was lack of Linux support for downloading the tracks or setting receiver configuration. The BT747 project as well as gpsbabel and mtkbabel all claim to support the M-1000C model but apparently the download protocol is different across different revisions of this model, other people’s comments on the web reflect this too. We had to use a Windows laptop with the ezTour program that ships with the receiver but is tricky to get working too. It also has the annoying default setting of logging GPS points every 5s instead of every second, which gets written to the device whenever it’s connected to the laptop.

We had some bikes and managed to add a lot of detail in nearby villages in OSM. Some teens of the local scouts team that was helping in the festival organisation also joined the workshop and I could pick their brains about more things in the area to add to the map.

We managed to snap some kite imagery on the last day. Technically we only made some slight errors but the timing was unfortunate because a bunch of attendees had already left before then, and the previous two days saw no wind.

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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.

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If you’re coming to the Przystanek Woodstock festival this week near the Polish / German border, you can join us at the “Freedom tent” briefly mentioned here and you can set up your own tent at the OpenStreetMap Village.

The Freedom tent is a stand in the NGOs alley we’ve been preparing together with the Free/Opensource Software Foundation, Wikimedia local chapter, The Warsaw Hackerspace and The FreeLab sustainable living project.

No mapping party this year as the area has been mapped in detail last year, but we’ll have workshops and we’ll be snapping Kite Aerial Pics like we did last year

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.

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to You (hereinafter "Wishee(s)")
as copied from various well-known blogs (hereinafter "Blogs")

1. Please accept without obligation, express or implied, these best wishes for a fruitful in the creation of online maps ("Maps"), environmentally safe, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, and gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday as practiced within the traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice but with respect for the religious or secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or for their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all, and further for a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated onset of the generally accepted calendar year including, but not limited to, the Christian calendar, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures.

2. The preceding wishes expressed in Part 1 are granted, without regard to the race, creed, age, physical ability, religious faith or lack thereof, choice of geodata editor application ("Editor") or lack thereof, licensing preference or sexual preference of the wishee(s), on the following terms:

a) they are to be considered extended to all members of your family or other social unit, including but not limited to:
i) other persons directly or indirectly related to you by blood or otherwise and any such persons to whom you consider yourself to be related regardless of biological, legal, religious or other process,
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iii) other animal and/or vegetable organisms (or inanimate objects) you or anyone else may consider part of your family or other social unit;

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