What’s been happening lately? Oh yeah…

We’ve finally changed the license! Hurray!

On the foundation blog I’ve been posting quite a lot about the license change process, as we in Communication Working Group have been working to ensure that this channel is a useful place to get “official” (carefully worded) updates on this sort of thing. Obviously in this capacity it’s important to be positive about it, but I’d just like to say from a personal perspective…

We’ve finally changed the license! Hurray!

The best thing about this is… we don’t ever have to talk abut the license change ever again! No doubt there’ll be lots of talk about the new license, but the fact is… it’s done. The license change sucked so much energy from the community and particularly from people who are core to making things happen in OpenStreetMap. So many ideas have been on hold while we battled with this thing. Thank goodness it’s over. I really need to go to the pub to celebrate (more on that later)

The Society of Cartographers conference also happened. This was maptastic, and quite OpenStreetMappy. In fact the very first talk was from David Earl (Freelance) - Project Drake: new maps for The University of Cambridge using OpenStreetMap. Steven Feldman talked about OSM and a bit about OSMGB. I blogged here about my little workshop on using OpenStreetMap data While I was doing that Andy Allan was doing a workshop on TileMill, which I wanted to go to. And on the third day as part of the ICA neocartography conference we had Richard Fairhurst presenting the Unstoppable Advance of OpenStreetMap including the awesome neo Steve Chilton slide:

Lots more map stuff besides, also chocolate muffins, and a tour on an open top bus. It was a pretty great conference. Not as great as State Of The Map obviously. Would’ve loved to be in Tokyo. In October I wont be going all the way to SOTM U.S. either, but SOTM Scotland could be a goer!

The vote for the board happened. I didn’t actually vote in the end. Couldn’t make up my mind. Some U.S. representation on the board would’ve been good. Kate would’ve been great on the board, though she’s already very busy being great for HOT. Alex could’ve brought some of that shiny MapBox magic to the core of the project. But congratulations to Frederik and Simon. They’re both very well known as massive contributors to the project, and people with strong opinions and powerful arguments about how the project should be run. They’ll do great things in the driving seat I’m sure, but also this will maybe help make more German and Swiss OSMers feel involved in the OSMF a little more (e.g. joining the working groups) which could be a great boost.

I’m in Amsterdam next week for the PICNIC conference where I’ll be presenting OpenStreetMap and HOT.

Also next week on Thursday it’s #geomob, this time hosted at the google campus. Dunno if there’s any google related geo presentations lined up. Time for some heckling? I’m sure it will be a geo-treat as ever, and will involve a pub.

All of this means that, despite my desire to have a good OpenStreetMap pub celebration, I’m not very free until the week after. If somebody wants to organise a OSMLondon meet-up before that, next Tuesday could be a good day, but I’m coming back from Amsterdam late that day. Whatever happens the OSMLondon event details are on the wiki page