In December 2020 the Licensing Working Group (LWG) received an inquiry regarding GeOsm and its trademark status. As GeOsm contains “OSM” which is a trademark of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, it comes under purview of our licensing policy. This was a topic of the January 2021 LWG meeting and Kathleen Lu (LWG) reached out to Willy Franck Sob, the main operator of GeOsm, to study its application.

GeOsm is a portal for distributing free geographic data. Its goal is to make OpenStreetMap data and other open data more easily accessible, especially to users in developing countries. A Cameroonian-led project, it already offers national data for 21 African countries - but it has potential for wider horizons.

Considering the compatibility of GeOsm’s ethos with OpenStreetMap, the LWG suggested that the OSMF should come to an agreement with GeOsm. Within that framework, Jean-Marc Liotier (Board Member) drafted an agreement (see annexed PDF) to define under what conditions the OSMF will permit the GeOsm trademark. Most of the clauses are typical generic points of a trademark licence agreement, but some are specific to OpenStreetMap and will interest our members most:

• The GeOsm trademark shall only be used as the brand for distributing geographic data under open data licenses as defined by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Definition published at http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/
• A major part of the data distributed by the GeOsm must originate from OpenStreetMap.
• Any code for the GeOsm site used as a point of distribution must be published under an open source license according to the Open Source Definition published by the Open Source Initiative.
• Any code necessary for converting OpenStreetMap data to the format consumed by the software of the site used as a point of distribution must be published under an open source license according to the Open Source Definition published by the Open Source Initiative.
• No proprietary data shall be distributed by GeOsm.

So, on top of Willy Franck’s communicative enthusiasm about OpenStreetMap in the African context, this trademark license gives the OSMF a solid guarantee that its brand will not be tainted by diverging interests.

Beyond these defensive measures, this formal agreement is also a nod to a community-led African initiative - free software developed by African leaders is not yet a common occurence, and the OSMF looks forward to GeOsm developing original approaches to bring OpenStreetMap data to new audiences and make them participants.

The OSMF took advantage of Jean-Marc’s presence in Cameroon to participate in a formal signing ceremony, with representatives of the Ministry of Local Development and Ministry of Housing and Urban Development in attendance. They confirmed the strong interest of their government in collaborative approaches to geographic data and the technological appropriation of geographical information systems through local initiatives.

There you are, in some Openstreemap editor, correcting the same typo for the 16th time, cursing contributors who neglect correct capitalization and thinking about how tedious this necessary data gardening is. While JOSM is endowed with unfathomable depths of cartographic potentiality, you long for a way to simply whip out your favourite text editor and apply its familiar power to the pedestrian problem of repeatedly editing text. Or the problem requires editing multiple mutually dependent tags and some XML-aware logic is therefore required – all the same: you just want to perform Openstreetmap editing as text processing. [..]

http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2015/08/25/from-josm-search-replace-to-processing-openstreetmap-with-your-favorite-text-edition-tools

This has been popping up in my social networks since yesterday and I have not seen it echoed here... So there - the White House uses OpenStreetMap : http://www.whitehouse.gov/mapping_service/inventory/524

How is that for an endorsement ?

Yes - This time I thoroughly checked that it has not yet been posted here...

"The ambitious volunteer-based OpenStreetMap has now mapped more than 120,000 km of South African roads" - http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Software/11499.html

There is also a discussion going on in the site's forum : http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?218624-The-lie-of-the-land-OpenStreetMap - there is a interesting bit about the availability of large amounts of data from the Surveyor General that is not usable by OSM because of a license restricting redistribution.

I have not see that one in the http://blogs.openstreetmap.org feed so here it is : Adventures of an Amateur Cartographer at http://frogplate.net/blog/amateur-cartographer.html

This article by a new contributor describes his journey from listening to a FLOSS podcast to discovering OpenStreetMap, playing with Potlach, gathering GPS tracks and finding joy in mapping. I find it a nice illustration of a typical first encounter with OSM.

The quality of OpenStreetMap's work speaks for itself, but it seems that we need to speak about it too - especially now that Google is attempting to to appear as holding the moral high ground by using terms such as "citizen cartographer" that they rob of its meaning by conveniently forgetting to mention the license under which the contributed data is held. But in the eye of the public, the $50000 UNICEF donation to the home country of the winner of the Map Maker Global Challenge lets them appear as charitable citizens. We need to explain why it is a fraud, so that motivated aspiring cartographers are not tempted to give away their souls for free. I could understand that they sell it, but giving it to Google for free is a bit too much - we must tell them. I'm pretty sure that good geographic data available to anyone for free will do more for the least developed communities than a 50k USD grant.

I answered this piece at ReadWriteWeb and I suggest that you keep an eye for opportunities to answer this sort of propaganda against libre mapping :
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_announces_map_contest_50k_for_adding_school.php#comment-175013

When I started, I tagged my additions with sources such as "GPS track". But I realized that in the future this might be a problem because ways change over time. So now I tag with something like "GPS track 2008" but I'm considering going even further in precision with source tags such as "GPS track Foo on bicycle on 20081204".

Now what is missing from JOSM is a way to filter the GPS tracks by date - for example, only show me tracks from the last two years. In areas that change, that would let us ignore obsolete data.

My part of town in Paris, France is called La Défense and it is a complicated layer cake of all sort of tunnels, galleries, multi-level motorway interchanges, public transportation, maze-like passages around and across buildings and pedestrian plazas. I'm beginning to improve it, but as I'm a beginner at the art of mapping, I find it daunting. I wonder what my goals should be. For now, OpenStreetMap does not model volumes but thanks to layers, the map is not quite flat either. But should I even attempt to map this complicated multi-level underground network entirely, or should I focus on the roads and on the surface network ? Is there a best practice somewhere, showing what level of detail should be aimed for ?

I have been busy mapping along the Petite Cote in Senegal. I have found numerous occurrences of Yahoo sourced roads with multiple concurring GPS tracks lying some distance away - clearly showing that the road is not following the correct path. I corrected them with the more precise path. That shows that when multiple GPS tracks are available and concur, they should be relied upon more than third party sources.