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SOTM 2009 and what followed

Posted by Ciprian on 29 April 2010 in English.

It’ s been a while since I posted anything here, but since I saw that OSI is probably going to sponsor another round of mappers to go to SOTM 2010 in Girona I felt like I need to share my experience from last year.

At first I wasn’t sure how things will be in Amsterdam as I didn’t know anybody except from the mailing lists. But I found some great people that drive forward a great project. I understood that OSM is interesting for a lot of companies, and that we can compare (in some areas at least) with the commercial providers, and we can even be better (see Muky Haklay’s blog). I’ve seen great progress across Europe and North America and some great starts in other areas, and great ways to add data to the project without the need of expensive equipment (yes, I am talking about Walking Papers).

What happened in Romania in the last 9 months? Well, probably not as much as I had hoped but we moved forward: we started with a few micro mapping-parties (Vaslui, Buzau and Ghimbav) and this month we had a huge mapping party in Cluj-Napoca, thanks to the geo-spatial.org community. We managed to continue the collaboration with Norc, that gave us access to more GPS data and a lot more street-view panoramas and we started to put together some money for OSM advertising (you can see the OSM banner at the Cluj-Napoca mapping party). There are some companies in Romania that are using OSM data and some of them are offering back services (like the transparent WMS service from AlphaTelecom).

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