You're invited!

TriMet, Portland's regional transportation agency, is holding a Meet & Greet for local OSM Mappers:

Friday May 13, 2011
4:00pm - 6:00pm PST
TriMet Center Street Administration Building
4012 SE 17th Ave.
Portland, OR 97202

Why?
• Meet other local OSM Mappers and the PSU students that are working on OSM improvements in the 4-county regional area.
• Observe our OSM editing process first hand and provide feedback: it is a manual and labor intensive process, it is not a data import. We are using up-to-date regional jurisdictional data and 6-inch ortho-rectified digital imagery flown in August 2010 as a reference with permission from the sources.
• Learn why we chose to invest in OSM and the community, rather than a proprietary mapping solution.
• See a sneak preview of the Open Trip Planner, TriMet's new open source multi-modal trip planner scheduled for release in Fall, and meet the developers involved in the project.
• Explore opportunities for collaboration and on-going maintenance (ex: local cities and counties can make street data available to the OSM community).

Using http://www.itoworld.com/static/osm_mapper.html, we were able to find some past and present active mappers for the Metro region.

Let us know if this time doesn't work for you, or if you are not local but interested - we can schedule a webinar or make other arrangements.

Cheers,

Bibiana McHugh (manager), PJ Houser, Betsy Breyer, Grant Humphries, and Melelani Sax-Barnett
TriMet, GIS and Location-Based Services

Trimet has started working on OSM using the open datasets from RLIS and other agencies (http://www.civicapps.org/). I, along with a few other interns, will be attempting to help update OSM with bike routes, more accurate roads, and trails. Trimet is switching to open source trip planning software (http://maps5.trimet.org/otp/), and hopes to use OSM as the data source. But in this area, OSM's data isn't ready for routing. By the way, Trimet will be using its own transit layer in the trip planning software.

The Trimet team is pretty new to OSM, and we're gonna need contacts in this updating process as we don't want to mess up other people's work. I've been learning as much as I can as fast as I can from the wiki and mailing lists. I've already contacted a few users for information.

We will definitely want input before we do any bulk imports or automated editing using RLIS data, like bike routes, street centerlines, and trails. We haven't quite figured out how to do that anyways.

Anyhow, just wanted to keep everyone informed.