OpenBelgium 2015 took place in Namur on February 23.
Ben Abelshausen organized a session on OpenStreetMap and asked me to be co-presenter. I arrived early in Namur, because I wanted to avoid the traffic jams around Brussels. Hence I had plenty of time for a short walk in the town center. Although a lot of POIs are already mapped, I still took over 300 pictures and hope to find some missing features. And yes, so far I found a couple of missing memorials, statues and it turned out that some POIs could be updated as. Haven’t finished this yet.
Back to the conference. The session on OpenStreetMap was titled “It’s the community, stupid” to emphasize that this data is not coming from the public sector, unlike most other data discussed in the other sessions.
I had the honour to kick of the session and talked about the daily life of a crazy mapper. After me, Jorieke showed the audience that mappers do work together via a variety of tools and that mapping can be a social event as well. She also talked about collaboration with communities in developing countries through HOT.
Next, Ben talked about imports and how good imports can enrich the community. Finally, Glenn talked about using OpenStreetMap data and how consumers can be part of the community as well.
Afterwards we had to answer several questions on quality, possible collaborations with the government and how people could start using data. It seems that there will be follow-up meetings on the use of and the contribution to OpenStreetMap within the public sector as well.
Exiting times and I hope this will increase the interest in OpenStreetMap.
It was also great to see Nicolas and Julien back, as well as meeting Marc Ducobu, who is doing the translations to French of our Mapper of the Month interviews.
The next event is a mapping party in Brussels with as main topics cycling and wheelchair access. The event will take place on April 25, for more info, see the wiki.
Hope to see you there.
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