Annual report 2022

26.08.2023 - Jonathan Beliën, Joost Schouppe

Financial report

Financial report for the year 2022. TLDR: we doubled our capital from 5.700 EUR to 11.600 EUR.

Projects

Traffic Sign Project: growing into a proper project

The Traffic Sign Project turned into something more structural, with its own project page and periodic updates.

Our new Corporate Member TomTom offered to give technical support on our projects. One of their engineers rewrote the program so it can run on Github Actions (serverless, weekly update) and can talk to MapRoulette automatically. The automatic updates are not implemented yet though.

Road Completion project - expanding in Wallonia

The Road Completion projects keeps running. In Flanders, the tool now does what it was initialy meant to do: monitor new roads that are created in official data, and make sure they are mapped quickly in OSM. It turns out it does something else as well: when roads get deleted (usually accidentally!), we get a quick report to make sure they are mapped again. We had good talks with the Wallonia government as well, about how they could use our feedback to improve their data. A nice concrete win for us, is that most of the data is now available at a permanent URL, making it easy to automatically update the challenges in MapRoulette.

EqualStreetNames

The names of public spaces (streets, avenues, squares and others) define the identity of a city and how citizens interact with it. Most cities suffer from a major inequality between male and female street names and we want to help fix this.

Started in March 2020, the EqualStreetNames project keeps growing…

In 2022, 11 cities in 7 countries have joined the project:

You can still see the global map of all cities here: https://equalstreetnames.org/

Welcome Tool

The tool developed by OpenStreetMap Belgium to help local communities to keep track of the new mappers in their regions and welcome them is still attracting new regions from all over the world.

25 regions in 14 countries were added to the tool in 2022 in 🇨🇦 Canada, 🇨🇱 Chile, 🇨🇳 China, 🇫🇷 France, 🇩🇪 Germany, 🇭🇺 Hungary, 🇮🇩 Indonesia, 🇱🇷 Liberia, 🇳🇪 Niger, 🇳🇬 Nigeria, 🇰🇵 North Korea, 🇵🇭 Philippines, 🇰🇷 South Korea, and 🇺🇸 USA.

The tool is available here: https://welcome.osm.be/

Street Level Imagery project

As believers in open data, and believers in leading by example, we started investing in the creaton of open street level imagery. Using the income from our corporate memberships, we bought three budget 360 cameras and shipped them out to a series of volunteers. The coverage generated exceeded our expectations. The project has created several off-shoots, like the 360 everywhere project in Wallonia and the camera bought by Westtour in West Flanders. We also shared news about the project in the global fora, gave a briefing to the French Local Chapter and talked to Meta about scaling this up.

More project details on our website and on the wiki.

Leaflet & promotion material

Inspired by the French business cards, we designed our own. We also created a leaflet to showcase our biggest projects. These leaflets were used at events and handed out

image

Our newsletter is back!

It had been quiet for quite a while, but we now post an update on OpenStreetMap Belgium community every 3 months.

You can check all our newsletters and register if you want to receive it by clicking here.

The 5 Flemish provinces are building a network of cycle highways together. These are mapped in fine detail in OSM. The data is used by the routeplanner the provinces offer at www.fietssnelwegen.be. We worked together to finetune the data model and the data quality. After this, it was decided that we would also maintain the data for them. We made a commitment to update the network in OSM within two weeks after they sent us an update. We can’t make commitments as volunteers, so this is a job we invoice for. The amount of work is relatively minor and has de facto been done on a voluntary basis, though we do get the income.

Events

Open Belgium 2022

After a hiatus, Open Belgium was back in 2022. It is the conference organized by our umbrella Open Knowledge Belgium that brings together everyone working in the “open” sector, commercial, government and community.

We had a nice OpenStreetMap side-track there.

Trefdag Digitaal Vlaanderen booth

The Trefdag is one of the biggest government data conferences in Flanders. We shared a booth there with Anyways (who sponsored this with their Corporate Membership). The booth was pretty succesful. It was interesting that we didn’t have to explain the basics over and over again like we used to, but that people had interesting questions. Some impressions available here.

Foss4G / State of the Map BE

We worked together intensively with OSGeo Belgium to turn the usual FOSS4G Belgium into a combine SotM/FOSS4G Belgium event. We had very interesting OSM related talks and a good turnout. A survey afterwards confirmed the impression that the combination of topics from OSM and more traditional FOSS4G subjects worked really well. Some impressions here

Supporting the use of OSM

Cycle Networks in Wallonia - Rando Velo

The people who manage the large cycle route networks in Wallonia asked us to intervene when it comes to data from Rando Velo in OpenStreetMap. This is a voluntary based network that was originally signposted but has been less active recently. More info here

Support Flemish gov with Hoppinpunten

The Flemish government is modeling a new way to organize public transport transit points. We talked about how they could integrate OpenStreetMap into this project. More info here

Talk with Eurovelo

Talk about how we can colaborate on better data about Eurovelo routes. More info here

Community

New forum

The OpenStreetMap Foundation has launched the new OpenStreetMap.org Community Forum: https://community.openstreetmap.org/

All messages from the old forum have been migrated to this new platform (Discourse) and you can find OpenStreetMap Belgium community here.

Meetups

All our meetups & events are published at https://www.meetup.com/openstreetmap-belgium/ and on osmcal. Overview here:

Online only:

Running the organization

Corporate membership

Our previous corporate members were kind enough to renew their membership in 2022: GEO-6, Anyways, Visit Flanders and 2 new corporate members joined OpenStreetMap Belgium: RouteYou and TomTom.

Evolution of membership

We lost no members and gained one in 2022, adding up to 28 now.

Meetings

We had no members meeting in 2022, as there was one in November 2021 and in January 2023.

There were two official board meetings. Minutes available here: https://github.com/osmbe/working-group-bylaws/tree/master/minutes