Mapper of the Month: Volker Schmidt (Europe)

Volker at Petrified Forest National Park AZ 2016

Who are you ?

I am rather old: born in 1944 in the heart of (Western) Europe, halfway between Strasbourg and Luxembourg, in Germany at 2km from the French border. Let me put it this way: I am a European citizen with, by accident, a German passport. I live, for the second time in my life, in Padova, in northern Italy, about 35km west of Venice. Before retiring I worked, mostly, for the nuclear fusion research programme of the EU as an engineer and manager for large experiment control and data acquisition systems, with a two-year intermezzo in the search for gravitational waves at Caltech in California. My hobbies? My hobbies have changed over time. I had several hiking periods, a pottery period, and now am nearly fully occupied by two interconnected hobbies: (1) slow-cycling (as opposed to racing) from going for a stroll (on the bicycle) for lunch to cycle travel for days or weeks and (2) OSM with an eye on cycling. My nickname? I got that many years back when I started my first job after University in (then West-)Berlin in 1974. I had to invent a user name for our local computer system and constructed “vosch” from the first letters of my name and family name. We were five in the team and all Asterix and Obelix fans. So I added the “-ix”.

Meeting in Louvain-la-Neuve

Let’s meet in Louvain-la-Neuve for the next OpenStreetMap meetup in Brabant Wallon on the 11 February 2018 , 6:30 PM ! Anyone interested in OSM is welcome, from the absolute beginner to the most experienced mapper. Do not hesitate to come if you are just curious about OpenStreetMap and participatory cartography.

FOSDEM 2019 - Geospatial devroom

FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate.

Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.

The Geospatial devroom is the place to talk about the state of the art of open, geo-related data, free and open source geospatial software and its ecosystem. This includes standards and tools, e.g. spatial databases, online mapping tools, geospatial services, used for collecting, storing, delivering, analysing, and visualizing geodata.

Mapper of the Month: Guirec Halflants (Belgium)

Translation by Escada and Koninklijke.

Who are you?

I am Guirec Halflants. I am originally from Brussels but live in Arlon at the moment. I always have been passionate about maps and I travel a lot using maps during the summer evenings. Later on, I invested in the Time Atlas of the World, which is outdated in the meantime. I also enjoyed the offer of a newspaper to publish a staff map of Belgium on a daily basis; I have the collection almost complete, tidily organised and folded but I almost no longer use maps on paper.

Weekly Riot chat digest : 24/12/2018 - 31/12/2018

Lots of conversation happens in our chat room. The volume is so high, it’s hard to keep up. And it’s easy to forget about issues that were raised. So Tim started making this weekly summary. Have a look at our channels page for more info about joining the chat or other ways to reach us.

Mapper of the Month: Wille Marcel (Brazil)

Who are you ?

I’m a OSM mapper from Brazil. I started studying programming by myself at the same time I got involved with OpenStreetMap. It lead me to focus my career on development of GIS applications. Besides work, I dedicate most of my time to the DeROSE Method, it’s a high performance and life quality methodology.

Weekly Riot chat digest : 17/12/2018 - 23/12/2018

Lots of conversation happens in our chat room. The volume is so high, it’s hard to keep up. And it’s easy to forget about issues that were raised. So Tim started making this weekly summary. Have a look at our channels page for more info about joining the chat or other ways to reach us.

Weekly Riot chat digest : 10/12/2018 - 16/12/2018

Lots of conversation happens in our chat room. The volume is so high, it’s hard to keep up. And it’s easy to forget about issues that were raised. So Tim started making this weekly summary. Have a look at our channels page for more info about joining the chat or other ways to reach us.

Mapper of the Month: Can Ünen (Turkey)

Can Ünen username: unen

Who are you?

I’m a university lecturer in Istanbul, with a B.Sc. in civil engineering and a Ph.D. in geomatics. I’m the chairman of board and one of the founding members of Yer Çizenler (a made up term not used daily in Turkish, directly translating to “geographers”), an association for everyone who wants to learn how to map in OpenStreetMap, contribute to the map by joining millions worldwide, and utilize user generated open geospatial data in humanitarian context in Turkey. I was also Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s (HOT) country manager for Turkey, during Yer Çizenler’s partnership with HOT for “Crowdsourcing Non-Camp Refugee Data Through OpenStreetMap” project until June 2018. My OSM username is unen.

OsmAnd route engine hacking

Zeus WPI - the student working group of UGent - has invited me to give a small workshop on tweaking the routing engine of OsmAnd. After a small introduction, we’ll try to get the things working on our phones.

This meetup is geared toward people with some technical background. You’ve should at least have edited an XML file before and know what a tag-value pair on OSM is.