cloudsourced

State of the Map 2009, the OpenStreetMap conference, is taking place in Amsterdam on July 10-12.  If you’re at all interested in open geodata, it is an unmissable event, and this year marks something special.  Its the year OpenStreetMap gets serious as a commercial ecosystem.

OpenStreetMap is no longer a quirky, little open-data project. Its massive. With over 100,000 registered users, albeit not all active, the OSM community is huge and especially passionate. The OSM community cares deeply about creating freely available mapping data, and shows no sign of slowing down.

This army of mappers is busily adding nodes and links to a global mapping dataset, that in many urban centres is more detailed and up-to-date than its commercial rivals. We’ve seen Geofabrik and CloudMade launch and provide geo services with OSM data, and this looks to be the start of a growing commercial ecosystem around OSM. So this year State of the Map has an extra day,  “dedicated to the theme of commercial viability of OpenStreetMap”.

Want to get involved?

The OpenStreetMap Foundation will be holding its annual conference in Amsterdam, from the 10th – 11th July 2009.  The conference will feature three days of talks, workshops and discussions by the people who are changing the face of mapping.  This is a conference not to be missed by anyone interested in joining OpenStreetMap’s mapping revolution.  Weekend tickets cost just €100 – and you can still get your ticket at a special early bird rate of €75.  You can find out more about the event here .

If all of the talk of the mapping revolution has got you excited, you can join OpenStreetMap’s efforts to re-map the world.  Signing up is easy and takes just two minutes – to sign up and start mapping, click here.