Every year, the momentum of OpenStreetMap continues to blow our minds. This year is no exception. With the launch of the Missing Maps project and new teams like MapZen joining the OSM ecosystem, the State of the Map is very, very good indeed. Shout out to MapBox for continuing to lead and bring resources to the effort.

The venue couldn’t have been better. The UN hosts many meetings and conferences, so it’s no surprise they have the gold standard for such facilities. There was some cool translation/remote conferencing equipment in a basement hallway that everyone was checking out.

There was an impressive variety of sessions this year and I patched together my own personal track that followed the presentations of friends and clients. A couple of highlights:

Carrie Stokes from USAID presented on the SERVIR program, something we’ve been involved with in various capacities for several years. She made some great points about how important maps are in making critical decisions in our government.

Dale Kunce of American Red Cross International Services gave an update on OpenMapKit (OMK) and some of the recent field pilots using OMK. The OMK project has been a fun one for us and it’s exciting to bring together the ODK and OSM communities to strengthen both the tools and the maps.

Overall, it was great to see some of the work we’ve been involved get presented. We’ll get our act together and represent on the agenda next year!

We’re planning to expand our contributions to the OSM community and work with our clients to build better tools, introduce OSM as a platform that our clients can leverage and contribute to, and take advantage of OSM to create custom maps that meet their specific needs and represent their unique brands.

We’re also working with Cadasta to build a platform that emulates OSM as a model to do something in the land tenure space… but that’s for another post.