Milan, Italy will be the host for State of the Map (SOTM), the annual OpenStreetMap community gathering, in 2018.
The conference will be organized by Wikimedia Italy (Italia) and the Polytechnic University of Milan (Politecnico di Milano, Polimi), the largest technical university in Italy, after they submitted a joint proposal.
The event will take place from 28 to 30 July 2018 and will be hosted on Polimi’s university campus. It will bring together at least 400 participants from 5 continents, including several community members from emerging communities supported by the SOTM Scholarship Program.
Polimi has put great effort in fostering the advancement of OpenStreetMap in recent years, developing projects based on OSM and promoting training, research activities, mapathons and initiatives like PoliMappers.
State of the Map 2018 will aim to enhance the collaboration between the Wikimedia and OpenStreetMap communities, who will join forces to showcase their efforts to promote open and free culture.
Wikimedia Italy started laying the groundwork for the event by working with the Wikimedia and OSM communities in Italy. This included a joint effort with Fondazione BEIC to geocode the photos of the Paolo Monti photographic archive, released under a free license by Fondazione BEIC on Wikimedia Commons. The photos helped make a prototype map that shows how libraries and heritage institutions could use OpenStreetMap with Wikimedia projects to provide an alternative way of browsing their collections. At Wikimania 2017, the project was called out as one of the “coolest projects” developed by an independent Wikimedia chapter.
And Wikimedia Italy is continuing to support these data-growing projects: one of our main objectives for 2017 is to increase the coverage of house numbers and street names to facilitate routing. Between January and April 2017, we reached a big goal by adding over a million house numbers for Emilia-Romagna.
In the next few weeks, Wikimedia Italy and Polimi will start event organization work with the SOTM Committee: one of the first steps in our plan is launching a contest to choose a logo and build visual identity guidelines for the event. Conference updates will be available on the SOTM and Wikimedia Italy websites.
Francesca Ussani, Communications Manager
Wikimedia Italia
In brief
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Compiled and edited by Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation
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