This was my first State of the Map. That is if you do not count my virtual visits to all previous ones via the video sessions I have seen afterwards.

In this diary entry I will not write about the individual sessions, I keep that for another entry.

Let me start by congratulating the organisers and the volunteers for a great experience. Furthermore a big thank you to all people that did a presentation. I found the talks that I followed of a high level. That is they were informative, entertaining and brought by passionate people. Something I have not seen in other (non-OSM-related) conferences that I visited.

What I did wrong was that I visited too many sessions that are recorded and not enough bird of a feather (BoF) sessions. The ones that I visited (Public transport plugin for JOSM and Wikimedia’s Kartotherian) were very interesting.

It was good to see people that I only met virtually before, either via a forum, a Mapper of the Month interview or as part of the Weekly OSM team.

BTW, a big applause to my colleagues of the Weekly OSM/Wochennotiz team for winning the Influential writer award. It’s a pity that the SOTM team nor the OSMF team made more publicity about the winners of the awards (e.g. live via Twitter). Because I was in a BoF at that time, I still don’t know the other award winners.

Update: They are now listed on https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2016/09/26/we-have-our-winners/

I should also have been braver to talk to more people, but what do you say to famous people like Andy Allen or Frederik Ramm? Anyhow, if I would have talked to you, I would have thanked you for your hard work for OSM and for the “courage” to continue with your work for carto-css or “promotion” for craftmappers despite all critiques.

As for the OpenStreetView team, I love to have discussed the de-blurring in the website. For what I do (mapping destination signs), it’s a necessity and should take far less time than in Mapillary.

The social event had good food, but was missing beer. Not for me (I had to drive home), but an event in a former brewery with almost no choice in beer is strange, especially in Belgium. During the event, I had a nice talk with the woman that made the winning design for the SOTM logo and her partner, an American journalist.

I had a great time and feel sorry I missed the first day due to other obligations. And as Gregory sang at the end, we now will continue to “map, map, map”.