Greetings OpenStreetMap-pers,

This is a summary of a few key topics from the OSM-Colorado Meetup yesterday. I was really excited to have this handful of folks together; it felt more like an ‘OSM super group’ meeting than any of the meetups I have organized; reminded me of some of the early OSM-Colorado events I attended back in 2010-2011. Although I think we all had some kind of mobile device/laptop/etc. no one ‘fired anything up for show and tell’ but instead we really just had a great time hashing-out some of the major issues and opportunities around OpenStreetMap in Colorado, USA.

One of the most significant items is a wonderful opportunity to work directly with the Denver Regional Council of Governments to explore importing a huge volume of data that they have purchased and are releasing as Public Domain. We are still very much in the ‘exploratory’ stage, and have started a wiki-page. There are so many ‘side-topics’ that come up with this discussion: how to conflate with existing data, perform import(s) when/where appropriate, make it community driven, frequency that the data will be updated, how to maintain and update when there is need, and a whole lot more. Stay tuned to that page and/or the import mailing list as we begin to ramp up the effort.

We also discussed this year’s MapCamp! – Poudre Canyon. The High Park Fire in 2012 and Floods in 2013 reeked some havoc in and around Poudre Canyon, so although I have been told that some of the camping/recreation is still closed; I think it’s an even better reason to ‘head up north’ so we can do some surveying and get OSM up-to-date with the changes caused by those incidents. However, we might be looking further ‘up the canyon’ towards Cameron Pass or maybe Pingree Park area for camping. We also discussed timing and it seems like mid-August is what we are looking at (i.e. between SotM-US and SotM-International, but before it starts getting cold up high; and June seemed pretty full already for most of us).

Outside of those two ‘major topics’, we generally discussed what people want to see out of the meetup group; types of events, etc. We have some great ‘competition’/friends in Colorado, like GeoSpatial Amateurs, MapTime! Chapters in Boulder and Denver/MileHigh, and tons of other mapping/GIS/Coding/etc. groups; so we really want to ‘find our niche’ and not ‘step on toes’ with other groups. In my opinion that means focusing more on mapping and data collection versus presentations; also sticking fairly strictly to ‘just’ OSM versus more general mapping platforms and applications fairly well covered in the other groups.

We also discussed some of the more ‘interesting’/controversial things like the tagging of National Forests/Parks/Monuments/etc. It seemed a general agreement that boundary=protected_area with appropriate protect_class=* is the better tagging schema; but there is reluctance to make this wide-scale change as we understand this is not rendered yet. So with the folks on hand, this and several other of our conversations went pretty deep into how all these things work and are related. I talked about my favorite OSM feature, South Park (the real geographic feature vs. cartoon town) and how the conversation on talk-us spurred some motivation in me to further work on the natural features (forest and grassland mostly) around me – which I started years ago, but there’s a lot of forest around here :)

All and all, it was a great meetup and I think the momentum around OSM in general is fueling a renewed desire to make OSM-Colorado one of the most active ‘micro-chapters’ in the United States. Please feel free to join us!