OMB

One of the things I emphasised when standing for election to the OSM Foundation Board was the need for transparency and communication of Board activities to the membership. This is something I’m going to be working on consistently over the next 11 months. This post is the start of the first phase of the work. I’m going to keep a record of the work I do for the Foundation and try and communicate my work as clearly as possible. A lot of the work happens in bits and pieces - I grab 20 mins on a train or plane to read and write emails, draft press releases and so on. I’ve also set aside 2 hours on Thursday mornings for OSM-Foundation related work, so I’d anticipate these updates following those session.

Lets get going. Today I’ve been working on:

• Drafting a press release for the GPStoGO program’s first unit loan. I’m aiming to get the release out by the end of the week.
• Drafting an announcement for the call for venues for the State of the Map 2009. The announcement should be out by the end of the week and will invite proposals for venues to host the 2009 event.
• Catching up on Foundation emails, particularly regarding the License work, which is an ongoing effort for all of the Board members

Upcoming actions next week include getting up to speed on the process of setting up local OSM Chapters. I have a call with some other Foundation members tomorrow, after which I’ll be getting in touch with some OSM people around the world with the aim of getting local OSM chapters set up.

You can subscribe to my posts about my OSM-F work by clicking on this link.

For all Foundation related requests or info, please email me at nick@osmfoundation.org

I’m standing for election to OpenStreetMap Foundation this year, here is a manifesto of sorts, what I want to achieve as part of the OSMF and how I’ll go about it.

I’ve been part of OSM for about 2.5 years and over that time I’ve been involved with lots of aspects of the project including mapping, coding, salvaging servers, administering websites, helping to organise the State of the Map conference and representing OSM at conferences and exhibits in Europe and North America. This year I want to become more deeply involved with the day to day work that goes on to make OSM run smoothly, so I’m standing for election to the OSMF board.

Over the last 18 months my main role within OSM has been helping to organise the SOTM conferences, along with other OSMF board members. I was involved with the planning of the most recent conference, starting in January 2008, taking the specific role of finding speakers, timetabling their sessions, collecting presentations and generally making sure everything ran smoothly. Organising the conferences has been hard, challenging work, but lots of fun too. With OSM growing so quickly, both in terms of absolute numbers and the number of countries covered, next year’s conference will become bigger and require more organisation from OSM volunteers. As an OSMF board member I would volunteer myself to look after the organisation of the conference - from the call for venues to the conference itself. Having an OSMF board member who is committed to helping organise the conference will help to make SOTM09 even better than the previous two year’s events, promoting OSM within the a wider community of open source and open data projects and attracting new mappers to our project.

Of course I would also be involved with OSMF’s other projects and activities which include promoting OSM, dealing with legal issues and funding servers and hosting. I’ve been deeply involved with the geographic industry for the last 5 years, giving me a lot of exposure to the mapping world. Working in surveying, GIS and software development has taken me to conferences, jobs and events around the world where I’ve loved promoting OSM to anyone who will listen.

Here’s a summary of what I would aim to achieve over a year as an OSMF board member:

• State Of The Map organisation. Help the conference grow by supporting the community in choosing a venue, organising logistics, helping with call for papers, helping with website set up and anything else needed by the hosts
• Accountability for OSMF. Helping OSMF to be more accountable to its members, publishing updates on the main things being worked on by the Foundation
• Promoting OSM. Representing OSM at conferences, shows and developer events around the world and most importantly helping to support other OSMers in their promotion of the project

If you have any direct questions, drop me an email or on Skype.

The OSMF Wiki Page has the following information about the elections:

Nominations for this election will close on Monday August 25th, 2008 and the vote for each position will be called and counted at the AGM on August 30, 2008.

If you want to vote, you need to be a member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. You can join the OSM Foundation here. Membership costs just £15 for a whole year and entitles you to vote in the elections as well as helping to support the Foundation in its work.

Finally, thanks to TomH and Dutch for proposing me.

Apple are all over the “Enterprise” shop with Active Sync support in the new iPhone 3G. Crackberry addicts are seriously considering making the switch to a sweeter flavour of opium. I was lucky enough to place an order for an iPhone on the morning the 11th July release date was announced. O2’s mastery of ecommerce has allowed them to debit the £160 odd fee from my bank account. Sadly, I’ve been chosen for a random security check, which involves spending an hour on an 0870 number to tell someone my passport number and debit card number. See some inconsistencies emerging?

Why? I don’t know. All I know is that I don’t have time to talk to O2 for an hour. Want to capture the “Enterprise” market? Don’t dick us around.

FAIL

Read more here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=514266

Update

It gets worse, I just got this text from O2:

Sorry your experience on Monday wasn't great if you were trying to order iPhone 3G. Go to http://shop.o2.co.uk/info to find out the latest details.


My experience on Monday was fine its the arsing around now that’s killing me

Update 2 : Live blogging the less glamorous side of the iPhone

08:01am - Call the security verification line on 0870 4444713, half an hour before the published opening time of the line, just in case.

08:22am - Give up on the previous call. Get ready for the real opening time at 08.30am

08.30am - Call the number, dialling

09.01am - Still on the call. Dialling, no music, no “You are in a que”. Just ringing.

09.14am - Still ringing. Skype Credit down to £1.07 from £6.00

09.25am - Run out of Skype Credit. Auto-top-up FAIL for Skype, which has never happened before. Just wasted 57 minutes of my life. Still no iPhone.

We might have high taxes, bad weather and risk averse investors, but Burritos can now be crossed of the list of differences between California and London. Tortilla are a Californian style burrito house who’ve just opened up in Angel, north London.

Vanessa loved her burrito:

I loved mine too:

This close up shows you some more delicious details:

The burning question, of course is if London’s Burritos are as good as California’s. The short answer is no. The best burrito I’ve had was from a store near Sunnyvale. This wasn’t as good as that, but it was significantly better that the surprisingly OK burritos in Detroit airport.

Admittedly I’m no burrito expert - I throw down the gauntlet to burrito aficionados Mikel (who made me my first burrito), and Steve (who likes burritos a lot). Will be waiting to hear what they have to say.

India’s Tata Motors has the People’s Car, and the Isle of Man’s Peel Engineering has the P50. Spot the difference?

Searching for “google” from maps.google.co.uk fails to return Google’s London HQ, instead it gives this set of results, which shows their Manchester and Zurich locations, as well as a paid listing:

View Larger Map

Google’s real location is here.

This week, we’re going to be working on OSM, all week long. Check out the ZXV blog for more details.

Come map the streets of South-East London:

The OSM South East London mapping party will aim to fill in the blanks in the OSM map of the area. Greenwhich, Lewisham and Blackheath are all well covered by Yahoo!’s aerial imagery, so lots of roads have been filled in but most of them don’t have a name and there’s lots of mistakes with junctions not joining up properly and so on. We’ll also be collecting point-of-interest data; schools, hospitals, shops, pubs and restaurants all make OSM’s map richer and more useful.

There’s more details on the OSM Wiki. As always, OSM Mapping Parties are open to everyone - if you are interested, get in touch or add your name to the wiki.

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Last August I took a flight with GB Airways from Gibraltar to London. When breakfast was served, we opened the seat-back and saw this:

Click on the link and take a look at the high resolution version and you’ll see the filth I was greeted with. Its not what you expect from a £3 tube fare, let alone a £150 flight. I called the flight attendant, who told me there was nothing he could do about it. I suggested that there must be something that could be done. He returned in a few minutes with some wet face towels. “What do you expect me to do with these?”, I asked.

“Clean the tray,” the attendant replied.

“Even RyanAir don’t make you clean your own trays,” I said.

Eventually the manager came to my seat and cleaned the tray for me, which wasn’t really good enough. There was still caked on filth which smelt like old milk all over the seat back and tray infront of me. By way of compensation the attendant offered me a glass of champagne - really not what I wanted at 7am.

When we got home, we emailed GB Airways and attached the above photo. This is the reply we received, some time later (click on the image to see it in more detail):

There’s little point in getting pissed off with stuff like this. I’ll be pretty unlikely to fly with GB Airways in the future - there is plenty of choice on the routes they operate that I take a couple of times a year from the south of Spain to the UK, and their prices would have to be substantially cheaper than anyone elses for me to risk their unique brand of in-flight filth combined with surly attendants. Thankfully, the company’s Gatwick and Manchester routes have been bought by Easyjet, who in my experience have new, quiet and clean planes.

My advice: steer clear of GB Airways.