On Saturday evening 22nd March at the Warehouse Café in Digbeth Birmingham members of mappa mercia received the annual Document Freedom Day Award 2014 on behalf of the OpenStreetMap Foundation from the Free Software Foundation Europe, whose members travelled down from Manchester for the event.
Document Freedom Day is organised every year by the Free Software Foundation on the last Wednesday of March “ for celebrating and raising awareness of Open Standards and formats . On this day people who believe in fair access to communications technology teach, perform, and demonstrate.” So watch out for events all round the world this Wednesday 26th March.
Last year’s award went to Die Tageszeitung for using five Open Standards in publishing their daily newspaper.
Receiving the award Brian Prangle long time OSM contributor and local mappa mercia community co-ordinator said: “It’s always great to have your work recognised, so thank you, on behalf of all the hundreds of thousands of contributors to OpenStreetMap, to FSFE for their award. We’re thrilled that you see OpenStreetMap as making such an effort towards open standards and it’s especially pleasing that you position us as an ‘emerging standard’”
A celebration is nothing without a cake, so apart from the mandatory certificate which we can share with the whole of OSM, FSFE generously provided a superb cake which we ate so unfortunately we can’t share it! But rest assured we worked hard on behalf of OSM and devoured as much as we could before heading off to a nearby pub.
“This was a wonderful opportunity to learn about the achievements and problems faced by a sister movement” said Anna Morris from the Document Freedom Day campaign. “We found that we have many common goals and ample opportunity to share skills and resources.”
We had such a good time with a lovely bunch of people from FSFE and as Anna said we share many goals and ideals so we are planning to keep the contact and collaboration going to see how we can assist each other.
Images Andy Mabbett,
CC-by-SA 3.0
RobJN
It was great to meet with memebers of Free Software Foundation Europe on Saturday. The award is wonderfull recognition of the work that has gine into making OpenStreetMap the best source of free map data. And with OpenStreetMap coming up to it’s tenth year, the timing couldn’t have been any better.
When I first discovered OpenStreetMap.org and saw the map it was clear that it was more up to date than other online maps. Now I realise it’s not just about the map visible on OpenStreetMap.org. Users contribute to the underlying map *data* not just a basic map. By making this map data available for free OpenStreetMap has enabled others to create their own maps, apps and even build businesses using the data. We want to see the map data being used, and this is exactly what Open Standards, Compatibility and Document Freedom is all about.
RobJN
And here’s the associated article from the OpenStreetMap Foundation (an international not-for-profit organization supporting, but not controlling, the OpenStreetMap Project):
https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2014/03/26/document-freedom-day/