State Of The Map 2012

We’ve already gotten some great proposals for talks on SOTM12 but we still have some more slots left. So the deadline is now extended until May 31st, submit your ideas through Call for Presentations. Don’t wait too long as space is filling up quickly!

Proposals submitted before our earlier deadline (April 30th) will get a confirmation this week and we hope to announce them on this blog next week so you can know what to expect.

You may wonder what the SOTM team is working on at the moment, so let me give you an update.

As you may have noticed, registration is now open, thanks for all who have registered already! You still have some time to get your ticket at early bird prices. If you are an OSMF member you will get an e-mail soon with details on the extra €10 discount. This means you can get a ticket for 3 days of OSM fun for only 75 euro!

The Call for Presentations deadline is approaching fast. If you submit your talk before the end of April you have a very good chance to get accepted. We will let you know in the first week of May and hope to start publishing some talks then.

Of course we’re always looking for new sponsors so have a look at our Sponsors page if you want to request our Sponsorship brochure.

The local team in Tokyo is working on the catering and looking into some excursions we would like to offer.

We’re also working on the Scholarship program for this year and hope to announce this very soon.

Hope to see you all in Tokyo!

Venue

The conference takes place at the Convention Hall (General Research Laboratory Bldg.) at the Komaba II (Research) Campus of the University of Tokyo.

Address

4-6-1 KOMABA MEGURO-KU,
TOKYO 153-8505, JAPAN
35.66109N 139.67760E (OSM map)

Travel together

Do you want to know what accommodation our delegates are staying in? Staying in the same hotel together with other mappers makes it easier to meet and explore Tokyo. We contacted hotels in Shibuya area, asked for availability and were able to make preliminary reservations from Sept. 5th to 9th. We also tried to negotiate discounts. Take a look at the accommodation page on the OSM wiki for more information about where to stay during the conference.

If you want more travel information, look at the transport page or the travel tips page.

More information

Have a look at the SotM2012 Wiki for more information. The Wiki pages will be updated regularly in the following weeks.

We now also have a Facebook event page and in case you want to learn some Japanese, there’s also a Facebook group SotM 2012 Tokyo in Japanese.

‘Liking’ the Facebook pages will not get you into SOTM 2012 but there have been rumours that registration is about to open! So stay tuned!

We’ve got ourselves a new logo! Nicolas Bozon has won our logo-contest with his Fuji-san logo. The logo depicts Mount Fuji, which (according to Nicolas) denotes the geography of Japan very well. The momiji leaves represents the Autumn season, during which SotM will be held. This all in the red sun which is well known from the Japanese flag.

We received a total of 9 logo’s with our logo-contest. It was great to see so much creativity within the OSM community. We would like to thank all participants who’ve submitted a logo for the contest.

The State of the Map (SotM) organizing committee announce Tokyo, Japan as the winning bid for the 2012 International conference for OpenStreetMap (OSM). The annual event will be held September 6th-8th 2012.

There were five proposals to host the leading international OpenStreetMap conference: Aveiro (Portugal), Havana (Cuba), Lille (France), Tbilisi (Georgia) and Tokyo (Japan). “We’ve received several strong bids. Deciding on the best location for State of the Map is always one of our biggest and toughest decisions.” says Henk Hoff, chairman of the SotM organizing committee. With the crisis Japan had to face the past year, the Japanese OSM has grown intensively; making Asia an important part within the OSM community.

“We strongly believe that holding State of the Map in Asia will widen and strenghten the international community as a whole, like it has done in Europe and North America in the past” commented Taichi Furuhashi of OpenStreetMap Japan.

2012 will host the sixth annual international conference, attracting over 250 people in attendance. Previous editions of this conference were held in Manchester (UK), Limerick (Ireland), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Girona (Spain), Denver (USA). Sponsorship details, volunteer opportunities and more information will be available in the near future.

photo: Tadataka INO – The regend of Mapper in Japan. CC-BY-SA Katori-city on Wikipedia