LibrePlanet: Conference/2019/Transcripts/open-streetmap-through-the-years

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-[OPENSTREETMAP, KATE CHAPMAN, CC BY-SA 4.0]-

-[ https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/openstreetmap/ ]-

-[TRANSCRIPT BY JOEPUBLIC JOE@FREWORLD.INFO]-

[KATE CHAPMAN] (Good? Okay.) Hi, everyone. I'm Kate Chapman, and I'm the chairperson of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Been involved in OpenStreetMap for the past decade. When I was asked to give this talk, it's a little funny, because the award we won yesterday is really for everyone. So, trying to think about what to touch on.

So I'm really just going to go through some of our major milestones, some background on the project, those sorts of things. One of my original ideas was, could I read the names of everyone who contributed data, but it turns out, that would take a year. So, that won't work. So I'm just going to talk about some of the things we've done.

So, sometimes I forget this part--I'm a geographer, so I just assume everyone thinks maps are important. But--And, today, it's becoming more obvious because we have so many more uses of maps, You know, if you have a smartphone, they're right there on your phone. It's not so much before when you occasionally would use a street map or something like that. But it's still, you know, maps are important and they've been important for a long time.

One of my favorite 150-year-old maps, one of the epidemiological maps that was about cholera... So basically John Snow mapped cholera cases in London And this is how he saw there was a geospatial distribution related to certain water pumps, of those cases. What's this have to do with OpenStreetMap, other than maps, are cool, and they've been cool for a really long time? Can you imagine if that road data didn't exist? Like, how would he have plotted that? How would he have done that work? And in some places in the world, that's the situation we're at today. So, think back, 2004, that's when OpenStreetMap got started. In the U.K., the Ordinance Survey, which is the national mapping agency there, their data was very expensive. University student Steve Coast needed map data, very similar to what John Snow needed, so he decided to make his own map. And OpenStreetMap was born. At this time it was mostly people walking and on bicycles with GPS units, so imagine the hiking GPS units, you know, not so much your phone which you might use today. You know, everyone wasn't just walking around with a GPS in their pocket So, the vision was to create a free map of the entire world.

We, in earlier days, didn't talk about it as much, but really, I believe, it should be made by the people making up that world. You know, everyone should be able to contribute to that map.

One of my favorite things about how we discovered licensing is called the Cake Test. Geographic data or a map is only open if someone can make you a gift of a cake with your map on it. And so the idea behind this--this isn't so much the free as in speech, free-as-in-beer type argument, It's actually, could you take your map to a baker, say "Print this map on a cake," take that to a party, cut up the cake for all your friends and share it, and respect the license? The end result of this is: We make a lot of map cakes now. I've eaten OpenStreetMap map cake at the world bank, at government offices, at little community parties, It's one of the unique, quirky things about our community.

So, at a very high level, technical look, what really makes up OpenStreetMap? So we have these things called nodes, ways, and relations, and that's the actual data of where something is on Earth. The X-Y coordinates, if you will. And so we have that information, and then we have key/values attached to it. So you can have a point and you can add as much information to it as you want. The reason this is unique is normally in geographic information systems, you have layers. So you might have like your hotel layer, your street layer, and it's separate data. Picture it almost like separate tables. We just mash it all together. And the reason that's awesome, though, is our data schema is actually crowdsourced, not just our data. But you end up with really funny things like we would tag, you could have on a road, HORSE=YES. Which, presumably, are you putting HORSE=NO on all the roads? So, over the years, you know the structure can be a little funky.

So let me go through some major milestones--I'm sure I missed some. Sorry, there's many milestones; it's been fifteen years and I skipped the first third of them.

So 2004, like many good projects, domain name gets registered, put up a website, and the first mailing list post. The first really community gathering was, thirty mappers went to the Isle of Wright in 2006, to map the island and get to know each other. So, OpenStreetMap, a lot of it takes place in the physical world. So, a lot of times we're mapping at home, but we also come together.

Another important thing that happened in 2006 was that the OpenStreetMap Foundation was formed. So, before that, it was really just Steve Coast had like this project and this idea, but as with many projects, you start to need some legal structure behind it. Who's going to own the servers, who owns the trademark? The domain name? Those sorts of things.

So, the Rails port. What is this? This is our software, also in 2006, that runs the OpenStreetMap website and the API. You should think about names, because they could stick around for really long times. So, thirteen years later, the Rails port has existed longer than the original software. Sorry you don't have a cool name, Rails port. And, same year, the first OpenStreetMap companies were founded, GeoFabrik and CloudMade. 50% of these companies still provide OpenStreetMap services, and 100% of them are still in existence.

The one not providing the services is not competing with us, or anything, so... Just so you know. So, JOSM. JOSM is a desktop editor. I think of it as the Swiss army knife of OpenStreetMap. There is nothing you cannot do in OpenStreetMap in JOSM; there's probably a plugin for it. There's a lot of buttons. So, this is sort of the power user tool that developed about that time.

One of the other real game changers, if you remember back, people were just going around with GPS units. So you actually needed to go down every inch of the area you were mapping. Yahoo! donated their imagery for digitizing in 2006. So, meaning, you'd have a picture, a satellite picture or an aerial picture, and you could trace over it to create lines to digitize buildings, things like that. So you no longer had to walk every inch to map things. And there are some things that maybe would be inaccessable because there's a fence or something; and you could still now see them.

The first State of the Map happened in 2007, and then this map, which is a little hard to see on this screen, but those are all the other places State of the Maps have happened, be they regional, international, when people are getting together to talk about OpenStreetMap, in a conference format, all over the world.

As I said yesterday, we'd be nothing without free software, so mapnik is a library that allows you to render beautiful maps, that came out about 2007, 2006, and it was one of those things, another mailing list post, people like "oh." There's always mailing list posts but this one is successful, and drives a lot of the cartography today.

Potlatch. Potlatch was our first online editor. Remember I said we had the swiss army knife of mapping. Potlatch is more--for a while, if you went to OpenStreetMap.org, You didn't just like sign up for an account and edit. It was more complicated than that. This is the first time you could, just in the browser, start editing.

GPS2Go, this is a program that we don't really do anymore. And it's because access to GPS is a lot easier. But it was this idea that you could write to the foundation, and be sent GPS's in places where they would be more cost-prohibitive. So we started sending GPS units around the world.

So, I sort of polled my fellow board members, to ask about those milestones that they thought were really important. And the thing was, this 2009 Gaza mapping actually, we forgot about it. And the keynote yesterday reminded me; I'm like... Wait a minute. We've done mapping in Gaza to try to help, because at OpenStreetMap, we try to help in our own way. So the first time in 2009, we call Maron, put out a call, let's map, map Gaza, and then later, funded by and supported by Jumpstart International, sent people to actually learn how to map in OpenStreetMap. Then the community was called on again in 2014, to look at satellite imagery to map damaged buildings in Gaza, so the U.N. could do an assesment of what level of damage had happened.

So, for me personally, and a lot of the community, the terrible earthquake that happened in Haiti, in January 2010, was really a changing point for the project. So what happened was there was a huge earthquake, and people were trying to figure out what they could do. And what I always thought was fascinating is people just started mapping, figuring, just from old imagery, figuring maybe having a free map would be useful. But they didn't at first talk to each other. So within an hour of each other an OpenStreetMap mapper in Japan, and one in Germany, just started mapping. And then eventually, you know, people figured out what they were doing, And over the course of a month, 400 people came together, to map Haiti, going from this rather blank map to this detailed map, We were--imagery post-earthquake was donated for us to use. And eventually some of us started going there.

In the early days, just a few days after the earthquake, what really, I think, got people going is this picture was posted on our wiki. And it was from one of the search and rescue teams. And he said, "Having OpenStreetMap on this GPS is vital for us getting around." And, you know, a lot of times you don't even figure that out. Because, how many search and rescue people are going to take the minute to, like, sign up for a wiki account and then post a picture?

But this is one of the real first very clearly documented uses of OpenStreetMap in emergency response.

So the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team was an idea; talks were given about it starting around 2006. It was this idea that free map data could be useful, in humanitarian response. We started going to Haiti in response to the earthquake. The first trip happened about six weeks after the earthquake. And then we kept going. Originally it was just to help response organizations use the data, but later, it was to teach people in the community, and teach people in organizations, how to actually update the map.

And then, in August 2010, someone wanted to give us some money. Prior to that we were getting a little travel funding through a fiscal sponsor, but it was really one of those things where we didn't have a big plan. And so we became an organization. We did not put a lot of thought into it; we more were like, we like needed a bank account to have some money to keep doing good work. And then, the next year, the Australian government approached us, and said, "What if you pre-mapped?" So then we started going to Indonesia to build an OpenStreetMap community there. And the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team, or HOT, supports humanitarian international development projects around the world today. And I should mention, so this is a separate organization built on OpenStreetMap.

And part of the reason for going to Indonesia, as I mentioned, was, sometimes it can actually be fairly easy to build free software. But if you need data, what do you do? So they're building impact modeling software to help disaster managers make better decisions. So they had scientific models, and they couldn't figure out how to get them into the hands of of the regular disaster managers, so they'd actually do something to plan.

So the idea behind this software is you could have a model of say, like a volcanic eruption, and you could combine that with infrastructure data such as buildings, and say, okay, in this scenario, this many buildings will be damaged, so, this many people will be displaced, so you need to plan and have this many tents, blankets, rice, all these sort of things to prepare.

They didn't have that building information. So that was why we were there doing the pre-mapping, was to power InaSAFE, this free software that we were putting in the hands of disaster managers.

The next major milestone, and unfortuantely with the humanitarian work, it's always tied to something terrible that happens. A local Nepalese organization, called Kathmandu Living Labs, had been mapping in OpenStreetMap for a few years...

Their executive director is the first person to do his PhD. in OpenStreetMap, his thesis, you know, they were home.

And the earthquake happened, and so, the next day, they were outside, because it was the only safe place to be, and beginning to figure out how to update the map, who they could help, in collaboration with the international OpenStreetMap community. The difference here is we had connections to community members on the ground, versus Haiti, we were sort of coming in and just trying to see what we could do.

So, I'm going to shift a little, back to, sort of, more geeky legalese because I could give an entire talk on humanitarian efforts, but, that's a small sector of everything that OpenStreetMap does. One of our other major milestones: We've always had a copyleft license, but we used to be licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution license, which, at the time, it's no longer the case, was not right for data. So there was questions if our data could actually be free under that license. So we ended up converting to the Open Database License. And the reason this is an important milestone is, a license change is a huge deal, we had to get everyone to re-agree to the new license, and we lost some people along the way. And it took some time for the community really to recover. But today, it put us on better legal footing, and we're really the largest project using this license, today, but more and more people have begun to use it.

So, we're around 2012 now in our milestones.

iD is the current default editor if you go to openstreetmap.org and hit edit, And it was really, in my opinion, one of our friendliest editors by far. You can sign up for an account, it'll walk you through a tutorial, you really can say to someone, "Edit in OpenStreetMap; it's easy, just sign up for an account and get going."

Another milestone is, I don't know if you remember this, but, Google basically used to offer free API access, and people built their entire businesses on it. And then they were going to start to charge, and certain businesses all of a sudden were going to have multi-million dollar API bills. So people started switching to OpenStreetMap. Our data is free, you know, it's not necessarily free to host, or, go through a provider providing the data, but it was significantly cheaper than what Google was putting in place at that time. So we started to really pick up steam at that point. Which has continued over time as people saw there was a viable option other than Google.

Another--So we've had mapathons all over the world, including the White House. So, one of our more prestigious mapathons, under the Obama administration. But OpenStreetMap is really beginning to be sort of everywhere.

Remember that 2006 donation of imagery from Yahoo!? That's not the only place. Now, we're almost spoiled for choice for imagery, in some, some ways. The State Department provides imagery to us. Digital Globe and Airbus, who are the two space organizations, commercial ones, that own multi-billion dollar satellites, they're the only ones if you want high-resolution imagery of the Earth, often donate imagery. Planet, which is a microsatellite company, just provided it, The World Bank, governments, many others. So we went from walking around with GPS units, to having many choices of different sensors to actually map with.

And then there's the uses. So we don't just have map cakes, we have map coloring books. I think when a project can stay with the sort of the zeitgeist of the time, and what is popular, that's a sign that you've made it, you know? And so our data is free and open enough to make a coloring book.

Over time we ended up with a lot of informal affiliations for OpenStreetMap, but we also have official local chapters. And what it means to be a local chapter is you actually have the rights to use the trademark, you get a seat on our advisory board, and official recognition from the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

2016 was the first chapter's congress at State of the Map. We've actually been in some ways a little slow at developing these local chapters, but they're officially recognized, and we have unofficial local chapters that I'm sure will come on as we go over time.

We also have corporate membership. So, a lot of organizations use our data, and so corporate membership was a way they could support us. Corporate members get a seat on our advisory board, they're separate from our membership that elects our board of directors, but they have a place within our community. Everyone from Apple and Microsoft to the individual mapper have a place in OpenStreetMap. Just figuring out where we all fit.

Another exciting thing that happened last year, is we received a quarter-million dollars worth of bitcoin from the Pineapple Fund. What was exciting was, it appeared in our wallet, and someone had to tell us. So that was awesome. So we're a pretty low-budget organization, our budget tends to be around seventy thousand to a hundred thousand pounds a year. So a quarter-million dollars is huge for us, because we have one part-time staff member and that's it. Running all this data that all these organizations use.

Then there's our growth. So, we started, you'll see from this, it's a little bit logarythmic, I really should have put a graph in place which would have helped, but, you know, going from a thousand users in 2005, to five million registered users today. And the numbers are a little funny; slightly over a million users have contributed data, but five million people have signed up for an account.

The OpenStreetMap of today is still a community mapping themselves, but it's grown to be much, much more. Like other free projects, we're not without tensions. You know, when you work together to such a lofty goal, I think we all believe in the same thing; we want a free map of the entire world. But the roadmap to get to that free map, we don't agree on all the lefts and right-hand turns.

The OSM of the future. I'd love to see more data available from sensors, and so from sensors I mean things, anything from like, a satellite, to GPS trace from your phone, to maybe LIDAR data from self-driving cars, to street view, to anything we might be able to use to update that map. There's probably things out there that'll come eventually that I haven't thought of. Or no one's thought of. We really need to define the place for automated mapping. So, since we started as a very manual process, and now machine learning has made major strides in how you can extract data, from satellite and aerial imagery, or even street view imagery, it's figuring out where's that place, you know, where do the humans and where do the robots fit.

I would love to see more editors from all over the world. We do skew very while, male, and western. There's a lot of work to get other people involved. But we really don't fully represent the map that we're making. More users, more community, and of course, there'll be more map cakes.

So, how many of you have ever mapped in OpenStreetMap?

Oh, pretty good number. Good audience for that.

So how do you join us? There's a lot of different ways.

Simply start mapping. Go to openstreetmap.org, get an account, and then map what you know. Go to your neighborhood; there's probably something missing. Because you can have a virtually unlimited amount of detail. There's probably something important to you, that someone else hasn't yet cared about. You can also start coding. Use our data. Contribute to tools that help us improve the data. And there's a million other things you can do with OpenStreetMap.

Start organizing. As I said, it's a lot of time home at your computer, but, we have mapathons, mappy hours, I don't know if there's ever been a mapapalooza or a mapstock. But there should be; just stick the word map on it.

So, if you've been participating in OpenStreetMap for a while, please consider joining the OpenStreetMap foundation. We're not an expensive membership. Fifteen pounds for a year, gets you a seat at the table. You're on our OpenStreetMap Foundation mailing list, you can vote for our board of directors, you can run for our board. This is a way to support the organization that supports the community.

There's a few upcoming events. So if my talk about OpenStreetMap was so exciting you want to listen to two or three days of it, State of the Map 2019 is in Heidelberg, Germany, the 20th through the 23rd of September, and the U.S. chapter of OpenStreetMap is having State of the Map U.S. 2019, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the 5th through the 8th of September. Both of these have scholarships available, so, if this is something you're interested in, and you're concerned you may not be able to afford the cost, I encourage you to go check out those opportunities. There's also opportunities to volunteer.

So, I want to thank the Free Software Foundation. I wouldn't be here talking to you today without the generous award that we were awarded yesterday, the social benefit award. As I've said, free maps power free software. It used to be that if you wanted to write free software using geospatial data, you would tend to have to get a small subset of proprietary data to be able to do anything. And, it didn't cover the world, you were building it based on proprietary data, and you didn't have that many options. Now, fortunately, we're able to give you options.

And it also goes the other way. People couldn't contribute to OpenStreetMap without using the free software our community has built.

And, if I haven't stressed it enough, I hope I have, thank you to the OpenStreetMap community. You know, without a million accounts adding information we wouldn't have a detailed map.

Okay; thank you. I definitely have time for some questions.

-[APPLAUSE]-

[FACILITATOR] If you have any questions, just make your way up to the microphone, if you need a microphone brought to you just raise your hand and I'll come to you.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER 1] Thanks so much for letting us know what OpenStreetMap is up to. I was curious you mentioned briefly at the end that, oh, it kind of skews a little white and western, Are there places that are like kind of top of the list, like, you know, like, man we really would like to get to know some folks in X place, or, something like that?

[KATE CHAPMAN] Hmm, that's a good question. You know, it's sort of a geeky answer, but, you could do analysis with population, and then look at, like, how much data is supposed to be there, and some, some individuals and organizations are doing that and trying to focus in those areas. so, it, yeah, it's not like a specific country where's like, oh we should go there right now, it's more, like, how do we have better coverage and support burgeoning communities so they can contribute.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER 1] Cool, thanks.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER 2] Hello.

[KATE CHAPMAN] Hi.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER 2] First of all, thank you for providing OpenStreetMap, especially providing them in SVG, because they're very, very useful. I wanted to know if there was future plans for improving the search capability, especially the address mapping. Since, looking at the maps, they look beautiful. But actually doing searches for places, it often falls down.

[KATE CHAPMAN] Yeah. Well, so, there's two aspects to that. One is, sometimes in OpenStreetMap we're spoiled for choice, There's the search we provide on our website, and then there's other providers. And the other is data. So, we definitely don't have universal address data, so, 123 Main Street might not work, and so I would say I can't personally speak to efforts to improve that, I'm sure the developers working on that will incrementally improve it. But I'm not aware of a specific big initiative to do that.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER 3] It's very interesting to hear, you talk about the disaster, relief team, which I guess is separate, you said? From your main efforts? And funding, so, you guys have sort of a shoestring budget, or did at one time, like half an employee, so, how does that get--does that, does the disaster relief team get funded by something like the U.N. or, are they, how much nonprofit funding is there for that kind of work versus volunteer time and such?

[KATE CHAPMAN] Yeah, so it's a combination. I don't know what the budget is of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team now, I was their first executive director so I did know at one point, but, it's on the magnitude of over a million dollars a year, it might be two million, somewhere in there. And it operates with paid staff but also a lot of the work is organizing volunteers, So, there's--if there's a disaster, helping organize people so they can help update data. Also, part--there's a partnership called Missing Maps, which, I don't know who all the partners are now, but originally, it was HOT, Doctors Without Borders U.K., the American and the British Red Cross. And so coming together and saying, okay, these aid and humanitarian aid agencies are going to specific places, let's do as much remote mapping as we can do first, before they go on missions places.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER 3] Yes, so I think this sort brings up a very interesting point, as, so you have this open data licence but there's, you have this need for real-time information, right? Now I wonder if you almost need sort of like this of infectious sort of GPL-style license or, if people are using your data, and they're combining it with essential sources of data, if you can somehow make that data also free, right?

[KATE CHAPMAN] Yeah. So the ODBL license is a copyleft license (Yeah.), and so if you were--and there's examples on our wiki about specific mixing and matching and what it means. So that is in place. And it sort of depends on what you're doing with it, basically, but essentially, like, the basis is, if you take OpenStreetMap data, and you improve it, and then you share it with someone else, you have to share it with everyone. So, very, very GPL-ish.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER 3] Could it be also that if someone's using OpenStreetMap data, and they're republishing it, and they're adding other data, could you stop someone from making that proprietary data, and could you require that they also share that sort of data that being served alongside?

[KATE CHAPMAN] Well, that's exactly what--that's what I just said.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER 3] Okay. Okay. Oh, so it is a requirement. Okay.

[KATE CHAPMAN] Yeah, if you're improving OpenStreetMap data, like, you have to release that.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER 3] Thank you.

[KATE CHAPMAN] Mm-hmm.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER 4] Hi. (Hello.) I'm interested in versioning of the data and finding out, it sounds like the emphasis is on using the latest data that's available at any given time, but what if someone wants a map that was a month old, or a year old, or something, is that built in to the system?

[KATE CHAPMAN] Yeah. So, you can definitely do that, basically we have different types of dumps, and you can start at a snapshot, and add the daily--daily snapshots on to get to what time, you want to be. A lot of that sort of data is used more for sort of social analysis than anything else, because, academic studies have shown that if something's mapped in OpenStreetMap, it's highly accurate. It's comparable to commercial and government data. But if there's a blank spot, that doesn't mean necessarily that there's a blank spot. So, there's only certain uses where like snapshots of data from before would necessarily be useful.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER 5] My question is actually more of a comment, which is something that I think you didn't touch on in the talk. There's an application, it's available in the F-Droid repository, called Street Complete, and that is something I've found that does let you sort of passively contribute to the Open...

[KATE CHAPMAN] That's true. As I said in the milestones, I knew I'd miss something, and Street Complete is definitely one to you.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER 5] Sure, I just thought it'd be a great way if you just want to contribute right now.

[KATE CHAPMAN] For sure, yeah, it's a great way.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER 5] Just install that, and, yeah.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER 6] Hi, I appreciate that you've been trying to represent the broad community, and the great amount of work that's gone into this, but I'm just wondering if you'd be willing and able, to share some of your personal interests in this as a geographer because, (Sure.) as we heard, right, you do what you love, and it's a lot of volunteers and, that's, I'm sure, how you got into it, so...

[KATE CHAPMAN] Sure. So, two things. I started my map in my neighborhood. In Sterling, Virginia, I don't live there anymore, but you could probably tell where my neighborhood is, if you took those snapshots of the data and looked for it, but I worked for a proprietary mapping company at the time, that basically took government data, like polished it up, and then sold it as a subscription back to the government. And during hurricane Katrina, I maxed out my boss's AMEX black card, which I guess has a limit, buying proprietary data to help find people places to stay after hurricane Katrina. So I feel like I need to spend the rest of my life, working on freedom, to make up for that. The second part, so basically I knew I needed to find a new job, when I discovered OpenStreetMap, I'm like, why are we doing this with data? Eventually it's going to have no value. I mean, it's valuable, but it's going to be a commodity. So that happened. And then my personal project I was working on, is I lived in a relatively nice neighborhood, but the fancier neighborhood next to us had the same playground equipment, but they had surveillance cameras up, and it said you had to be a resident to use the playground equipment. So I started secretly mapping their neighborhood and my own, basically to show they looked the same. So my friend and I used to call it "spite mapping," "Oh, you rich people, we're going to go map your neighborhood." So that's how I got involved, but then, after Haiti, it, like, I started going to Haiti after the earthquake, and then I was one of the founders of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, and so OpenStreetMap really has personally changed my life. I went from living in the suburbs of Washington, DC, to living in Indonesia for four years to build an OpenStreetMap community there, to traveling all over the world, meeting our communities, and getting people started mapping. So really, as a geographer and an individual, it's been an incredible community to be a part of. And I don't really know where I would be without OpenStreetMap, What would've happened, would I still be working for a government contractor, in a cubicle maybe? Hopefully I would've found something else. Because I definitely at the time knew about free software, so it wasn't like these ideals were beyond me. But, yeah, I really feel like I owe a lot to OpenStreetMap and our community, because that really enabled me to do what I love, and hopefully save my soul from, you know, proprietary data.

-[LAUGHTER]-

[AUDIENCE MEMBER 7] That's great. Thanks for your talk. Quick question, you mentioned that a lot of the imagery data was like donated? I'm just curious like why those companies are donating it?

[KATE CHAPMAN] Yeah, and it's a little complicated, because it's usually not released under an open license, it's more, derivative works from that data is allowed, so, like, OpenStreetMap is open but the imagery, a lot of times it will say this can be used for OpenStreetMap. (Yeah.) I--There was a time when I just used to go to companies begging them for imagery, and maybe they--and I wasn't the only one, so, they sort of, I think, got sick of it, and like "Oh, the OpenStreetMap people again." But it's generally, except in some disasters, it's generally not an open license, and it's specific to OpenStreetMap.

[AUDIENCE MEMBER 7] Okay. And it's just like, out of the goodness of their heart, or that they're annoyed at you asking?

[KATE CHAPMAN] OpenStreetMap is useful to them too. (Yeah, okay.) So, it's really, we got the the point where we were, there's a business case, like some of it is like social good, but they're big corporations, too, so, you know, they're in it for something. (Yeah, right.)

-[LAUGHTER]-

Okay, well, thank you everyone, for listening to me, and I really appreciate my first LibrePlanet. I'll have to, you know, keep it on the calendar again. And, thank you.

-[APPLAUSE]-