More than two weeks have passed since a packed long weekend in San Francisco for State of the Map US, and we’ve had some time now to reflect and run some numbers.
381 attendees came out for the conference, making this the largest OpenStreetMap gathering ever. It was 70% larger than last year’s U.S. conference in Portland, echoing the overall huge growth we’re seeing in new users and edits to OpenStreetMap.
Most people traveled to the conference from within the United States, with a large West Coast representation. But the international crowd was also impressive with folks coming from Nicaragua, Haiti, Germany, England, France, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, and other countries. Of all attendees 20% were female, which while still small is up from last year’s count of 15.5% female attendees.
In total there were 52 sessions, and all but two are available to watch online in their entirety. There were also 20+ birds of a feather sessions on everything from vector tiles to the redesign of openstreetmap.org to OSM in humanitarian and government work. And don’t forget the three awesome parties.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to fill out our survey on the conference. Most notably 42% of respondents use OpenStreetMap in their job, 35% expect to use it in the future, and only 23% do not use it now and doubt they will down the road. We were also happy to see that 68% of respondents would like to come to future OpenStreetMap events, and a whopping zero said they wouldn’t consider it.
The energy within OpenStreetMap right now is truly inspiring, and this was really put on display in San Francisco. I’m excited for the community to keep pushing forward in the coming months and to come together again at the next State of the Map happening in Birmingham, UK in September.
