Hi, I have been approached by the city of Munich, who want to apply for an EU grant to set up and operate a good cycle routing platform based on OSM data.
What they currently have is a platform that uses only their own data which they spent (and spend) a lot of time to create and maintain. They have basic road data and have manually added information about the safety, suitability, and "green-ness" of routes so that you can get a routing that matches your requirements. What they now intend to do is expand this to encompass the rural areas around Munich as well, while at the same time delegating the data maintenance to the community. Of course the whole thing will be developed in a way that can easily be used for any other place (a major selling point for an EU project). They also intend to create incentives and processes for citizens improve the data. This will probably start with finding out (from their previous experience) what data you need to do proper bike routing, and then analyzing in how far this is already present in OSM, and where not, create/improve tools for people to see where the data is missing and fix it. Then there'll be the development of the routing platform, perhaps based on pgrouting, and then they'll want to set up processes for people to work with the data, e.g. also have a feedback loop into the planning offices so that they know where bottlenecks are and so on. It is not yet exactly clear what the plan is, but they are really keen on not only taking OSM data but also working with the OSM community and feeding everything back to OSM. Munich has recently been in the press for ditching Windows and switching all of the administration IT over to Linux, so they're probably the largest public entity in Germany to have "seen the light" of free software (and free data now as well). They're looking at a project duration of up to three years, and want to request appropriate funding from the EU under the IEE programme which, among others, has funds available for increasing the use of cycling. The project application has all the right keywords to go down well with the EU (application deadline is 20th June, but the decision will only be made in late 2008), but there's one catch: Any successful EU project needs to have a number of partners in different EU countries, and that's why I am writing this post: Munich doesn't yet have enough partners to get this through. Possible partners include city or regional administrations, cycle associations, even commercial entities like publishers who have an interest. Munich would be the "project lead", doing the deals with the EU, but since the project isn't that specific yet, partners will certainly have a say and their wishes be accommodated. Partners will get their share of the money if the project is accepted, and will be expected to co-operate in finalizing the proposal. As an example, a good partner would be a city administration that wants to roll out cycle routing locally, or an administration that wants to create cycle maps, or someone who intends to use the data and put it on mobile navigation devices, or even a public transport entity that intends to combine cycle routing with their traffice schedules or something like that. If anyone is interested, or has an idea about whom we should contact, please tell me. With roughly six weeks left until application deadline, we need partners who are flexible - someone who first has to be convinced that OSM is good would probably be too slow. (If it doesn't work out this year then they intend to apply next year but I guess until then OSM will have done all the work on its own.) We'd be especially happy to find partners in Eastern Europe (it seems that these make funding a project more attractive to the EU), but anyone else outside Germany is also fine. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
