State of the Map 2026 impressions

I have been at the State of the Map 2026 conference in Paris, France for the past few days and want to share a few impressions here. I plan to make a separate post about my talk, this is more general commentary. Jardin des Tuileries The OpenStreetMap Foundation I also don’t want to write much about the OpenStreetMap Foundation here. This is partly because i am probably going to make another post about the upcoming OSMF board elections. But also because that part would have been fairly sad and that would overshadow the otherwise rather positive impression i had. The conference gave a good opportunity to observe the social interaction of the OSMF board and the rest of the inner circle of the OSMF with the other community members at the conference, which allowed me to refine my understanding of the social dynamics of the organization. Summarized in one sentence: I regard this as a huge missed opportunity for the OSMF in-crowd to engage in eye-level exchange with people from the larger…