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.

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 OSM community they otherwise do not practically communicate with beyond the casual level. Of course, the cross section of the visitors at a SotM conference is much more narrow than the OSM community at large. But it is still massively larger and more diverse than the group of people the OSMF as an organization practically engages with in deliberation on decisions they make these days – which means a substantial unused resource of knowledge and competency.

Social exchange

I had not been at a SotM conference since pre-COVID (and i am not counting FOSSGIS conferences here, since they are not comparable at all) so i was able to meet again quite a few people who i had not met in person for many years, but whose perspective on OpenStreetMap i value. The much higher bandwidth and additional modes of communication available in an in-person exchange are truly enjoyable in such cases and can help to a more nuanced understanding of each others ideas and thoughts.

The other part of social interaction at the conference i found particularly valuable was getting to know and engaging in communication with people i did not know beforehand – or only vaguely recall them from their online activity. I think i had an approximately 50:50 ratio in this field between people approaching me and me approaching others – which is naturally how it should be, although i only achieved that ratio probably because i presented a talk and a poster so people had a good basis to engage in a conversation with me.

For this part, however, i don’t think the in-person conversation is inherently so important. It is more that the opportunity for a casual first contact one-on-one is much more difficult to find in digital communication. That is more an issue with established communication culture and technical frameworks of communication used and not a limitation of digital communication per se.

And naturally there is the third major part of social interactions that involves developing the social relationships with people i already knew better and who i have usually seen at least occasionally in person since 2019. I have to say i kind of neglected that part a bit probably and i want to apologize to those who i have either not talked to at all or that i have only exchanged a few words with and who might have expected more. I observed (and this aligns with observations at previous SotMs) that many people at the conference spend the main part of their time in socializing with a relatively small and close social circle of theirs. While this is understandable it also misses out on the chance to widen your horizon. In many cases those you observe being strongly tied to a crowd of familiar people are actually grateful of being approached by others, especially if they are relative newcomers who struggle with the unfamiliar environment. On the negative side i distinctly noticed that there are quite a few of the OSM old-timers who seemed to be almost exclusively pursuing networking for their personal and career interests at the conference and expressing at least disinterest – if not contempt, regarding people approaching them with ideas and views outside their specific interests. Please note i distinctly make this observation not only from my own experience because i am aware that i am a controversial figure in the OSM community and if people express disinterest and contempt at my views that is not something you can necessarily extrapolate further.

The location

Having SotM in France has been long overdue – the French OSM community is one of the most active world wide and one of the best integrated in local society at large. They have made bids for hosting SotM several times in the past but never succeeded before.

It is natural for the French community to pick Paris as the place to host the conference and it is a convenient location for the international audience to travel to. The public transport system in Paris seems very well managed (in actual operation – the ticketing is another story, but i will skip that here). I was also impressed by the free public toilets and free drinking water dispensers throughout the city center – in particular in contrast to the saddening pictures German cities present in that regard.

The location, however, has been non-ideal for the purpose of maximizing accessibility for large parts of the OSM community economically. Paris is an expensive city and the conference venue was not located in an area with abundant affordable accommodations. The only hotel in walking distance to the venue was a medium priced ibis hotel and the contingent of rooms at reduced price the conference organizer negotiated with the hotel apparently was already booked out when it was publicly announced. In retrospect, my recommendation would have been to pick a cheap accommodation away from the conference venue and to commute to the conference via public transport – which is fairly affordable in Paris.

The venue itself was a very good choice, providing a lot of space, including outdoors. The only minor practical issue was that the different rooms for the talks were in separate buildings and required a walk outside, and Friday and Saturday there was occasionally heavy rain – for which many of the visitors were unprepared after a long dry summer in most of Europe.

Speaking of the Summer – because the conference took place at the end of a warm summer many of the conference rooms were fairly warm and stuffy on the first day. This became better on Saturday and Sunday as the weather substantially cooled down.

The catering at the conference was excellent, lunch was provided in the university canteen and was really good quality with two main meals (vegan and meat based), a salad bar and a broad selection of deserts.

The social event

I am generally not a fan of social events so my perspective might be considered somewhat biased here up front. The French community tried to provide a special experience here and organized the evening event on Saturday in a museum (Musée des Arts et Métiers) in central Paris. The event took place in a former church that is part of the museum.

Due to the previously mentioned fact that the conference took place at the end of a warm summer it was – similar to the conference venue – somewhat warm and stuffy. But more importantly – inside a church building filled with several hundred people talking it gets really loud. At some point i was tempted to put on my ear plugs.

The rest of the museum was also open to those conference visitors who had pre-registered and paid an additional EUR 10 fee and the museum visit provided a nice time-out from the noise at the main gathering. Also the outdoor space in front of the museum was open to us, providing additional quieter space. But this was not communicated well beforehand to the conference visitors so they could not make best use of the available options.

In general, finding a suitable venue for a social event of a conference like this is hard, especially for more than 500 people like in this case. Based on my observations in this SotM and also at previous conferences i would give the following recommendations:

• Good acoustic design of the rooms where the visitors gather is of very high importance. Sadly this is lacking in the vast majority of places. Humans have the unfortunate tendency to – if they have trouble understanding each other – speak louder – which is silly, of course, in places where the trouble in understanding is caused by others talking to each other. But this is a problem that can be solved through technical means by properly dampening sound propagation in the rooms.
• If the climate at the conference location permits event visitors to spend time outside having space outside well accessible from the inside parts of the venue is of high value. In many cases it will not be possible to trust the event can take place fully outside, but ideally you’d then have sufficient space inside for everyone and also sufficient space outside for most of the people where it is less loud and conversations are easier, especially with a larger number of participants.
• There should ideally be both enough space for most people to sit down and enough space for people to gather standing without standing in the way of others. If the place is designed for most people to sit most of the time (i.e. tables and sitting with only narrow space in between for walking) this will hamper people freely mingling while if sitting opportunities are rare it will be exhausting for people and prevent more intense and longer conversations.

The talks

As in past SotM conferences i actually listened to relatively few talks live – partly because it is exhausting to switch between different topics in rapid succession, partly because the other functions of the conference, in particular talking to other visitors directly, seem much more important to me in light of the talks being also available for viewing afterwards.

None the less, here a few recommendations of talks i found interesting. Note this is grossly incomplete since i have not seen a lot of the talks so far.

• Making maps with Ultra by Daniel Schep (Video, Description). In my own talk i point out the significance of traditional maps for the social cohesion of the OSM community, but i also point out that this is not meant to demonize the interactive, individualized visualization approaches. This talk gives a bit of a glimpse into what might be possible in that field and how meaningful use cases of individualized visualization can look like beyond the dabbling with mostly meaningless technical gimmicks approaches that some of the other map production talks take.
• Sourdough and Layercake: removing technical barriers to using OSM data for cartography and analysis by Jake Low (Video, Description). While this talk – like practically all the other talks on map production at the conference – has a selectively technical focus and ignores many of the fundamental inner contradictions the whole client side map rendering paradigm contains, this is the first presentation i saw that is actually reflecting critically on the division of design decisions between tile schema development and style development. The sourdough part of the talk (first nine minutes) presents the idea of creating a style agnostic vector tile schema, minimizing the level to which map design decisions are already predetermined in the tiles – in a similar way to OSM-Carto currently using a style independent database schema. Now the significance of this is IMO not the practical value of such a tile schema, but that this might help people realizing the inherent limitations of the client side map rendering paradigm.
• Making a living on OSM by nurturing the commons: inside the French Federation of OSM professionals by Marina Petkova and Florian Lainez (Video, Description). This talk introduces the French Association of OSM related businesses and how this has organized itself separately from the hobbyists in OpenStreetMap France. This is highly recommended to watch for anyone who is involved somewhere in the world in organizing the local OSM community as a potential role model. I recently discussed the conflicts arising from the German community having not chosen such a path and the FOSSGIS as originally an association representing professional interests taking on the mantle of representing the German OSM hobbyist community in addition. Incidentally the base membership fee in FPOSM for a single person business and the future membership fee of FOSSGIS for an individual mapper starting next year are the same (EUR 60 per year).
• Here be Rainbows: LGBTQ mapping in OSM by Amanda McCann and Erica ‘spughetti’ Temp (Video, Description). Don’t let the specialized subject make you dismiss this talk. There were very few really mapping focused talks at this conference and this one i found in particular noteworthy because it discussed the problem of developing tagging that is recording social aspects (in this case: if a certain public place is welcoming or friendly to certain people) in a meaningful and critical way. Many people developing such tagging put expected usefulness of certain information over verifiability – ignoring the fact that the expected usefulness is usually an illusion without verifiability. This talk is a nice counter-example by acknowledging the difficulty.
• Wonders of OSM by CapitaineMoustache (Video, Description). This is a fun talk at the end of the conference with various anecdotal examples for weird and unusual, but nice mapping around the world, celebrating the diversity of mapping in OpenStreetMap. Incidentally, this is also a great demonstration of the advantages of OSM-Carto and traditional map rendering techniques over the widely hyped ‘modern’ client side approaches. I invite everyone to follow the links from the presentation and then switch to the Shortbread and Maptiler OMT layers for comparison.

Note that this year – in contrast to most previous years – the talk videos are already available immediately after the conference. The SotM organizers have contracted a small French video production company for the videos, and they seem to have done a very good job – including automatic transcription and translation of the talks.

The questions after the talk

One thing that has significantly changed compared to the time i was previously at a SotM conference is the questions after the talks. In an effort to better open the conference to remote participants, questions are meant to be primarily asked digitally now. There are many visitors who struggle with that. In my eyes, the idea to better include remote participants is commendable, but the implementation is highly non-ideal. First of all – while the live streams of the conference were open to everyone, the questioning seemed to have been behind a paywall – you had to purchase an online participation ticket for access. The reasoning behind this eludes me (beyond the we use a paid platform for the questions where we pay for every visitor, so we need to limit access – which is not really a convincing reason IMO).

Be that as it may – practical handling of the Q&A differed. Some of the session hosts only allowed online questions, some first went through the online questions and allowed spontaneous questions from the room if there was time afterwards, while others alternated between in-room spoken questions and online questions.

For the presenter of a talk, answering online questions is often more difficult because the people asking are usually not aware of the previous discussion – because the questions tend to be asked already during the talk. So there is less of a conversation developing. For me, when i answer more difficult questions i tend to re-state the question in my own words before answering and maintain eye contact with the person asking to assess if i understood it correctly.

Overall i think if you have the talks in front of a live audience it makes sense to also accept questions directly asked by the live audience. The remote participation is not really helped by not doing so and the live audience is more likely to evade the constraint by approaching the speaker after the talk in person – which is much more damaging to the inclusion of remote participants.

I have previously presented how i would imagine talks at a mixed in-person/remote conference to be organized and i have refined that concept based on the experience at this SotM. I might discuss that in a separate blog post.

On SotM organization

One notable thing happening at this year’s SotM was bidding farewell to Christine as head of the SotM organizing committee of the OSMF. I discussed the significance of achieving generational turnover in projects of the OSM community in the past. The OSMF has so far been notoriously bad at this and this might be the first really positive example of managing a generational turnover in the OSMF.

In the European OSM communities we tend to have a strong aversion against the discussion of what the Americans casually call leadership. We tend to equate leadership with authoritarian leadership and hierarchy – and we often are critical of both. I think Christine’s involvement in the SotM organizing committee demonstrates many of the aspects of leadership important in a fundamentally egalitarian community like OpenStreetMap – like providing guidance and advice, encouraging and putting trust in people and moderating conflicts, cooperating with rather than managing people – aspects which we tend to ignore if we equate leadership with people exercising power over other people.

And these in return are supportive of a successful generational turnover – so the SotM organizing committee is in a fairly good position of accomplishing that.

I am reluctant to declare that the SotM organizing committee has already demonstrated a successful generational turnover though, because that is not tied to a single person, but to the group overall.

Exclusivity and Inclusivity at SotM

In previous discussions of State of the Map i critically commented on the exclusivity of these events and the fact that – despite the claims from the OSMF that these are meetings of the global OSM community they are not. There are traditionally mostly three groups of people present at the SotM conference:

• People professionally involved with OSM or OSM data in some form
• The wealthy global OSM jet set
• Members of the local community from near the place where the conference takes place

This was the same back in previous SotMs i visited as well as this year. The main differences i observed were that

• The intercontinental presence seemed substantially shifted and reduced – both on the professional and the jet set sector. There were quite a few people present from Africa and South East Asia but very few from South America and Japan. This might be related to the local conferences (SotM Asia, SotM LatAm) taking place – which might be more popular than the OSMF SotM meanwhile. The presence of big US tech companies was substantially reduced.
• There seems to be an increase of non-commercial professional visitors (students, people working for government institutions or NGOs).

I don’t really have a solid basis to assess if the number of pure hobby mappers at the conference relative to the other participants has increased or not.

What remains the same is that the State of the Map is clearly inaccessible for in person visits for the vast majority of the OSM community. And no scholarship program is going to really change that in substance. Attempts are made to allow remote participation and this way reduce the barrier – which is commendable. Still anyone reflecting on the State of the Map conference should always keep in mind that the people present there are not in any way representative for the OSM community at large.