Save the date: March 25th, 10-16:00

Last year, the Interuniversity National Mapathon was a great success: about 200 people in seven universities participated, and we got in the 7 pm news issue of both VRT and VTM.

We're proud to announce the next National Mapathon is being planned right now, and the universities want our help again! We will need mappers and volunteers at ULB (Brussels), VUB (Brussels), UCL (Louvain-la-Neuve), KUL (Leuven), Ugent, ULG (Liege), UNamur. Four more cities might still join in the following days.

An invitation to register for the event will follow shortly, but mark your agenda now :)

Call for volunteers
If you feel like stepping up your engagement, why not help out during the events? Previous experience with humanitarian mapping, iD and the Tasking Manager is of course welcome, but we will give you some training too. Last year, it wasn't easy finding volunteers for all places, but it is important that there is an experienced mapper at all of these places.

Basically we need you for any or all of these tasks:
- give an introduction about (humanitarian) OSM, a short training
- just being around and helping people with questions
- validating (even from home) during the event, so we can correct newbie mappers before they make the same mistake a thousand times
- help with organisation, finding sponsors,

Just send a reply to this mail with your preferred tasks and city (or cities) and we'll be in touch.

Presenting the new OSM.be

Though we've been a little quiet, we were quite active over the last months. We had our first OSMbe Hackday, where we worked together on the project to import the Flemish GRB buildings into OSM. But that's not all, during that day, we also worked on a new website, which is online at osm.be.

You are very welcome to contribute to the website through Github.

To make it easier for everyone to jump right into the world of OSM in Belgium, we've started OSM Projects. Two are online now, with several more to come. You are welcome to propose your own projects too!

Let's meet up

We have many channels of communication, and sometimes we forget to use all of them. If you never want to miss an activity, do sign up to our Meetup group. In mid February, we're having bar meetups in both Antwerp and Brussels, and we would love to see you there.

But whether you live in De Panne or Arlon, you can go to the Meetup page and "Suggest a Meetup" and just host a meetup yourself! The only thing expected of you is to show up in the bar at the agreed time and look like a mapper.