osp blog - Colm

OSM to SVG

2018-10-06T00:00:00+02:00

Extracting OSM data for SVG use.

I've been meaning to document my OSM to SVG process for a while now, I just had to run the process again recently, so here was a new chance to take screenshots along the way. The basic idea is to process a portion of Open Street Map data into a vector paths and shapes. One of the ways I have been able to accomplish this is using an xml conversion tool, in my case, xsltproc but there are many others. Before we can convert the dot osm xml, here is how I obtain the osm data in the first place:

Note: this process is greatly aided by this page on the OSM wiki, but a lot of the info and links are out of date, hence this document. It remains a good place to start. [https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmarender/Convert_osm_data_from_OSM_file_to_an_SVG_image]

Getting the data

It is possible to extract bits of OSM using the API, making a GET request in this format https://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/map?bbox=-0.5,51.3,-0.4,51.4 but if your request is too big, the OSM api will refuse to treat your request. Most of the time I simply download a full country file from geofabrik http://download.geofabrik.de/europe.html

about the bounding box

Just for reference, a selection area can in this case be called the bounding box. In my experience, most tools that function with OSM expect the bounding box to be set as left,bottom,right,top. Depending on the api or tool, those values will be differenly seperated, but that order seems to be consistent, thank goodness.

Mine was of these values:

-6.59 52.87 -6.21 53.23 meaning left=-6.59 bottom=52.87 right=-6.21 top=53.23

I know there probably are better ways to do this, but I still get my box coordinates from this online tool from geofabrik again: http://tools.geofabrik.de/calc/#type=geofabrik_standard&bbox=-6.588098,52.879038,-6.214317,53.220207&tab=1&proj=EPSG:4326&places=2

That tool only gives you the coordinates, now we need to cut out our selection from the large file downloaded earlier.

cut out the piece you need

osmosis is used to cut out section of the map for easier work using a command like this, assuming you want to work with the compressed file* :

bzcat downloaded.osm.bz2 | osmosis --read-xml enableDateParsing=no file=- --bounding-box top=49.5138 left=10.9351 bottom=49.3866 right=11.201 --write-xml file=- | bzip2 > extracted.osm.bz2

you could also uncompress the file, and use the desktop Java OSM editing tool called JOSM. With JOSM, you can open and edit (it's main purpose) OSM data directly.

convert the OSM xml to svg using stylesheets from osmarender

Now comes the complex part of transforming OSM xml into SVG xml. See, OSM after all is basically one enormous xml database. This is an interesting but potentially problematic thing, long term. See emacsen's post about the serious troubles of OpenStreetMaps

If you're reconciled with OSM for now, we need to convert the section of the map DB to svg, for which we need to rule-render the OSM xml to SVG xml. This is done using a stylesheet that can be obtained from osmarender. OSMarender seems to have an xml processor built in but I couldn't get it to function on my system so I used *xsltproc* which reads rules from an xsl file + a stylesheet to convert all xml to all xml.

OSMarender gives us access to a load of zoom-level stylesheets. However when I tried to obtain these using my packet manager, all official links were dead, luckily, clones were made, so get yourself a copy of the OSMarender stylesheets from a place like this https://github.com/pnorman/osmarender-testclone

the xsltproc manual suggest this command structure as a general example: xsltproc -o map.svg osmarender.xsl osm-map-features-z17.xml but in my case, I use the xml fields to select a data file, so the command looks a bit more like this:

xsltproc -o bunclody/bunclody-fullmap.svg ../osmarender.xsl stylesheets/osm-map-features-z17.xml

!! Depending on the zoom level you choose, and the size of your bb, this operation can take multiple hours, be aware of this, and keep an eye on your system, the cpus will have pretty intense xml crunching to deal with !!

Note that this stylesheet includes a section of options in the file header that looks like this:

<rules xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" data="/home/colm/git/osmosis/glendalough.osm" svgBaseProfile="full" scale="1" symbolScale="0.107" textAttenuation="14" minimumMapWidth="0.5" minimumMapHeight="0.5" withOSMLayers="yes" withUntaggedSegments="no" showScale="no" showGrid="no" showBorder="no" showLicense="no" interactive="no" showRelationRoute="no" symbolsDir="../stylesheets/symbols" meter2pixel="0.1375">

Contour lines

Unfortunately, the OSM db does not include any contour lines data. Thankfully, out bounding box can be a query element for earthexplorer using phyghtmap that will give us a .osm export of the bounding box we're interested in.

phyghtmap --earthexplorer-user=colm --earthexplorer-password=********** -a -6.59:52.87:-6.21:53.23

phyghtmap expects left:bottom:right:top as noted above

phyghtmap will need login credentials from earthexplorer, so you'll need an account from there before you can download any of that data. I'm unsure how phyghtmap queries earthexplorer exactly, but in my case, the bounding boxes I set often result in multiple files. To merge the two or more files that your phyghtmap query returns, I use JOSM, import both datasets as different layers and then merge them from the program. This is not exactly a necessary step, but as I'm bringing in the contour lines as a separate svg layers, when merged, the contour lines layer will be exactly the same size as the OSM data we converted earlier, meaning it can be easily aligned to the baselayer.

xsltproc -o bunclody/contours-wscale.svg osmarender.xsl bunclody/stylesheets/osm-contours-only.xml

Next, you need to convert this other OSM-type data into svg also, using a similar xsltproc command. Here this repo was essential again https://github.com/pnorman/osmarender-testclone

merging the two

Bringing together your different svg layers is done with inkscape of course and now you have multiple paths to chose to handle your data. If you're just doing on screen renders, then I believe this text will be enough for you. If you intent is flat printing, I can't help you there yet, as my interests have been around plotting these maps; for this read on.

First of all, I had to (re)discover some inkscape tricks to help me work on the different parts of the maps. I listed some of these below, I may add to this list later:

resize svgs + content to different sizes https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/6574/in-inkscape-resize-both-the-document-and-its-content-at-the-same-time
Find replace tool in inkscape: CTRL + f, open options, uncheck all types, select text or paths to create a dynamic selection that can then be moved to a separate layer.
osmarender follows SVG practices pretty nicely, but if you're tying to convert objects to paths, inkscape will complain about working cloned objects. The tag is a good practice XML SVG feature, but in our pen plotting case, we need all native paths, so: Search for clones (using detailed method above) and then do a edit > clone > unlink clone to re-create all paths as individual style objects, instead of cloned bits of the xsl stylesheet.
I'm still looking for a way to save one single inkscape layer as it's own SVG, any ideas on this topic are appreciated.

Later, I process the SVGs either to HPGL or to GCODE. If your machine uses the latter, I suggest using the ! now built in ! gcodetools extension. If gcode in inkscape is your path, I personally got to grips with the extension with this published method: https://www.norwegiancreations.com/2015/08/an-intro-to-g-code-and-how-to-generate-it-using-inkscape/

Happy mapping !

Reviving the OSP blog

2018-01-20T00:00:00+01:00

Welcome to the new OSP blog! Happy to have you here. This post is titled reviving the OSP blog because in the last 5 years or so, the structure of our website has drastically changed. When this blog was started, on this day in 2006, Harrisson asked the question that has fueled this collective to this day. The point of this article is not to answer Harrisson's question, but rather to take the opportunity to look back a tiny bit, as this migration has exposed things to me that I never got the chance to see in the old blog.

Our old blog ran off Wordpress. And while Wordpress is a great system to run a blog off of, it has been hard to make it fit in with the rest of OSP's website advancements. In 2013 there was a move to show our git server as the core of the website, a way in which we could share our projects and publish their source files in the same instance. The website went from a traditional blog based site to a site that is used to communicate our design process in a ‘release early, release often’ manner: every time we add a file to our shared repository it shows up on our site.

The site changed a little over the next year or two, with it's last update to current form in 2016. E r i c wrote about the precise proceedings of this on his own blog: i.liketightpants/and/. Somewhere in the mix of all this was also the move from the original domain name we had inhabited: ospublish.constantvzw.org to the current one: osp.kitchen. As the website was now an ambitious growing django app with a copy of all the git repositories we worked on, we moved to our own VPS to stop putting too much weight on the constant server.

All this meant that the blog, the original OSP site took a back seat. We kept publishing to it, but the rhythm clearly dropped. In fact, 2013 was possibly the year during which we posted the least to the blog. We attempted a rescue by fixing up the theme of the wordpress blog to fit in better with the rest of the main site, but there was nothing for it, we got too busy and had enough trouble keeping the icebergs properly updated. Bit by bit the plugins got deteriorated, and the wordpress admin felt more and more foreign. We're not really writing blog posts anymore. But this post is here to try to put a stop to this, and along with it, a whole new way of managing the blog.

In October, I found out that my favorite static site generator Pelican actually had a tool to import .xml exported wordpress archives. The script obviously heavily depends on pandoc but has recently fallen behind pandoc's latest usage models, so the import was not as clean as the tool said it would be. Not to fear, a few regex scripts later and most of the wounds were patched.

In the process, I had to make a decision to facture Wordpress's liberal attitude towards categories and tags. Seemingly, WP allows a post to be part of multiple categories, as well as have loads of tags. The latter I have no issue with, the former, when moving to a file based static site generator confuses things deeply. So I squashed any category past the first one into tags, and now categories are based on what folder they come out of, which I thoroughly appreciate in pelican. Still, I screwed up one of the scripts somewhere, there are a lot of new single tags that are actually resulting from missing commas. This one, or this one, or this one.

Lastly, I hope this move lets us use the blog with more flexibility. It's markdown file based, so we could be simply publishing other documents we've written here, or actually use it as an archive. Gitlab pages actually takes care of SSGs with Pelican so that's one less thing to worry about. We'll see how we export the generated content to somewhere on our own server in due time.

Forgive the last few code or style bleeds in the content, we're working on those!

Up Pen Down — Huppe plume tonne

2015-08-07T18:54:00+02:00

Announcing Up Pen Down — Huppe plume tonne

a workshop and preformance during the Quinzaine Numérique 2015:

specifics of the workshop are on their way, but for now, here is the introduction text:

En 2012, OSP (Open Source Publishing) construit un workshop de plusieurs mois avec des étudiants de l'École Supérieure d’Art et Design de Valence. La proposition au centre des tables s'intéresse en détail au «trait», dans le sens de «chemin» (path en anglais) par opposition et en dialogue avec la notion de forme. Si ce point de départ offre plusieurs perspectives — celles du dessin, de la typographie, de la cartographie — ce «chemin» pose aussi la question des outils et en particulier des outils numériques, et de leur relation avec le langage visuel.

Il y a trois ans donc, des étudiants en design graphique, en typographie et nous-mêmes sont amenés par le trait à la performance. Aujourd'hui, nous allons réitérer l'expérience en modifiant le chemin de l'apprentissage. Nous proposons un workshop d'expérimentation permettant deux approches :
– pour les participants avec une expérience graphique, s'intéresser à produire du lettrage par des mouvements à échelle du corps;
– pour les participants avec une expérience chorégraphique, s'intéresser à la manière spécifique par lequel le dessin (down) et le non-dessin (up) questionne le mouvement et ses différentes échelles;

Nous chercherons à nous intéresser spécifiquement à une série de questions, et aux spécificités qui y répondent.

La chorégraphe et danseuse Adva Zakaï nous accompagnera dans ce travail de débroussaillage. Son travail de recherche fondé sur l'hypothèse que le corps mute progressivement en texte numérique, et que le numérique mute en retour au contact intime des corps.

Relearn 2015

2015-06-28T17:36:00+02:00

Relearn is back for 2015!

We're very happy to see the summer school continue and morph into a new being again this year, with a new set of people taking care of the organization. Quick recap: OSP set up the first edition of Relearn in 2013. In 2014, Relearn was a jointed venture with all the Variable labs taking part, just before we had to vacate the house. This time, there are no immediate ties between the organizers, yet there is a very solid body of exciting and able people taking care of this summer's school.

This year, we go to Zinneke, to broaden our horizons.

You can read all about the selected tracks on relearn.be/2015/ and peruse through the archives for /2014/ and /2013/

!Applications close on the 1st of July!

See you there?

ASBL Print party outcome

2015-06-05T10:55:00+02:00

When you mix travel stories with non profit association elation, within the zero boundary format of a print party, what do you get?

We came up with a mix of different things we wanted to share and show, and mixed them in with some more down to earth writing extracted from our Statutes. One article in particular, Article 3, we are particularly happy with, so we plotted it on a huge A1 during the party, then offeredan interface to let anybody add in drawn augmentations.

Meanwhile, live Laidout and cutting plotter trace, not print - draw, not paint.

Article III: Goal, social object, field of action

2015-06-05T10:41:00+02:00

This is an extract from our association statutes. Links at the end of the page.

The association OSP has as its main goal to propagate Free and Open Source culture in Brussels and internationally. More specifically, OSP asbl aims to stimulate the social movements of Free Culture and Free Software in the field of graphic design.

Free Culture and Free Software challenge the excesses of copyright and one of the ideas which underly copyright: the ideas of originality and of artistic creation as a solitary act. Instead they propose a vision of artistic creation which includes collaboration, exchange and creative re-appropriation.

Free Culture chooses not to reject copyright outright, but to appropriate and subvert it with its own means (also known as “copyfight”). Participants in Free Culture choose to distribute artistic works under a license which permits others many of the freedoms normally lacking in traditional copyright licenses: the freedom to freely use the works, modify them and redistribute the modified copies.

Free Software as a concept applies to computer software; an example of a Free Software license is the GNU General Public License. Free Culture as a concept applies to other cultural works such as designs, drawings, compositions, texts. An example of a Free Culture license is the Free Art License and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.

Free Culture and Free Software are part of what is more popularly known as “Open Source”. More specifically Free Culture and Free Software are “share-alike”: that is to say, a work of Free Culture and of Free Software can only be used by others if the resulting work is also licensed as Free. They can thus be seen as to be concerned with creating an alternative ecology which features a different way of dealing with intellectual property; an ecosystem that can exist next to but cannot easily be fully appropriated by the existing privative regimes of intellectual property.

While one can make Free Culture with proprietary software, and one can use Free Software to produce creative works under traditional copyright licenses, OSP asbl stimulates the use of Free Software to create Free Culture in order to develop a coherent ecosystem of freedom. Indeed Free Software, by its open nature, invites to understand the mechanisms of digital tools to then manipulate them in a critical and constructive way. Practices shape tools—tools shape practices.

OSP asbl pursues the realization of its goal by all means but more specifically through three axis: pedagogy, research and graphic design. OSP asbl gives workshops in the frame of traditional educational institutions and organizes alternative events outside of that frame which further question how Free Culture can change existing pedagogy. In collaboration with cultural or educational institutions, OSP asbl is able both to develop a theoretical framework and the open tools which exemplify this position. By engaging in graphic design practice, both as part of its own projects and those of others, the hypotheses from the research are tested in practice, and new questions arise. Finally, editing and publishing are a means to serve OSP asbl goal, as are public events: print parties, workshops, performances, exhibitions and lectures.

When depositing statutes to declare an association in Belgium, you are intended to write these in the language used by the governmental institution you are registrating with. In the case of OSP, we wanted to register with both the Dutch and the French governments to have the dual ASBL / VZW status. We have an English version because it was our middle ground to sync beteen the french and english version. It's nice to use the english one on the blog.

OSP ASBL VZW Celebration Print Party

2015-05-28T11:51:00+02:00

We are happy to announce an OSP ASBL/VZW* celebration evening and Print Party.

Back from our yearly travel to the Libre Graphics Meeting, full of Toronto stories, and soon to be tattooed with a VAT number, OSP welcomes you in their transit tavern.
Join us in cutting, plotting and browsing recent works. Come to celebrate the launch of our association with us, and visit our Schaerbeek studio before the caravan moves on!

De retour de notre voyage annuel aux Libre Graphics Meeting, avec quelques expressions torontoises à partager et bientôt un numéro de TVA à se faire tatouer, OSP vous accueille dans sa taverne de transit. Rejoignez-nous pour découper, plotter et feuilleter nos récents travaux. Venez fêter le lancement de l'asbl, et visiter notre studio de Schaerbeek avant que la caravane ne se déplace à nouveau!

19:00 → 21:00 Machines launch + crackers
21:00 → 22:00 Dancing
Guests: Roland, Océane, Cameo.

OSP asbl/vzw Print Party
Thursday May 28, 19:00 — 22:00
Avenue Princesse Elisabethlaan, 46
1030 Schaarbeek

* ASBL/VZW is the Belgian form of non-profit association that we have chosen as the legal structure for Open Source Publising.
The general assembly will officialy create the entity, as we will vote on the following statutes:
http://www.ejustice.just.fgov.be/tsv_pdf/2015/03/06/15303974.pdf (French)
http://www.ejustice.just.fgov.be/tsv_pdf/2015/03/06/15303975.pdf (Dutch)

HTML sauce cocktail

2015-03-19T15:10:00+01:00

We just finished a great workshop week @HEAR Strasbourg on the topic of printing HTML.

Printing HTML is not a new idea, but in the last few years we've been compiling sets of tools and scripts to properly use HTML as a base for proper layout. This idea has taken on several flavors over different projects, the first serious one being the Balsamine program for the 2013-2014 season.

Since that first successful experiment, the HTML print workflow has extended and been used to control print outputs within Ethertoff, and in situ used for both the Relearn 2013 publication and V/J14 'Are you being Served?' book. Another successful and notable use is ~~this ye~~ars Balsamine program, displaying all sorts of crispy vector images along side of a more complex layout.

All this preamble culminates in the assembly of all these tools in a boilerplate starter tool, simply named html2print. Hosted in parallel on Git OSP & Github the kit aims to introduce you to the idea of making printable documents from Html, CSS and javascript.

We've found many advantages to working this way, so we made it the object of this workshop in Strasbourg with the students from the Communication Graphique department of the school.

Head on over to the blog post on Sürkrüt (comgraph blog) and the schools GH to find all the fun creations and source files.

Miam!

Conférence @ HEAR Strasbourg

2015-03-10T23:25:00+01:00

Ramène ta fraise!

We're currently giving a html2print workshop @HEAR in Strasbourg that we're punctuating with a conference presentation of OSP's work tomorrow evening in the main hall @18:00.

Come on over, ramène ta fraise!

Results of the html2print workshop on their way and in construction, for now know that we're reactivated automatic frog so meet us on Github.

Laidout

2015-03-05T20:44:00+01:00

[![laidout-grafik-tools]({filename}/images/uploads/laidout-grafik-tools.png){: .alignnone .size-medium .wp-image-7331 }]({filename}/images/uploads/laidout-grafik-tools.png)

Tom Lechner ===============================================================================

Our description of the first encounter we had with Tom would probably be similar tothe one ofany of the two hundred people, sitting in the audience of the Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels, back in May 2010.

The Libre Graphics Meeting is an annual meeting for users and developers of Free, Libre and Open Source graphic design software.[Looking back at the archive](http://youtu.be/zLKjdUGu02A), there is a proper cheer when Tom progressively peeled, like an orange, the image he was stretching over a dodecahedron, demoing the way Laidout could be used to prepare the file to*print* such a shape.

Tom has as many facets as he has obsessions for different mathematical geometrical schemes, after two and a half years at Caltech where he spent a lot more time making artwork than finishing homework, he"moved to Portland to attendanart school and then continued on to make artwork and open source computer art tools, narrowly avoiding starving to death in abject misery under the weight of student loans."

[Laidout](http://laidout.org/) started as an imposition tool used by Tom Lechner to print his comics. Over time more intricate functionalities were added such as the aforementioned possibility to work image imposition onto 3D objects, or the addition of drawing tools. As Tom developed his own GraphicalUserInterface Toolkit for Laidout, the software comes with a personal "voice".

It feels like a very intimate tool full of hidden menus and shortcuts. With every new version its exciting to see the added features and, how they all come with their own approach and interface. Laidout appears to be like any other tool at first glance, but when you take a closer look, or see one of the screencasts on Youtube, you understand that Laidout has its own approach —which is really refreshing in a landscape where so many toolsare alike.

Engraving Fill Tool

The most recent version of Laidout came with an engraving tool, a utility that turns an image into line drawing. For the latest program of La Balsamine, a Brussels theater for which we've been designing the identity for some years now, the co-directors invited us to work with engraving and engraving patterns.

We decided to experimentondigital patterns and lines, digging to find different ways to (re)draw images.Last year, at the Leipzig edition of the Libre Graphics Meeting, we were treated to yet another wonderful presentation of Laidout's new tool (called mesh conceptions).

Wefantasized over a similar toolwhich could"engrave" images with the same fluidity and magic. A different approach exists in Inkscape (arguably the main vector editor in the libre graphics world), but which is more manual andmuch less granular for what we wanted to achieve.

Laidout had, by then, most of the building blocks in place for what we wanted to create. This season's program forla Balsa was the perfect opportunity to commission Tom for this next step in the tool; applying the fill tool over an existing image, a content aware overlay, of sorts.

[![out-1\_762-1327]({filename}/images/uploads/out-1_762-1327.gif){: .alignnone .size-medium .wp-image-7331 }]({filename}/images/uploads/out-1_762-1327.gif)

It is this relationship that we thought could be interesting to portray here; this ecology of exchange between designer and developerwhich can only really be affordedin a working model where neither is afraid to open up their sources. This relation is at the center of our practice, we couldn't really see any other way of working now.

This article was originally written as a response to a submission request to [Grafik Magazine](https://www.grafik.net/) in the [Screenshot](https://www.grafik.net/category/screenshot/) section. You can view it in it's [intended context here](https://www.grafik.net/category/screenshot/diy-software). the text and embedded images are published under the [Free Art License 1.3](http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/) and [CC](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)[-BY-SA](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/).

OSP @ Princesse!

2014-09-29T15:56:00+02:00

Since the early days, OSP has changed form over and over, from asking simple questions right through to organizing week-long workshops to share answers its members have found.

There have been a fair amount of turning points in the past, and some of the biggest ones have happened over the last few years. The Variable residency was certainly an interesting step, it brought in means to extend and collaborate in an environment that called for growth on the personal and group level. The three years in Variable were key in making OSP what it is today, but not only OSP, all of the Constant research experiments have taken from the shared house and gone forth.

Variable went out on a big bang with Relearn 2014 but all good things come to an end. We were all extremely happy, and we left with as many plans as questions for what the next steps would be. Even before leaving Variable, we knew of the forthcoming F-LAT project and other ideas regarding the maintenance of the Brussels (whatever that means) FLOSS network of people. It's going to be yet another exciting year!

For OSP, it was clear that we enjoyed the idea of a studio space and wanted to follow up on that, so after a few weeks of searching we found a perfect fit in the old Hackbase.be working space. Hackbase is still moving into a new directions, but thanks to them, we're equally happy with the space and its history (and its unremovable shelves filled with old computer gear from all eras!). OSP has a new home.

There certainly is still a lot of work to do there, but we're very happy. The added bonus is that it's only a few streets away from the re-purposed Variable building, so we're not too nostalgic.

The caravan is also in the process of setting up its own fully fledged legal structure (in its own name) as a non profit organisation, or ASBL as they say in French. As soon as we're up and running, we'll have you all over for a studio-warming (even though we can't, at this point guarantee the room temperature) party, Loop events, and any other reason too!

Av. Princesse Elisabeth 46

Schaerbeek Brussels

Welcome!

Hachures Tournures Balsamine Print Party

2014-09-29T15:55:00+02:00

We're happy to be having the next Print Party in the familiar Balsamine Foyer for the second year in a row!

This year as part of a newseasonal program, but also smaller parallel program «Nos Petites Madeleines» and along with the 15 day long Quizaine Numérique we're going to be presenting Hachures Tourneurs.

Following the path started with the Seoul Fonts Karaoke, continued with the Bits and Sounds worksession at Relearn 2014, OSP is going to scratch its sonic itches once more with the re-thread of this (appropriately musical) years visual material and program.

We're very pleased to have Antonio Roberts on board with us for this event; as a glitch artist, it is in Antonio's nature to take things apart, and put them back together again, purposely in the wrong order, to see what will happen. Exactly what we need to bridge graphic design to audio.

The gang will do its best to convert as much of the program into sounds, then tracks, then mix them all together, we're expecting it to be loud, at the very least.

October 18th 17:30

Théâtre de la Balsamine - Foyer

See you there!

Visual Culture and Médor at Europe Refresh

2014-09-29T15:51:00+02:00

Once again Les Halles are housing the 2014 edition of «Le salon du financement participatif» called Europe Refresh and it looks like it's going to be a couple of exciting weekends!

This year, to maximize the chances of fully funding the projects, the Salon will be set up for a weekend in Brussels then a weekend in Paris.

We're very happy to be attempting two big projects this year: Visual Culture and Médor.

Visual Culture

is the name we've given to the tool that we're building to share and publish any (design) project with the possibility to see and retrieve any previous version. Its current form is what constitutes OSP website's home page, and it makes up the exploratory system enabling navigation into each repository OSP uses.

http://osp.kitchen/tools/visualculture/

Médor

is not a dog! It's a trimestrial, Belgian magazine of inquiries and stories, 128 pages long. Médor contains long-term investigations, reports and portraits focused on Belgium. Médor digs the heart of issues. It inquires and it is persistent. It takes the time needed to be further, beyond appearances. It seeks to understand the facts and to give opinions about uncovered truths. Médor launched this week and is planning several methods to get the project fully financed. See the current progress on the website:

https://medor.coop/

See you there?

Médor

2014-09-29T12:49:00+02:00

Medor is not a dog !

It's a trimestrial, Belgian magazine of inquiries and stories, 128 pages long. Médor contains long-term investigations, reports and portraits focused on Belgium.

Médor digs the heart of issues. It inquires and it is persistent. It takes the time needed to be further, beyond appearances. It seeks to understand the facts and to give opinions about uncovered truths.

Médor intends to cultivate the pleasure of reading and to inform while entertaining. Médor's journalists make sense of current events and are proud and passionate about their work. Today the profession of journalism is threatened by job pressures that erode the search for meaning and by small news items that jostle the priorities of the press.

So Médor aims to reinvent the mechanisms which produce information. Médor is innovative and differentiates itself through its creative process as well as its editorial line. It invents its own, suited ecosystem : original, free style graphics ; teams of journalists and graphic designers or photographers who work together in pairs ; collective decision-making ; rotating chief editors ; readers organized in a co-op ; and decent salaries for all.

It functions with a horizontal structure and open-source software, pays everyone, print on FSC (ecolabel), guarantees transparency, independence, etc.

Join Médor on the full website: medor.coop

étapes 220

2014-09-29T12:44:00+02:00

étapes magazine issue 220 focused on Co-Working, so we were pleased to be asked for an interview for the Portrait section of the publication.

In proper OSP fashion, after an initial set of questions from Caroline Bouige, the interviewer, we answered collaboratively, both to the questions and to each other.

You can read the full Q&A up on http://osp.constantvzw.org:9999/p/etapes

For the full article: http://etapes.com/etapes-220

Our friends from Libre Objet were also featured in this issue, so grab yourself a copy!

Relearn Variable summerschool 2014

2014-04-15T18:52:00+02:00

Good news! Considering how well last years OSP Relearn Summer School went, we're reiterating and extending the school with all of the people and labs that make up Variable. We're really exited to be able to make this happen again, especially considering all the extra people that will be joining in this year. Relearn starts on July 6th (Sunday) and ends 11 July (Friday). You might have received some of this info by email already, so here is an overview of what we're attempting to do:

Relearn is a summerschool with as many teachers as it has participants. It is about sharing and trying Free Culture practices, and is entirely done with Free, Libre and Open Source software.
It starts from the idea that tools are increasingly mediated by software and the algorithmic and legal dynamics that constraint and shape its use.
Reconnecting to the physical and digital material of those tools is a means of (re)asserting ownership and ensuring active participation in the future of our work practices.

Relearn welcomes participants — artists, students, teachers, practitioners — from all ages and disciplines.

→ see some more pictures taken during Relearn 2013

→ Check out the publication that was put together by gathering all of our common written experiences from last year
(and even print your own on Lulu )

To participate, please send an e-mail to registration@relearn.be before April 25, and include a short description of your hopes for this years worksessions and what kind of learning experiences you would like to be part of.
Participation is free but the number of places is limited to 60!
We'll be in touch by the 5th of May.

This year we'd like to open up the process and let anybody submit a proposal for a worksession; we've detailed how to do so on relearn.be