Cool!!! 
Given enough notice, I can make it almost any day.
KKL are very bike friendly. They’re doing all sorts of stuff in the forests with various communities.
e.g. the TLV JM Bike Route, which we already have mapped here or here or better here
You can send him these links, so he could have an idea…
talkat.
Amazing! I wish I could participate.
But I’m way too far from Israel currently 
We would like to have a powerpoint presentation about OSM to show to KKL (and hopefully others in the future)
I have found a pretty detailed one here:
http://www.slideshare.net/harrywood/openstreetmap-open-licensed-geodata?src=related_normal&rel=620877
but it’s from 2 years ago, and it would be nice to have something more recent.
Any pointers?
dimka
Update: the Ministry of Interior also expressed interest, we are going to meet with them soon as well.
dimka
I’d also like to participate, but can’t commit… Please post the schedule here, and let me know if I can help preparing.
It was scheduled for next week.
I’ll contact you offline with more details.
talkat.
Hi,
here some more presentations that could be useful:
Palestine OSM project (should be very interesting in Israel to see)
http://www.slideshare.net/mikel_maron/freemap-palestine-november-2008-presentation
http://www.slideshare.net/nichtich/openstreetmap-presentation
http://www.slideshare.net/chippy/geong-presentation-about-openstreetmap-presentation
regards,
Mr Israel
The meeting at the Ministry of Interior went well (talkat, you did a great job!), and here is their short summary (translated):
I would say, more than we could hope for
Expect further developments soon.
dimka
Amazing!
Seems like you guys did a great job.
Excellent job dimka and talkat, I’m also very surprised they are really willing to cooperate, I hope it’s not just stalling (“let’s be positive and buy time to check things up”), you know.
Two questions if I may: 1) what data can we expect? 2) when?
Well done,
Superware
Superware - nothing specific so far. Some of (hopefully, most of) the government organizations have no interest to withhold the data to themselves.
Speaking of which: another organization which expressed interest is Teva (החברה להגנת הטבע). Probably there will be a meeting with them soon. In particular, they produce the well-known hiking maps. And that makes it interesting. For one, they probably regard OSM as a threat. But, I believe it can also be an opportunity. Consider these maps (Mapot Simun Shvilim). Today they take the basic layer from somewhere else (Israel Survey, to be precise), and they add to it the trails layer which is managed by them. Now this has serious limitations. For one, they probably have to pay for the basic layer. Second, they cannot make maps in other languages. By using OSM data and their own map-making technology they would be able to overcome these difficulties. At the price of opening up their data. I think we should convince them that the quality of OSM data will eventually surpass theirs. Therefore, it will be wise for them to start getting into OSM sooner than later.
By the way, how do you think OSM compares to Mapot Simun Shvilim? I think in terms of the number of trails OSM is better, but a lot of metadata is missing (trail color, difficulty etc.)
Maybe we should prepare for the meeting a custom-made map with all the trails colored, including Israel National Trail (some kind of a “state of the art”)? Any particular area in mind?
dimka
Nice!
www.teva.org.il is a registered “voluntary association”, and is not-for-profit. I believe the price of their maps covers the cost of their print and maintenance of the data, but I don’t know for sure.
Having their data would be nothing short of GREAT 
Suggested area - Tel Dan national reserve - http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=33.24796&lon=35.65127&zoom=17&layers=M
Whoever did it talkat did a great job
Thanks you! (Blush… )
talkat.
The meeting was one month ago. Anything new on this topic?
There have been three meetings thus far.
The Ministry of Interior agreed to supply the administrative boundaries in raster form, but they are yet to deliver them. They are having legal consultations as to the possibility of sharing more data. And we are hoping they would invite us to the government GIS forum.
KKL were very excited about the whole idea of OSM and agreed to give their forest data, while checking the possibility of more data sharing (e.g. hiking & biking trails in KKL forests) with the co-owners of that additional data. The guy we met said he would send us something in two-three weeks time, but I guess they are now pretty busy after the Carmel disaster, so this will probably have to wait longer.
Teva - the guys there were excited too, but they happened to belong to a department which doesn’t have so much useful geographic information for OSM. They do intend to use OSM data for their needs though. The continuation of this line will be a meeting with the ITC people. (All the recent developments with Lonvia etc. will be handy there.)
dimka
Are you guys also in contact with someone from RTG (רשות הטבע והגנים)?
Also note that ITC is a join commetee of KKL, TEVA, RTG and maybe some other “nature related” organizations.
No, they didn’t respond to my initial email.
As I said, we are hoping to present the OSM at the government forum, so that we wouldn’t have to chase each and every authority.
I guess such things are naturally slow-going.
Today it finally happened: I have received from the Ministry of Interior a raster image containing all the administrative boundaries.
It is provided AS-IS and without restrictions of use. In particular we can use it as a background for tracing. That said, our understanding with the people from the ministry was that they should at least get credit. I am opening another forum thread in order to discuss how we should proceed with this.
Lacking better storage option, I have put the file on my university homepage:
http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~dmitryb/moin/shiput.tiff
Hopefully this is only the beginning.
dimka
Bump. What’s the status of this?
http://www.govmap.gov.il/ has excellent aerial imagery, far more superior to Bing in some areas, and I’d love to use it.