During my undergraduate years, I have learnt about Open Street Map as a prominent example of volunteered geographic information. However, there is always great inertia adding new data into the map and there are two main reasons: First, I am afraid that my input would be inaccurate, which might compromise data quality. Second, many areas in Singapore have already been quite well-mapped - including my neighbourhood. Given that I do not have updated local knowledge of other parts of the world, my concern is that satellite imagery alone may not help me to map areas well.

My concerns were finally allayed after attending my first workshop as part of the Grab GeoStars 2.0 programme. This programme features a series of workshops and trainings conducted by Grab’s very own Geo team. Following which, the majority of the programme is student-led, but guided and supervised by Grab and the partner University. Through the programme, participants will get the opportunity to go on OpenStreetMap (OSM) mapping workshops for disaster risk areas, initiate exciting OSM mapping projects, showcase their work on Grab’s social media platforms, be a part of the global OpenStreetMap mapping community, and eventually conduct workshops to share their new-found knowledge and experiences with their peers in their communities. An exciting Mapathon event marks the end of the GeoStars programme.

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Last year, I joined the State of the Map 2018 and shared about my then “young” project on mental health awareness. I was actually supposed to share about how we use OpenStreetMap and Open Data for social welfare and development, but then our Department did not allow me to do so because… reasons. And so I had to change my topic at the last minute. Guess it was a blessing in disguise because I was able to share my advocacy and how I apply my expertise and OSM to this personal project for something very close to my heart.

And so off I went to Milan complete with plans on how to save my money yet make the best out of my first trip to Europe. With no support from work, or from people I wrote to for support, I had to support and pay for everything myself. It’s been a year since I’ve came home from the trip and I am still paying for a portion of my fare up to now! 😂 Thank you and I hate you, credit cards. Lol

From that experience, I promised myself that should I join 2019’s SoTM, I’ll take all my chances to get support in promoting my project and encouraging people to use OSM, open data, and free and open source technologies for advancing their advocacies and promoting the welfare of underrepresented sectors and communities.

I have created the website and pages for the mental health project, organized workshops and mapathons for it, prepared all the necessary logistics, invited people to talk about mental health for free, collected data, gathered resources, and promoted the project ALL BY MYSELF, and I thought this should change and SoTM is a great venue to support that change.

As soon as the submission period for talks was opened, I took my chance. As soon as the application period for scholarships was opened, I took my chance.

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At the moment I’m stilling doing routine building drawings on maps in Tajikistan, so there hasn’t been much of worth to update on. As a result, I think my initial estimation of weekly updates might become fortnightly or even monthly updates, depending on what work I end up doing as time goes by. For example, voluntary work for Missing Maps will primarily be putting buildings on the map. If I then wanted to work on more local mapping, I could take walks around the place to gather public building information (e.g. the name of a pub).

First of all, I would like to thank the organisers of the State of the Map to invite me as a scholar and HOT to extend this invitation to the HOT summit.

It’s an incredible experience. I met many new people, but also people I had been communicating with online and that I now meet in real life. It’s a great networking opportunity.

I gave a talk about PT_Assistant, which was received really well. So the next day I did a more interactive session working on a single bus route in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, which we converted to PT v2, or at least the way I like to interpret it, keeping it as simple as possible, while still expressing all that’s needed for it to be useful.

osm.org/relation/8771035 osm.org/relation/10063024 osm.org/relation/8771035

As you might have noticed, OpenStreetMap offers the delivery= tags/keys to tag places and restaurants which offers food deliveries. But, have you ever wondered how to tag those who do not have their own delivery service, but they do accept orders from food-ordering and delivery apps?

I have seen this case multiple times on small restaurants in Indonesia which indirectly accepts delivery service from GoFood and GrabFood. Sure that there are other similar services available in the world including MelbSC (Australia), Deliveroo (multiple countries), Foodora/Foodpanda (multiple countries), UberEats (multiple countries), Just Eat (multiple countries), as well as Demae-can (Japan).

So, why not we tag these services into OpenStreetMap the same way as payment:*= tags?

The rules are simple. For every food delivery apps that one place accepts, tag delivery:<app or service name>=yes. For example, if one accepts both GoFood and GrabFood mentioned earlier, give both delivery:gofood=yes and delivery:grabfood=yes respectively. If the place does not have their own delivery service, as originally intended in the wiki, tag delivery=no.

Some users might want to quickly find the place in respective food delivery apps. To ease that workflow, I suggest to add a sub-subkey named delivery:<app or service name>:ref=, which stores the URL or URI of the food delivery website/app. Using URL/URIs for this will be much easier for mapping, rather than finding and obtaining respective “restaurant ID”s similar to wikidata= and wikipedia=.

OpenStreetMap Carto (the default stylesheet on the Openstreetmap.org website) has released version v4.23.0 today.

Changes

• Combine low priority layers using ST_PointOnSurface (#3874) Fixes a bug which rendered parking icons twice

• Restore rendering of landcover text labels on points (#3878) For the past several months nodes with tags like leisure=sports_centre lacked a text label

• Adjust aerodrome initial & final zoom levels (#3879) Aerodrome name labels now start rendering at a later zoom level, and continue rendering to higher zoom levels unless the area is too large

• Adjust width of hedge & citywall up to z20, adjust hedge color (#3847) Minor changes to make barrier line widths more consistent

• Increase office= initial zoom to z18 and move some values to z19 (#3896) No longer renders “office=*” at z17, undocumented values are shown at z19

• Create new layer for ref of highway=residential/unclassified/track (#3709) Changes ref to standard halo-radius, oblique font, and same size as name at >z17. This renders the “ref” number at lower priority than the names of these minor roads

• Add fill colors for wetland=mangrove/saltmarsh/reedbed (#3807) Also adds salt dots pattern for wetland=saltmarsh

Once changes are deployed on openstreetmap.org it will take couple of days before all tiles show the new rendering.

For a full list of commits, see https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/compare/v4.22.0…v4.23.0

We welcome any bug reports at https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues

We welcome new contributors who might be interested in solving one of the many open issues. See a list of [relatively easy first issues](https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22_.

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If you could take a look at the OpenStreetMap mapping efforts and mapping-related events, they are mostly concentrated in Metro Manila. One day, OpenStreetMap local community (OSMLoCos) had a wild idea that piqued the interest of many OSMPH volunteers (including me!): “What if we organize an event in the South (Visayas or Mindanao)?”

With proper coordination, marketing skills and ardent volunteers, last August 1-3, 2019, OSM PH invited mapping enthusiasts to be part of the first of many Pista ng Mapa (Festival of Maps) at Foundation University, Dumaguete. This was a great opportunity for people outside of Metro Manila to participate in a mapping event for FREE! I gladly sign up for this event in the hopes of meeting fellow mappers and get to visit the beautiful island of Dumaguete.

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Mapping buildings in Siaya county to help in identifying flood risk areas.

At State of the Map US a few weeks ago in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Seth and I presented a session titled:

PostCards from the Edge: A Tour of OSM Data Analyses + Visualizations

The recording and description of the presentation is available here.

Our goal was to curate a collection of OSM data visualizations from over the years that tell the story of OSM’s evolution, both as a map and a community, as well as highlight a few innovative data visualizations that show new ways to interact with OSM data to learn more about an area of the map.

We produced this spreadsheet (same as the table below) with links and author information for each of the visualizations that we showed and discussed in the talk. Since many of them are interactive, we chose to link to the original source:

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I have printed out the OSM rainbow coloured logos from my last post.

I’ll be at State of the Map in Heidelberg, so if you want some to bring back to your local community, please let me know. I’ll be at any of the diversity talks at a minimum (e.g.). I have loads (each pile is ~50 stickers)

Cold Sping - Hudson Highlands

… two years ago, and I haven’t even managed to write a diary entry about it. Has it really been that long? I’ve been meaning to post a summary for the longest time, but somehow life got in the way. Fortunately, this week David Garcia and me will host a workshop at the HOT Summit and present a talk at State of the Map in Heidelberg. I’m super excited about both sessions – you should join us if you’re coming! And it became the perfect excuse to dust off my draft for this post, and make sure all the research outcomes are finally assembled in one place.

But let me start in the beginning.

Hallo, my name is Martin Dittus, and between 2014 and 2017 I’ve accompanied HOT and Missing Maps for my PhD on community engagement in humanitarian mapping. We’ve had an amazing time together! During the PhD, we were trying to understand how best to build HOT volunteer capacity online and offline. How can we best train our volunteers so that they are available when needed? What kinds of support can we give them to ensure they don’t drop out early? And the age-old question: are the most highly engaged contributors “born or made”?

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I continue to make progress with the Missing Maps projects. I think for the moment, since I’m doing the same things over and over - buildings and trees - that I’ll keep the diary entries to a weekly thing, or perhaps only when I learn/try a new process; for example, drawing roads.

We’re hosting an open discussion about “Diversity and Inclusion” in OSM at State of the Map.

“How can OSM be more diverse and inclusive? What can we do to improve this across all the various OSM spaces, including OSM governance? Diversity is the range of human differences, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, social class, physical ability or attributes, religious or ethical values system, national origin, and political beliefs. Join us to share your lessons and ideas on how we might grow and support a Diversity and Inclusive approach in OSM. There are Diversity and Inclusion groups across other ‘open’ communities. OSM has a diversity talk mailing list. This will be the place where the community can continue to connect after SOTM.” full session details

The goal of the session is to give space for the OSM community to talk about their needs and to plan a way forward to supporting OSM on this journey. We will do this with small group discussions to support shared dialogue.

Details: Sunday, September 22, 2019 1400 - 1500 CEST Kleiner Hörsaal

You can learn more about our planning here

This session is being co-hosted by the Diversity mailing list colleagues.

See you there!

I’ve just found that by initiating projects through the Missing Maps website, your time spent on projects can be timed automatically with a sort of stopwatch feature. This will help me keep track of my contributions to the projects as time goes by. As such I will be cross-referencing this diary and my Missing Maps account, which uses HOT Tasking Manager as the adjudicator.

The OpenStreetMap UK community has come together for a 3-month “quarterly project” to find all the solar panels in the UK. And the results so far… wow!

-> We’ve just reached over 100,000 standalone solar PV installations mapped in the UK!

-> Plus we also have almost 600 solar farms mapped, representing almost 5 gigawatts!

To give you an idea of completeness: the UK government believes there are about 1 million solar panels in the UK, and official solar farm listings have about 8 GW. What we’ve mapped so far is way more than I thought we’d manage, so I really deeply want to thank every person who contributed, large or small. We can use these data to pilot CO2-saving initatives - and so can anyone else. Open data for the win!

Here are a couple of simple plots from me, to show where the items are in the UK. (The data I’ve used are from yesterday, which is why my plot says not-quite-100,000 items.) I’ve plotted two different types of item: (1) “standalone” solar panels (i.e. ones that are not inside solar farms); (2) solar farms. You’ll notice the distributions are really different:

(The images aren’t showing up…. you’ll have to view them on my blog where I originally posted this)

Some of the darkest blobs on the map are evidence of focussed effort. I know that Jerry (SK53) has been mapping around Nottingham, Cornwall and other areas, so may be the source of some of these blobs. We’ve shown that with some local effort, and a bit of scanning through imagery, a lot of this can be done.

You’ll notice that many of the solar farms are in the southern part of the UK, at least according to our data. That’s not unexpected!

For more detailed data breakdowns, you can peruse Gregory Williams’ solar mapping analysis site.

We have more time to go until the end of the quarter… and we’ll be able to use the data for sustainable energy projects whenever you contribute - so please do join in!

I’ve started working on projects for Missing Maps, a volunteering collaboration that puts vulnerable people across the world on the map, with a view to being able to locate them and provide aid to them in the event of a catastrophe or natural disaster. Today I spent 1 hour adding some buildings and nearby habitation in an area of Tajikistan.

Added Avalon Tech Joint at the correct address as it was missing from the openstreet map. The Building has 4 shops and address is 32 Avalon Drive , Hamilon, 3200 . The shops are numbered 1,2,3 and 4.

Provence - Caseneuve near Apt

Spending 2 weeks with my wife in the Provence in April/May , heavily using OSM on my Smartphone. As usual, when preparing for a trip, I do a review of the region I will visit via Bing. Adding houses, tracks, roads etc. but also taking notes on the places we visited.

Dingle Peninsula in Southwest Ireland

Walking the Dingle Way in June. As usual, when preparing for a trip, I do a review of the region I will visit via Bing. Adding houses, tracks, roads etc. but also taking notes on the places we visited. Really appreciating the joint effort of the OSM community that created this great maps. Helpful when walking in fog and rain around the Brandon peak.

This is such an awesome project. I have only just found it, and am contributing in my own small way - One local doctors surgery added - you welcome world