Just for the record, anything I write here, or on social media accounts, or on mailing lists, or say publicly should be read as my personal opinion, and not the opinion of the OSMF or OSMF Board of Directors. I thought that would be obvious, but it is good to avoid doubt, and to be 100% clear. 🙂

This post is originally published at my personal page, but I assume here more people might read it. Some formatting may be off as I converted it from HTML.

Around March 2019 I started work to import a large chunk of open data into Openstreetmap. Specifically, to improve the landcover coverage of Sweden. Mostly it concerned areas and features of forest, farmland, wetland, and highland marshes.

This post continues and somewhat concludes the series of thoughts I’ve documented earlier in 2019:

• Landcover Conflation
• Landcover Conflation
• Unsolved issues
• Raster to vector

The import plan documents a lot of technical details. I maintained it to reflect the high level overview of the project throughout its life.

Why bother

My motivation behind the project was that I was tired to trace forests by hand. My understanding is that it would take a million of hours to finish this work by using manual labor alone. I, being lazy, always look for ways to automate it and/or integrate someone else’s already finished work.

And there is a lot of work to integrate. Here’s how the map looked like before the start of the project:

… See full entry

On Saturday 8th February 2020 we had an intensive training and a little competition on mapping within the mapping team in UNEC in order to improve our mapping skills. It was educative and at same time fun. I AM HAPPY TO BE ONE OF THE LION MAPPERS UNEC CHAPTER

I attended Openstreetmap Seminar with #OyoMappersTeam

I

Last week I joined 1000s of other open advocates for 2 full days of https://fosdem.org/2020/ It was good to run into open source friends and OSM allies (Thanks OSM-be for the meetup). The event is actually bigger than 2 days if you count some of the pre-days which were very applicable (SustainOSS and Chaoss).

All the videos/slides are online, so as we consider how we might help OpenStreetMap and OpenStreetMap Foundation communities/members/working groups/board, please do consider reviewing.

Sustain OSS

SustainOSS-pre-event

Community Metrics:

Data-driven change is close to OSM’s culture. For the past years, I’ve been writing that we need a community strategy that uses data as part of our toolkit. The good news is that the Chaoss community health project is doing this. We could learn from them. This could build on the work from last year’s OSM survey, Manfred’s post on statistics, and our concerns noted in the OSM SWOT analysis. There are working groups across “open” communities on Common Metrics, Diversity and Inclusion, Evolution, Risk, and Value. I missed attending this full pre-FOSDEM day event, but all the slides are online:

Chaoss 2020

It would be good for a few of us to engage more with this network. Happy to co-work on this front.

Why do people Contribute?

The talk by James Bottomley on the Selfish Contributor was fascinating. On the one side, it was good to see a framing on the ‘ego’ of one type of contributor. My main concern about the talk is that it reinforced tropes on who contributes and why. He did not cover the heart of community responsibility or community health. We all need to be active in making this a safe, fun, inclusive, and healthy network. Overall, it was good to walk in this line of thinking.

Video: The Selfish Contributor

Legal and Policy

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Just renewed my membership at OpenStreetMap Foundation.

On the 5th of February 2020, UniqueMappers Network host an online training on OSM which I participated.

1. On the 6th of February 2020, we in OyoMappersTeam had training for the new members. They were taught on how to mapped on OSM and mapped accurately as a surveyors or as people in Federal school of Surveying Oyo Nigeria.

The Oyo Mappers Team (OMT) had an event on the 6th of February, 2020 tagged “RE-TRAINING & MEMBERSHIP REGISTRATION.” It was a success and people are ready to be committed.

I want to say something from my own perspective for Drinking Water Map, and option is my own, not a community members consensus. If other community members have thoughts it is only properly for them to speak for themselves.

Drinking Water Map is a organization to organization corporate-project, it is not wise to ban some certain people, and also not a mature things to do. But if we count the actions of e-info, I thought they will have a consistent action plan, at least interacting with outside will have a consistent action plan. But it was not the case, community member of OpenStreetMap had to reply to questions that already was answered, no one had read the written notes. I am very disappointed about e-info, being a environmental organization for 10 years, someone had to reply to already answered questions, had to explained to already told future vision.

Orthree on Flickr, CC-BY 2.0

… See full entry

Oyo mappers team,Oyo Nigeria

This is a random collection of thoughts from the last project of mapping a new area for emergency services.

… See full entry

Training on OSM and OSM Hydrants to update assets for fire operators. Venue: Lands Department’s Cartography Room, Suva.

Been adding Wikidata tags to entries with good success.

First I added all the airports in Thailand using ICAO code which forms a unique key. Second I added railway stations, using their names in Thai, also with good success.

Next, will be adding Museums and Schools.

This past week, on January 30, members of the Turkish parliament voted in favour of the proposed amendment to the National Geographic Information Systems law, regulating the acquisition, collection, dissemination and trading of spatial data.

With the law, the sole responsibility and authority on the national spatial data index is given to the Ministry of Environmental and Urban Affairs. Acquisition, collection, dissemination and trading of spatial data which is defined within the National Spatial Data Responsibility Matrix by third party individuals or legal entities are subject to prior approval of the ministry. Moreover, the approval will be subject to a fee of 25₺ for native, 50₺ for foreign parties per each 1/1000 plan corresponding to the study region(s) from the national topographical grid.

If not withdrawn or rephrased and applied in its full extent, the law will mean an end to volunteered geographic information in Turkey, and online non-profit data sources like OpenStreetMap.

The data layers which are included in the national spatial data responsibility list is as follows:

1. Coordinate Reference Systems and Geographical Grid Systems
2. Administrative Units
3. Geographical Names
4. Cadastre
5. Buildings
6. Addresses
7. Elevation
8. Orthophoto
9. Transportation Networks
10. Hydrography
11. Geology
12. Land Cover
13. Land Use
14. Soil Types
15. Protection Areas
16. Natural Risk Regions
17. Infrastructure
18. Energy Resources
19. Mines
20. Public Health and Safety
21. Populaiton Demographics
22. Environmental Monitoring Facilities
23. Industrial Facilities
24. Agricultural Facilities
25. Public Administration Regions
26. Flora and Fauna
27. Habitat Zones
28. Biogeographical Zones
29. Sea and Saltwater Regions
30. Atmospherical Data
31. Meteorological Data
32. NUTS Data

So, how to map race tracks? Well, use highway=raceway but there’s a little more to it than that. not complicated, but the details can matter. This diary entry covers my own approach, which I think is a good one, but there’s always a chance of disagreement.

highway=raceway itself

Like any highway= tag, raceway is for a linear, possibly closed way. A closed raceway is not a polygon, as such usage would be difficult for data consumers to distinguish from an actual closed way such as an oval track. If you want to specify the width of a racetrack, there is a width tag. It does not seem widely used, but it is documented in the OSM wiki. It’s in meters, by the way. Specifying lanes=2 can be a reasonable thing for a Drag Strip as an alternative.

I only use highway=raceway for hot areas. Hot areas are the parts of the race track which are restricted to folks with special credentials - race and track officials, drivers, and designated crew. Regular ticker buyers are not permitted into these areas and most of them involve cars traveling at speed.

access roads and parking

For generalized access roads, highway=service is appropriate. For obvious reasons, use amenity=parking for the race paddock and any spectator parking. Use name to specify what type of parking and possibly designate specific purposes; Lime Rock Park and Thompson Speedway both have similar names for their two paddock spaces, the blindingly obvious “A Paddock” and “B Paddock”. The road from the end of a Drag Strip shutdown area back to the paddock is often referred to as a “return road” and that’s how I name them.

access

For operating race tracks access should probably be private, as a purchased or comped ticket, or official credentials are required for access.

oneway?

Most race tracks are oneway. Drag strips and ovals, always. You can tell which is the start end of the drag strip by the black burnout marks. US ovals are always run counter-clockwise, that is, you are always turning left.

… See full entry

I heard someone talking about Drinking Water Map again. I want to make it clear as a Community member of OpenStreetMap, OpenStreetMap project welcome everyboday use its date, in the condition of obeying OpenStreetMap’s specification and license, following the OBdb license of database, the tile image is by CC-By-SA 2.0.

With someone not familar with Taiwan Open Source community, they not very well know about the definition of corporation. OpenStreetMap Taiwan Community is not legalized by Taiwan Government, not technically as NGO. I have to say again that E-infor mention about OpenStreetMap when talking about Drinking Water Map, is just an attempt to do something, does not endorses for e-info interior working goal. What they claim is not acknowledged or recognized by OpenStreetMap Taiwan Community.

OpenStreetMap Taiwan Community is very serious about the data quality of OpenStreetMap in Taiwan, and working solo by importing open government data of drinking water infrastructure, without the help from e-info. The problem raised by Community regard the map appearance issue, such as no information should be putted in name field, and the issue on GitHub Reposit, was ignored by e-for. Much of the time serious issue was not deal, instead was just some grin response for entertainment.

There are several problem between e-info and OpenStreetMap Taiwan. If you are interested you can read the post published in June.

Spent 1 hour and completed mapping all buildings in several sectors.

Project Details #7849 - Missing Maps: Galcayo city, Somalia

This is a task set up to map the city of Galcayo, accurate maps will improve the understanding that the Médecins Sans Frontières teams have of the city.

It was a dark and stormy night - no, not THAT dark and stormy night, but still a challenging situation! Imagine an emergency services reponder being tasked with rapidly finding a residence on an active call in an area of:

• Appalachian Foothills with winding narrow roads
• Rural dense / light suburban population density
• Rainy spring / early summer leads to rapid landscape / vegetation growth, quickly obscuring mailbox location.
• Tree covered and winding shared driveways several Km long - possibly lacking turnoff marking to individual houses. House is often not visible from the road.
• Unmarked, unreadable, or non-reflective mailbox number markers.

Last year, this situation led the local Slater-Marietta Fire District (FD) to post not just one , but two pleas for people to pay attention to driveway entrance and house markings.

While the local OSM community was importing cell towers in a nearby county, one of the mappers who worked on cell towers at the time noted that driveways would be very useful because of similar problems: the tower might not be visible from the roadway, and no clear marking for the tiny access road would lead to the tower. That statement and seeing the “Amazon driveway project” come to our area gave me a project idea for that fire district: review all roads, create all driveways, and enter all addresses - then have the EMS use a standard OSM navigation app to get turn-by-turn directions to their destination.

A mapping colleague established a working relationship with the county - although they don’t have open data, they gave OSM permission and access to image layers for 6 inch off-leaf aerial imagery and roads and addresses. After opening up separate task manager tasks for roads and buildings , the area was eventually completed and ready for navigation.

… See full entry

Here’s a summary of things I did in OSM in January 2020.

• Mapping
  • Continued to edit. I added lots (2,000?) buildings in Ireland as part of our new mapping project. I made at least one OSM edit every day in January,
  • Monitored and reviewed some RapiD changes.
  • Found & posted many examples of bad Facebook computer results.
• Coding
  • Wrote a tool to convert OSM history data into CSV files. This makes it easier to process, and work with, OSM data.
  • Wrote a tasking manager stat tool.
  • Attempted to get iD to switch to default opt out.
  • Figured out how to make images of globes from OSM tiles.
• Community
  • Co-founded RainbOSM, a Telegram group chat for LGBTQ+ people in OSM. Telegram is a closed source chat service, which is unfortunate, but there are a lot of people who use it.
  • Submitted 2 links to WeeklyOSM.
  • Participated in many twitter conversations about OSM #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 (Another closed source communication platform).
  • Participated in some conversation on LCCWG IRC channel.
• OSM Foundation Board
  • Jan 2020 Board meeting
  • OSMF board has decided to have a face to face meeting in London, so I had to book travel for that
  • Evaluated 7 fee waiver applications for the OSMF
  • Read the background material for contract agenda item
  • Read the background material for local chapter application for SK, AL, DRC, Oceania, AR
  • Phone call with community members (A. Mustard & OSM Irl group chat)
• CWG
  • Filed an expenses claim form for the stickers I’ve been sending out.
  • Sent out 600 stickers to the OSM community in the Phillipines.
  • Wrote wiki page about promotional material programme.
  • Looked into making more attribution fixer stickers.