The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and its vision to put the most vulnerable people on the map is almost as old as OpenStreetMap (OSM) itself. Over the past 10 years HOT as an organization has focused on programmatic funding and work to accomplish this goal. We are delighted to learn that the Audacious Project is supporting HOT to continue to nourish the growing OSM community globally for humanitarian and development response. This will allow the HOT community and organization to work towards that vision on its own terms and with a longer horizon in mind.

When HOT was envisioned the community network dreamed that mapping would be very local and support humanitarian action.

“The Audacious Project is an initiative that shows what humanity can accomplish when bold ideas meet visionary, generous supporters. Now in its second year, The Audacious Project invites visionary social entrepreneurs and nonprofits to dream big — and helps to shape those dreams into multi-year plans that are both viable and sustainable. The project then invites its coalition of partners — which includes leading nonprofits and individual donors, along with the public — to pool their resources and work together in service of these ambitious ideas. The goal is to amplify the impact of the world’s change-makers and change-funders, and move forward ideas with the potential to impact lives at thrilling scale. The Audacious Project is housed at TED, the nonprofit dedicated to “Ideas Worth Spreading.” About Audicious Project

HOT and Local Communities

HOT’s Announcement

HOT FAQs

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It’s been exactly one month since finishing Fort Lee, and I’ve just finished Cliffside Park, the most densely populated municipality in Bergen County (seventh highest population density nationwide). Cliffside Park lies on the border with Hudson County, which has four of the six places higher in population density than Cliffside Park.

Cliffside Park is rather small in area, which is why it only took me a month to finish mapping the area. The next place, Fair Lawn, is not so small, so it may take a bit longer.

Click below to see Cliffside Park!

Yesterday I started on the project of mapping board districts with the Geo-mappers

I just finished the Maine address import and thought I might share a narrative.

Origin Story

In early 2019, I was driving home, getting directions from google maps. I had grown apathetic to fast food restaurants highlighted on the map, but on this trip, the google lady vomited forth: “Turn left at People’s United Bank”. She might have said “turn left on Main Street” or just “turn left” but the application I trusted for navigation went out of its way to shill a business. I was left wondering “what else does it do”. Could advertisers pay to /optimize/ my route, sending me past their venue? That sounds /crazy/, and plausible. So it was time to make a change.

The alternative I found was OsmAnd. But upon trying it, I found Maine was missing nearly all addresses. I was baffled how that could be, and dismayed that I might crawl back to google maps. This wasn’t just impeding me, this would block anyone in Maine from switching, and /I am stubborn/. I realize everyone can contribute to OSM and Maine had a handful of contributors, but at the current rate, Maine may not be navigable within my lifetime. It needed a push.

Programming Montage

I had a vague idea of “get data from here” and “put data there”. The APIs had documentation and I had a compiler, how hard could this be? I started developing tools in July of 2019. In the beginning, I had two concerns:

• I could lose interest and leave the work “half done”, and regret that I ever started
• I could do a terrible job… and regret that I ever started

Looking back, this project held my attention the whole way and I’m satisfied with the results.

Side node: Did I look for existing tools? Yes, but I’m a software engineer and when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.

Using my language of choice, I wrote an Osm API client, a client for Maine’s address API, a E911-to-OSM schema translator, a conflation engine, and a command line interface to tie it together.

Lessons Learned

Some effects of writing my own tools:

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Mapped, but invisible: [example] (osm.org/way/815403329#map=19/49.91309/8.65250) Tags: area: yes highway: residential

What is RTKBase?

It’s a software to manage a Gnss base station. It’s a fully Open Source Software and it’s available here: https://github.com/Stefal/rtkbase

What is a Gnss base Station?

It’s a permanent and fixed Gnss receiver with known accurate coordinates. A base station is needed when you want to get centimeter accuracy with RTK.

New Features:

• Web Gui
• Automated installation
• Automated setup for usb connected Ublox F9P
• Satellite levels
• Map
• Settings
• Update from the Gui.
• Manage Raw data
• Multiple simultaneous streams (Raw/Rtcm/Ntrip)

GUI Tour:

Video

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Now you can organize OSM Smart Menu’s options in any order: Just use the six-dots icon in front of each website to drag it wherever you want.

How can you access the configuration page?

• In Google Chrome, right-click the OSMenu button, and select “Options”;
• In Firefox Desktop, right-click the OSMenu button, select “Manage Extension” and go to the “Preferences” tab;
• In Firefox Mobile, go to “Extensions”, and then select “OSM Smart Menu”.

The need for addresses

One of the things that often comes up in discussions about OpenStreetMap is poor address coverage in some places.

Rightly or wrongly, to many people a map is now no longer just a 2D representation of our environment. Searching and navigation/routing, despite being separate services, are viewed as part of a map, and almost as important as the visual map itself. We need good address coverage to improve geocoding.

Adding addresses really improves the map, and that’s what keeps me going with it. When I explained what I was doing to one person who approached me, he said “that’s a good idea mate, Google Maps shows my house all the way down the end of the road”. I also saw a food delivery driver pull up outside a house and ask “is it called Gate House?”. (On OpenStreetMap it is ☺)

Chancel Way or Chancel Park?

Recently I collected addresses on Chancel Way in Charlton Kings, Cheltenham. When adding them, I noticed something that didn’t seem right.

The road was split into Chancel Way and Chancel Park. At first glance, this seems fine. Having a common prefix like this is common in UK residential street names. (For example, Croft Road, Croft Gardens, Croft Drive, and Croft Avenue are nearby.)

The house numbering suggested that Chancel Way and Chancel Park were actually a single street. Following the street west, the first number on the left (south) side of Chancel Park was 19, and the next number was 21. This fits with the final odd number on Chancel Way (17). Even numbers on the right (north) side of the street match too.

More research

There are no results for Chancel Park on the Royal Mail postcode finder, yet it appears on Apple Maps (via DuckDuckGo):

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Hi guys, could someone help me please?

I need to create an article in wikipedia (not in osm wiki). Since i just registered in the en-wikipedia, it does not allow me to create new articles (just edit old ones).

The new article is here, in sandbox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kirill_Bon/sandbox

Target should be here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zakomara&action=edit

It’s a translation of corresponding Russian article in Wikipedia.

I need it to serve as a reference for the new osm-tags for 3D Buildings. Currently the list is here: osm.wiki/User:Zkir

Many of the local restaurants in Columbia, SC have not been updated. Some are in need of edit. I have submitted a few notes to make some edits to the map around metro Columbia. Also debating whether or not temporary businesses should be a part of the map. For example there are businesses that set up pop up shops in the area. Should businesses like Taylored Cupcakes, a local bakery, be a part of the map even though they don’t have a permanent physical location?

May 4-May 31 was the bonding period for my GSoC. I utilized this time to learn more about the codebase and started digging deeper into the specifics of the project requirements. I was provided a server (sponsored by OpenCage) to set up the Nominatim planet database. It was my first time working with such massive data. My mentors, Sarah Hoffmann and Marc Tobias helped me in setting up the server.

Installation and server setup:

The following is a brief of the steps I followed.

1. Created nominatim user without login permission

   sudo useradd -d /srv/nominatim -s /bin/false -m nominatim

2. Postgres configuration changes:

    shared_buffers = 2GB
    maintenance_work_mem = 10GB
    autovacuum_work_mem = 2GB
    work_mem = 150MB
    effective_cache_size = 24GB
    synchronous_commit = off
    max_wal_size = 1GB
    checkpoint_timeout = 10min
    checkpoint_completion_target = 0.9
    effective_io_concurrency = 500
    random_page_cost = 1.5
   
    # reenabled these two after initial import 
    fsync = off
    full_page_writes = off
   

   sudo systemctl restart postgresql

3. The data import stopped during the indexing (created issue https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/issues/1785)

4. The indexing was resumed using:

   ./utils/setup.php --index --create-search-indices --create-country-names

5. Then faced the issue https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/issues/1476.

   I had to use SELECT pg_terminate_backend( ) FROM pg_stat_activity; 7-8 times.

6. After a successful setup of planet DB, the next step was to import Wikipedia and Wikidata. This was done by following steps described at https://nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/admin/Import-and-Update/#wikipediawikidata-rankings

7. The photon project was also set up on the server for testing and playing around with the code.

With the completion of server setup, I am all set to go ahead with the next phases of the project.

Open issues:

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COVID-19 - KOSÑIPATA, CUSCO, PERU

HOT is mapping Cusco region in Peru at the request of regional government to support their COVID-19 response efforts. The maps will be used to provide cash transfers to families who are prevented from working by the quarantine and State of Emergency in Peru, and to provide nutrition and sanitation assistance.

Additionally, in parts of Cusco, over 75% of children under 3 years old suffer from anaemia. This means that their brains will not develop as quickly as other children, and once they start going to preschool and later school, they will often be tired, unable to concentrate or to learn effectively. The regions which suffer most from anaemia are usually the most remote, hardest to reach areas, where data available to local authorities and NGOs is minimal and access to health services for women and their children are limited. The Regional Government in Cusco wants to combat this by geo-locating where children under 3 live in order to improve the medical attention that they receive.

Spent 1 hour mapping building and roads.

Something funny happens when Google Maps meets the Chinese border. Commercial data providers follow China’s coordinate system (GCJ-02). Their illusion comes to a crashing halt when you reach a border with Hong Kong, Macau, or any other country.

In Móng Cái, Vietnam, something is noticeably off:

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So, today my friend, an urban planner, asked whether she can download a group of land-use data in her city for research purposes. Realizing that this kind of tag in OSM particularly in Indonesia still an excommunicated object mapped, so I just wanna remind that this data is very helpful and powerful for the urban planners. She also asked me if there is a highway data that has a polygon base data not only a line so her data measurement become more accurate.

This is a good idea, have you ever map a polygon highway ???

Hello there! I’m the administrator of Bluepages, a new wiki-based website with the goal of collaboratively building a historical directory of the world. The long-term goal is to create detailed, well-sourced encyclopedic articles about the history of every place on earth, like this. You might think of it as an effort to fill an empty space in the Internet’s free knowledge ecosystem between Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap, drawing on the great accomplishments of both while providing something entirely new to the world. Hopefully, Bluepages will become a useful resource for OpenStreetMap editors, and vice versa.

Bluepages is only a few months old, and we’re still trying to build up a community of contributors and establish ways of doing things. We want to collaborate with OpenStreetMap as much as possible, especially because most people who are interested in OpenStreetMap will probably be interested in our site, too. If you have the technical skills to help integrate OpenStreetMap data into our site, if you have ideas for how to make Bluepages a better site, or if you just want to join our community, please reach out. You can contact me directly here.

OpenStreetMap and Linux are pretty similar in a lot of ways. The licences are both copyleft, require attribution, and allow modification and re distribution. Both projects have a foundation to look over them, but are relatively hands of on day to day operations. Both foundations have corporate sponsorship to fund them.

However when it comes to edits, the projects differ. Linux is now hugely dominated by paid developers, OSM is almost exclusively volunteers. One reason for this may be because most downstream users of OSM use it exclusively as a base map, they use there POI data on top and then almost laughably link to Google Maps for directions. They are only using a tiny portion of OSM. (And they are missing out!)

Lots of Linux contributors are paid employees of a business, usually tasked with fixing or implements a specific thing. As far as I know only Amazon does this in OSM, paying employees to fix routing issues. Sometimes this is closer to having a benefactor, where the business pays the employee to work on what ever they want and the benefactor trusts it’s in the best interest over all. Mark Shuttleworth ran Ubuntu as a loss for a long time, they contributed to the whole ecosystem during that time. I guess Mapbox might have the finances to be able to be a benefactor, but other than them there doesn’t seem to be a lot of money around.

Some developers are founded directly through other people on platforms like Patreon. I don’t think this is a massive in the kernel space, although a few high profile developers for other projects do it. You would then get the freedom to spend your time how you wanted, working on projects that interest you. This is similar to having a benefactor although you have to spend a significant amount of time and effort marketing yourself, and being your own PR. I don’t know if OSM has a big enough crowd to support this.

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What’s Microcosms

Microcosms is a upcoming feature in the OpenStreetMap website to support local communities of mappers. Each microcosm is focused on a city and has a team of mappers working on improving OpenStreetMap in that city. The microcosm can organize their upcoming events and track RSVPs.

microcosm
noun
mi·cro·cosm | \ ˈmī-krə-ˌkä-zəm \
Definition
1. : a little world
2. : a community or other unity that is an epitome of a larger unity
source: Merriam-Webster

Development

Work started last year and is picking up lately. During development, microcosms is a fork of OSM called osm-microcosms. There’s a PR for early feedback from the website team.

The website team has a high standard for quality and I appreciate that. I continue to write automated tests for all the new code I create.

A design document is available to get an idea of what’s done and what’s to come.

Community

The Local Chapters and Communities Working Group has taken an interest in Microcosms and I’m glad to provide something to support them. Check them out on Matrix.

I’ll be giving a talk in the OSM US series of Mappy Hours. I’m scheduled for June 9th. And I’m talking to Austin about being on his podcast Nodes and Ways.

User Feedback

Thanks to Tom on the OSMF Operations Working Group we have a beta website for user feedback.

I’d love to hear what you want in Microcosms. What’s working well? What’s working poorly? What features are missing? Please file your issues and I’ll work on them.

OSM Testing Site: Microcosms

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Brian DeRocher is the organizer of MappingDC.

As of this morning I hit 15,000 edits. I am methodically plowing through the wiki’s “Districts in Turkmenistan” list of villages, identifying them on the map wherever they are, and adding a link to the node or way of the village on OSM. That will make it easier for me to identify which villages remain to be mapped as I seek to complete the map of Turkmenistan from my armchair.

HOT is mapping Cusco region in Peru at the request of regional government to support their COVID-19 response efforts. The maps will be used to provide cash transfers to families who are prevented from working by the quarantine and State of Emergency in Peru, and to provide nutrition and sanitation assistance.

Additionally, in parts of Cusco, over 75% of children under 3 years old suffer from anaemia. This means that their brains will not develop as quickly as other children, and once they start going to preschool and later school, they will often be tired, unable to concentrate or to learn effectively. The regions which suffer most from anaemia are usually the most remote, hardest to reach areas, where data available to local authorities and NGOs is minimal and access to health services for women and their children are limited. The Regional Government in Cusco wants to combat this by geo-locating where children under 3 live in order to improve the medical attention that they receive.

Spent 1 hour mapping Buildings and Roads

Available from:

• on Web
• Chrome webstore
• Firefox addon center

Map service list

• Main maps
• Baidu
• Bing
• F4map
• Google Maps
• Mapillary
• OpenStreetCam
• OpenStreetMap
• Qwant Maps
• Yandex
• 地理院地図

• Utilities
• BigMap 2
• Distance calculator
• JapanMapCompare
• KeepRight
• Kontur
• Latest OSM Edits per Tile
• Map compare
• Multimapas
• OpenStreetMap Analytics
• OSM Inspector
• Osmose
• Overpass-turbo
• Pic4Carto
• Who did it?

• Specials
• earth
• EO Browser
• FIRMS
• flickr
• flightradar24
• Gribrouillon
• Ingress Intel map
• Localwiki
• Macrostrat
• mapbox Cartogram
• MarineTraffic
• Old maps online
• OpenAerialMap
• OpenGeofiction
• PeakFinder
• Satellite Tracker 3D
• STRAVA
• Traze
• Twitter
• USGS earthquakes
• Windy.com
• 聖地巡礼マップ

• Other maps
• Copernix
• CyclOSM
• Google Earth
• here maps
• Historic Place
• maptiler
• MAPY.CZ
• Open Infrastructure Map
• OpenCycleMap
• OpenRailwayMap
• openrouteservice
• OpenSeaMap
• OpenSnowMap
• OpenStreetBrowser
• OpenTopoMap
• OpenTripMap
• OSM Buildings
• TomTom MyDrive
• ViaMichelin
• Waymarked Trails
• waze
• wikimapia
• Wikimedia maps
• World Imagery Wayback
• yelp
• Zoom Earth

• Local maps
• 2gis(RU)
• IGN Géoportail (FR)
• MapFan (JP)
• Mapion (JP)
• Ordnance Survey(UK)
• Yahoo Map (JP)
• 今昔マップ(JP)
• 地形図・地勢図図歴(JP)
• 地質図Navi (JP)
• 重ねるハザードマップ(JP)

• OSM local chapter
• OSM.ch
• OSM.cl
• OSM.de
• OSM.in
• OSM.jp
• OSM.org.ar
• OSM.ru

• External App
• Apple maps (for Apple device)
• Launch iD editor
• Launch JOSM
• Launch RapiD editor
• Launch waze map editor

• Map portal
• GeoHack
• map.orhyginal