Using OpenStreetMap (OSM) and JOSM (Java OpenStreetMap Editor) has completely transformed my perspective on places in Ghana. What used to be just names on a map are now vibrant locations I explore, analyze, and contribute to in meaningful ways.

With each mapping session, I am a digital explorer, uncovering hidden details about my country. While tracing highways, POIs, buildings, and rivers, to ensure that every corner of Ghana is well represented, I explore!. From the bustling streets of Accra to the serene landscapes of the Volta Region, my virtual travels take me everywhere without even leaving my seat.

As I explore and see places, I contribute data to solve real-world problems. Through OSM, I have contributed to flood risk assessments, improved accessibility to schools, and even helped emergency responders find critical locations. It’s amazing to know that my little edits can make a big difference in someone’s life.

Mapping is no longer just a hobby; it’s a passion, a responsibility, and a way to make a mark on the world.

One edit at a time! The journey continues!

Another one got ignored today, another road left unmapped, another place erased because it wasn’t profitable enough to exist on a corporate map. No one noticed, because no one was supposed to.

They don’t talk about the missing footpaths, the streets that don’t appear because they aren’t in a government database, the communities left invisible because they don’t generate ad revenue. They don’t talk about how your map—your view of the world—is decided not by truth, but by business interests.

They call us idealists, hobbyists, dreamers. They say the world has already been mapped. But they are wrong.

We are the ones who see the gaps. We are the ones who refuse to let our neighborhoods, our histories, our stories be erased. We are the ones who put the world on the map—not for profit, but for people.

Yes, I am a mapper. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is refusing to accept a world where only what is profitable is visible. My crime is knowing that no company, no government, no algorithm should have the power to decide what exists.

You may ignore us. You may try to replace us with AI, to wall off geography behind paywalls, to tell people that their contributions don’t matter. But you can’t stop us all. Because the world is ours to map.

After all, we are all alike. We are OpenStreetMap.

🤣 with apologies ++The Mentor++ (8 January 1986). “The Conscience of a Hacker”. Phrack, Inc. 1 (7): 3 of 10 - wikipedia

I’m back home! All the uploads done! Yeah!

Street-level imagery

As I had written about earlier, I was on tour with actually, to be precise, one of the bands I’m in under the title/ program “The Dubliners Experience” in the Netherlands from Jan 15th to Feb 1st. The GoPro Max was our constant companion on the roof of the tour bus. It covers mostly motorways and the areas around concert venues, of course. I also walked around the campsite we stayed at (band life isn’t as glamorous as they make it out to be in the movies after all) with it, but that imagery is not super useful, I’m afraid. How much can you map in a fen, when there are not even leaves on the trees to map species…But still, the area got covered.

I was especially keen to upload to Panoramax, because the coverage was quite poor which does not mean to discredit the people who have already contributed, of course!

I’ll give you some before and after screenshots, some of which I had already shared on Mastodon yesterday.

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Hi OSM folks,

Yesterday I finished mapping West Virginia’s forest landcover for OSM in 5 years! It was a big project and definitely the next one will be a bigger one but because of that I’m gonna do it in a pace that I can maintain. If I have to stop, then I stop. Well, it’s just a hobby for me. As I announced on Mapping USA, I’m mapping Pennsylvania from now on. I’m really interested in the history of that state, The Keystone State.

And yes, I just wanted to try myself out how I could map forest landcover outside of Europe. It seems everyone seems hyped and I like this!

I’m not a robot so I can’t work on it 24/7 due to my personal life and I know i’m not making a 100% accurate landcover, but hey, I learnt some tricks which I’m taking advantage of! Sometimes I also criticise the quality I do but well people usually improve as time flies.

I’d like to thank everyone in the OSM community for giving me help and guidance, and I’m sure I’ll still have questions if it comes to specific areas. :)

About me

I started mapping in June 2020 as a way to find parks and trails near my home in Redmond, Washington. My daughter loves adventures and provides huge motivation. I am a former compiler engineer and bring a passion for great tooling. I love being able to work with others on an expansive, vivid, and important project.

My mapping

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Today I will talk about the new version 0.8 of userscript that adds several useful features to osm.org.

You can view existing features of the script and install it on GitHub or in the OSM Wiki

⚡️ Faster rendering

My first PR was merged to openstreetmap-website code, and now the Map Data layer loads instantly. Be sure to try it. Thanks to the maintainers for help!

For the script, this means a huge acceleration in rendering large relations and GPS tracks (yes, tracks, read more!):

icon 👥 near relations is clickable 😉

📸 Photos from Panoramax, StreetComplete, Wikipedia Commons

Now they are displayed directly on the website. In notes, in tag history, and in changesets.

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After reading this article How to transform data from NAD83 to WGS84 and based on my personal experience (taking RTK GNSS measurements with multi-frequency multi-constellation receiver hooked up to ORGN NTRIP caster referenced to NAD83(2011) epoch 2010.00), I want to share some notes.

The article suggests QGIS as a tool just to proceed with warning potential users how it could easily go wrong with no warnings. However, it doesn’t provide any methods to verify the results or the method itself except for trusting the process. Since my first attempts (independent from the content of the article) to transform my observations have failed, I was looking for the verification method and found some.

First of all, as far as I understand QGIS uses GDAL/ORG and PROJ. This toolchain has a very useful command projinfo for testing the transformation. You’d need to understand WKT output that it will spit out, but you can much easier spot the situation when it’s going to use a ballpark low-precision transformation.

For instance, this query:

projinfo -s EPSG:6319 -t EPSG:7665

among many other things spits out this string:

Conversion from NAD83(2011) (geog3D) to NAD83(2011) (geocentric) + Inverse of ITRF2008 to NAD83(2011) (1) + Inverse of WGS 84 (G1762) to ITRF2008 (1) + Conversion from WGS 84 (G1762) (geocentric) to WGS 84 (G1762) (geog3D)

It explains in fairly good detail what it’s going to do and has some useful keywords such as geog3D which means that it expects input and provides output in degrees of latitude/longitude as well as ellipsoidal height, see EPSG:6319 for details. It also mentions 0.01 m at the beginning and in the context of OPERATIONACCURACY[0.01] which is pretty self-explanatory.

Then, you can actually attempt transforming an individual set of coordinates using cs2cs. The easiest way is to throw them into its input stream like this using echo:

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Cycling is not one thing

To most people cycling is just something people do as exercise and if you’ve seen one bike you’ve seen them all. To someone that has become deeply embedded into the cycling community at a national level as my hometown area has become a cycling hub for every variety of biking there is my view of biking has become quite diverse and how I’ve approached mapping cycling has matured and grown. I think a lot of people within the OSM community look at osm.wiki/Bicycle and scroll through pages and think, man it looks like you’ve got is all covered. However, I see this page I almost entirely see one type of cycling covered: Urban/Suburban Commuting.

So maybe a good place to start is to cover the variety of types of cycling that exist and how they are distinct and how they are also tangibly intertwined.

Even in listing these I tried to stop and logically break things in to categories like on-road, off-road, and closed circuit or hard-surface vs. soft surface of even high speed (sport) vs. low speed (recreation/commuting) but even here these starts to bleed together. For instance MTB racing has started to include gravel runs, so has cross country (XC), so has the Tour de France which is decidedly road.

Thus in no particular order here are some of the larger categories of biking and at a high level difference in how they function as it relates to biking.

Road Biking

Think tradition asphalt, curved handle bars, Lycra , fully human powered, and fast. From a mapping perspective this requires a lot of similar things to road mapping like speed limits but there is a particular interest in if roads have shoulders or if it’s an established mountain road that people train then there can be little difference.

Mountain Biking (MTB)

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The twenty-third development diary brings substantial architectural changes to OpenStreetMap-NG, marking a pivotal moment in the project’s evolution. This update introduces MapLibre GL JS as our new mapping engine, comprehensive dark theme support, and various quality-of-life improvements that enhance both user experience and technical capabilities.

🔖 You can read other development diaries here:
osm.org/user/NorthCrab/diary/

⭐ This project is open-source — join us today:
https://github.com/openstreetmap-ng/openstreetmap-ng

🛈 This initiative is not affiliated with the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

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Video Summary

Feel invited to watch this video summary that demonstrates improvements in action. The showcase provides a look at the new MapLibre GL JS integration, dark theme functionality, and various interface refinements that enhance the OpenStreetMap-NG experience.

⬇ Click the image below to play

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Hello OSM Community,

I’m still working on capturing 360° images of the city of Salzburg for Mapillary and Panoramax. My goal is to enhance OSM data in Salzburg, especially in areas with notes that could be resolved with better visual context - something 360° images can provide.

Progress as of now

Route Planning Challenges

So, i tried some tools to plan a route efficiently to cover as many streets as possible without overlapping - essentially the Chinese Postman Problem.

• Bikerouter: manual tedious labour involved to cover every street
• everystreet challenge: no GPX download, so useless. No developtment.
• RunEveryStreet: More automated approach, but key features missing and some bugs, and I didn’t get a response to my suggestions unfortunately.

Unfortunately, none of these tools fully met my needs, so i did it more practical.

The Solution I’m Using

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“Mapping USA 2025” welcomed participants to join virtually via Zoom for the two-day event between January 24th-25th with times from 11 AM to 3 PM ET. 🌍✨

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Hey guys! My first time giving diary entry in OSM!! Very incredible.

به مدت ۲۵ سال در مدارس مختلف استان البرز، خاصه در منطقه ساوجبلاغ با سمت مدیر فعالیت داشتم، باتوجه به حفظ ارتباطات عاطفی خودم در طول سالهای عمر، مخصوصا بعد از بازنشستگی، از ظرفیت بکار گیری و همراهی عده ی زیادی از شاگردانم در امور اطلاع رسانی، نقشه خوانی و نقشه برداری، جمع اوری اطلاعات دقیق اماری مخصوصا ازنقاط محروم و کمتر رشد یافته را دارم

I currently live in Chhattisgarh.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bayazid-ahmed-49490625b_my-journey-in-the-world-of-openstreetmap-activity-7286000400824942592-GRoF?utm_source=social_share_sheet&utm_medium=member_desktop_web

i left the city

Last time i was in the city, went for coffee and made a post here about it. Now i dont see any post…

digital hallucination

Now im writing from a remote location artist studio. Should i pin it on the map? kontajnerlab

In the upper-right corner of the main screen, you’ll see 3 buttons:

• Upload
  • Looks like an “up arrow”.
• Layers
  • This is the one we want!
• Settings
  • Looks like “3 horizontal lines”.

(Note: This tutorial was created using StreetComplete v60.1 on Android.)

Tutorial: Adding Fire Hydrants

1. Click on the “Layers” button.

2. Choose “Things”.

• The icon will now turn into a green-and-white bullseye-looking symbol.
  • (You can now see objects like benches / fire hydrants on the map.)

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Street-level imagery

Since last Thursday, I’m touring the Netherlands with the band I’m in. I brought the GoPro Max sponsored by Meta, because I thought it would be a great opportunity to get lots of footage for Panoramax which has little coverage in the Netherlands so far. We’re staying in the same place all the time, near Epe in Gelderland and fan out for the gigs almost all over the Netherlands. We’ll be playing until the 31st of January.

Unfortunately, it’s been very foggy since we arrived, so the imagery is not the best. It is also very cold, and the third trip (to Zutphen, if I remember correctly), the metal on the holder hinge shrunk and the camera tilted back, so that footage was fairly useless.

I upload the images to mapillary first, after all, they sponsored the camera, so it takes a while to get them onto Panoramax, and the internet at the accommodation doesn’t seem as quick as what I’m used to.

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OpenStreetMap is now 20 years old. Its community is contributing to complete a geographical database which fuel many activities, for instance useful for energy transition and power grids asset management. The increasing impacts of extreme weather phenomenons like storms or wild fires disrupt power grids and expose them to wider outages. Operators have to reinforce and adapt their assets for those upcoming challenges.

Overhead power grids asset management had suffered from disinterest since early 1990s for instance in France. It remains at least a significant challenge in developed countries. Important decisions that had been made to bury them and more generally because they are “highly visible infrastructure”. Nevertheless, several decades are required to completely hide a very capillary distribution grid. So we need to better describe them for sake of maintaining remaining overhead power grids, particularly ones that couldn’t be buried. Furthermore, very high voltage transmission lines will remain mainly overhead.

Producing and maintaining knowledge about utility networks assets is tedious and expensive without appropriate tools. I already had opportunity to explain how the “OpenStreetMap way” is helping for power transmission grid knowledge, back in 2020. Operators now face other challenges and are busy with bigger investments for transitions. Yet lesser time left for knowledge management as projects pace accelerate. Power grids inventory started early after OpenStreetMap birth in 2004. It began with most visible transmission grids. Tagging improvements are continuously made since 2010 and 15 years later we reach another step with a deeper experience in such activities.

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Hello, I was wondering if there was a way to make your own personal edits to the OSM without sending it to the server.