My engagement with OpenStreetMap began through my involvement as a YouthMappers volunteer, where I developed a strong interest in the power of open geospatial data for development and humanitarian action.

Calvin Amevienku is my name, a YouthMappers volunteer regional ambassador to Ghana. I have had the opportunity to support and connect student chapters, promote mapping activities, and encourage youth participation in open mapping across my region and beyond. This role has deepened my understanding of how collaborative mapping contributes to capacity building, digital transformation and community resilience.

Through my continued involvement with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), I have contributed to humanitarian mapping efforts that support data availability for underserved communities and crisis response. These experiences have strengthened my appreciation for the role of volunteers in building and maintaining high-quality open geographic data.

Being nominated as a 2026 HOT Voting Member is both an honour and a responsibility that aligns closely with my work as a YouthMappers Regional Ambassador. It represents a transition from active contribution to meaningful participation in governance and decision-making within the HOT community.

If selected, I aim to represent the perspectives of YouthMappers and regional contributors, particularly from Africa, ensuring their voices are reflected in HOT’s decisions. I am especially interested in strengthening youth engagement, supporting local chapters, and advancing capacity building initiatives that sustain long-term participation in open mapping.

I am committed to contributing constructively to HOT’s governance processes and to strengthening collaboration among HOT, YouthMappers, and local mapping communities worldwide.

Cheers!

I recently discovered this. You can survey for Open Street Map easy if you use your camera with location tags turned on. Take lots of pictures of anything that could be added or updated while you shop, walk or drive. Then later you can go through your pictures and use the location to find where they were taken. Compare the location tag against satellite images, and add everything you find useful in your photos.

I recently went on a trip and I’m adding businesses, addresses, stop signs, speed limits to OSM this way and its really helpful. Ive been able to add so much more details that I didn’t even know I saved in my photos. Try it!

The main improvement in this release is the support for shared corner fillets. Now, when two open ways meet at a junction, the rounding applies across both ways as a single continuous operation. This feature was suggested by Paul Berry — thank you for the idea.

In addition to this new feature, the plugin is now faster due to improved interaction performance during dragging and preview. I also added several internal fixes to improve stability, mainly regarding rendering and session handling.

FilletTools is available in the JOSM plugin repository.

You can join the discussion here.

Following the proposal made a few weeks ago to expand heritage tagging for Belgium and the feedback received, I have modified and improved the sections regarding heritage tagging in Belgium in the Heritage section of the wiki, regarding Vlaanderen, Wallonie and Brussels. The tag heritage=inv has been added to indicate heritage that is not protected but is included in a heritage inventory. In Flanders and Brussels, being included in such an inventory has legal implications and means a form of ‘light protection’. For JOSM, the sections in the “Belgium (Mapping in Belgium)” and “Heritage Properties” Presets (nl:Predefined tags; fr:Préréglages) related to heritage in Belgium have been updated for Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels. By the way, the “Belgium (Mapping in Belgium)” preset is the better choice here.

Versão em português

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On May 26, 2026, I completed two years as editor of the Brazilian Portuguese edition of weeklyOSM, which marked the return of the publication in that language after a hiatus of many years. Since I joined the team, the Brazilian edition has been published without fail, and I am grateful to my colleagues - Thayná Assis, Adriele Bernardo, Lívia Rios (ex members) and actually Paloma Moreira, Amanda Silva, Matheus Magalhães, Vitor Sousa and Francisco Theodoro, who have been my companions on this journey. As a record for posterity, I would like to highlight some events that have energized the global community, once again demonstrating the scope of weeklyOSM, which covers a wide variety of topics related to OSM and always values collaboration and openness.

 

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I am part of this collaborative project, which has been publishing news about the OpenStreetMap community since its inception as Wochennotiz back in 2010. If you’d like to learn more about this history, visit the EU/MychOSM Project page and tune in to the Lightning Talk I’ll be giving at State of the Map Africa 2026, taking place June 26–28. You can also review my presentation weeklyOSM-stats for the global State of the Map 2025 event, held in Manila, Philippines, from October 3–5. At this year’s event, I plan to present the updated results of the statistics and continue to take the pulse of this beloved publication of the global OSM community.

 

If you’d like to know about my observations — based on several years of working with mappers, developers, academics, NGOs, companies, and other stakeholders in this ecosystem, I invite you to read the chapter Overview of OpenStreetMap Usage and the Brazilian Case (in pt), available on Zenodo.org, which was published in my book from last year, Case Studies in Collaborative and Participatory Mapping (in pt), available on the Editora IVIDES website.

 

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Self explanatory, but I am doing a bit of micromapping and working on accurate representations of buildings and parks in the roodepoort area, close to where I work.

Hey there!! I’m Rupam Golui.. though most people online know me as Agasta and I honestly prefer that. I’m a 2nd year CS undergrad from Kolkata, India. Most of my time these days goes into open source and projects (GitHub: Itz-Agasta). I mostly work in Rust, Python, and TypeScript. Outside of code - I cook. Genuinely, not just survival cooking lol. I used to game a lot but somewhere along the way work took over and tbh I haven’t looked back. Also I love linux, currently running Arch (btw) and have been distro hopping since I was a kid… tried basically most of them, maybe move to nix next year. I rice my setup way more than I probably should, even participate in Reddit competitions for it. Could genuinely yap about this for hours. Yaa that’s mostly me, maybe someday I want to build a cool project people actually love enough that I can keep maintaining it full-time for years (hopefully).

Honestly I got here through a side project. Was building something with ocean data, needed maps, used Leaflet & Mapbox. But I got too curious about how all of it actually works behind the scenes - the data, the tools, the geocoding side of things. One thing led to another and I ended up deep in Nominatim’s codebase somehow. A few PRs later and here we are :)

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Ok so - I got into GSoC 2026!

I’ll be working on native category support in OSM’s search engine Nominatim this summer, and I’m really excited about it.

Right now Nominatim classifies every place using a single OSM class/type pair - like amenity=restaurant. It’s simple and it works, but it has some real limitations:

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Hi! I’m Sherley Sonali, a CS undergrad from IIIT Hyderabad, India. As part of GSoC 2026, I’ll be working on Valhalla RAD with my mentors Nils Nolde, Kevin Kreiser, and Christian Beiwinkel.

The project

Routing engines are quietly complex and a code change that looks small can silently make routes worse in ways unit tests never catch. RAD gives Valhalla maintainers a way to see exactly what changed in routing quality when a PR lands, and make an informed call before it merges. The system brings together a route request generator, a GitHub Actions pipeline that diffs results across router and graph versions, and a React web app where maintainers can inspect those diffs and decide.

A bit about me

I got into routing through Fleetix, a vehicle route optimization platform I built during an internship and it used OSRM to compute multi-stop routes over OSM data for real employee transport operations. Seeing how much the engine’s interpretation of the map mattered in practice, and what happens when it goes wrong, is what drew me toward Valhalla and eventually toward this project.

Where we are

The coding period has kicked off, the initial project setup is in place, and work on the request generation pipeline is underway. I’ll be using this diary to share progress and lessons learned as the project evolves.

Introduction

Hi!
My name is Francisco Albacete Chicano (but feel free to call me Paco!), and this year I have been selected for the GSoC 2026 with OSM, working on Valhalla Enhance Pedestrian routing project with my mentors Kevin Kreiser and Christian Beiwinkel.

Who am I?

Well, I am a second year student of the University of Murcia (studying computer science), who randomly discovered OpenStreetMap and began with a small programming project to learn more about it! While I was fascinated by it, I discovered OSM had projects for GSoC, I had for sure to take a try! So I started getting in touch with Valhalla as I really enjoy pathfinding algorithms and optimizations. And when I am not coding, I have been playing video games for most of my life and really like to have experiences with my family and friends (even better if there’s beer!).

What is the project about?

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I’ve been adding ALPRs throughout the region in my community and, first of all, wow there is so many of them. Second I am aware of what Flock cameras look like but I am unable to figure out who owns / creates the other more squat looking ones. If anyone has any information on how to identify the other cameras please let me know, I’d like for my information to be as accurate and precise as possible!

How dare you cast aspersions on and try to obstruct me and my work on OpenStreetMap in Victoria, BC. I thought OpenStreetMap was supposed to be collaborative, but instead you proceed to misrepresent my statements and get openly hostile and destructive toward my efforts. Now I must demand that you cease all further interference with and circumvention of what I am trying to do. I will not have it.

For quite a while now, I have been thinking about making a tutorial on mapping lifting stones. In case you are not familiar - this is a tradition throughout parts of Europe (VERY strong in the Basque country), but also in Asia and North America. Local men (and less often women, but that did happen) proved their strength by lifting a dedicated stone in the local area. You’ll find more information on Wikipedia and examples on Wikimedia. The tradition might go back thousands of years.

Since and because of the lockdown during Covid, Irish man David Keohan (“indiana stones” on Instagram) has been reviving the tradition in Ireland which very much entailed finding these stones, some of which had not been lifted in 200 years! There is a website with a map (Mapbox, so based on OpenStreetMap), but I followed up on some of the locations, and they’re not all correct.

Lifting Stones. Glen Roy by david glass, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Earlier this month my husband and I drove by or through a number of small communities in Northern California as we were headed to and from Canada. One of them was Grenada. I was curious to see if it was mapped on OSM. It wasn’t, save for the streets (including some erroneously added ones).

So I’ve spent my mapping time this month on Grenada. And now the buildings and addresses are there.

We all gave OpenStreetMap a try once, no? Same for me. No idea how old my (old) account is. I haven’t used it for years, and I wasn’t able to re-enable it again… but… in Autumn 2024, a friend told me about StreetComplete. I liked the idea of StreetComplete. Everyone likes it. But as mentioned, I had to create a new account for all of this 🤦 But it was worth it!

In this Autumn, my OpenStreetMap journey started. In Büsum, Northern Germany. In my vacation… After my vacation and multiple passing weeks, I mapped more and more. Dived into many details, tried to gather more and more knowledge in many areas, and there was and still is so unbelievably much. I took every opportunity combining required doings in the “real world” with mapping them in the virtual world. My friend and I discussed mapping, tools, great plans, even better ideas and so on and so forth. Well, we all had such dreams, no?

At some point we thought that OpenStreetMap should become a more prominent topic in our town. There was already a wiki page for our town. If I remember correctly, the last changes were from 2009. It contained great ideas and plans, but you can imagine that a lot has changed in the last ~15 years. In OSM and also in our town. Understandably, basically all content was out of date.

Since we collected already a lot of ideas what could be done, we started to re-write the wiki page step by step. The idea was to create a new entry point for people that are interested in OpenStreetMap in our town. Give them ideas on what can be done in our town. Also, since no one really likes to maintain MediaWiki pages regularly 🙈 the page should be pretty static. The content should give beginners, intermediates and nerds a helping hand on how to start on anything.

So everyone should find their obsession… mapping hydrants, trees, playgrounds ❤️ And be honest: You all have one!

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Hello, just a collection before putting it into a purposal

so there are many issues about walk=no at Gleisanlagen. Each enities pushing it to not my problem.

1. Routers need it to avoid Tracking through have traffic with separate sidewalks
2. Openstreetmap verifable on the spot
3. Historie of foot=no is changing in wikipedia.
4. StreetComplete is asking if its forbidden, not if its forbidden by sign.
5. Just use access.
6. Maybe foot:implicit=no / hazard:railway=yes source:foot:implicit=DE:StVO:25(5)
7. osm.wiki/Key:access suggest “saftey reasons” sidewalk=no or hazard=*
8. Vorschlag railway=light_rail impliziert ?foot=no?
9. There is a exception for maxspeed. Maybe create another train-crossings.
10. Grashopper working as expected. OSRM and navigating through busy crossroads. Valhalla has issue.

Reasons:

1. “Just use a better Router”,
2. Street-Speed-Limit is also not verifable on the Ground.
3. osm.wiki/DE:Key:foot
4. https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/poll-should-streetcomplete-disable-the-are-pedestrians-forbidden-to-walk-on-this-road-without-sidewalk-here-quest-in-the-uk/118387
5. Openstreetmap verifable on the spot
6. ?
7. DE:Key:hazard No, Entsprechend der OSM-Konventionen sollten nur Gefahren bzw. Gefahrenstellen kartiert werden, die vor Ort überprüft werden können.

Perfect solution: https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/2472 Are pedestrians legally prohibited from walking here according to a road sign?”

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/foot-no-oft-falsch-erfasst-durch-streetcomplete-quest/95470/6

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/falsches-gefahrliches-fussgangerrouting-durch-sidewalk-tagging-anderbar/130145

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/foot-no-prohibited-impossible/5135/25

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stvo_2013/__25.html (3)+(5) Gleisanlagen

I live in Washington State and noticed that several main roads like state highways did not have a speed limit set. When I use OsmAnd or Organic Maps to navigate, those apps are guessing what the speed limits are for several roads, creating very bad guesses of how long a trip will take. Fuel-efficient routes also are not optimized unless max speeds for roads are known.

I discovered several awesome websites that make finding existing speed limits a breeze. I don’t like relying on Mapillary, even though they do an amazing job in making it easier to map speed limits. I just don’t want to support their owner Meta (Facebook).

Specifically for my state, I found this website: Washington https://geo.wa.gov/datasets/WSDOT::wsdot-roadway-data-speed-limits/explore?location=47.916813%2C-118.330518%2C15

Move your mouse over any state highway, click on it, and it shows you the speed limit for that road segment.

With this website, it makes finding the speed zones significantly easier. I don’t have to use Bing Streetside or Mapillary anymore because I rely on government data instead.

I also found other state websites and will list them now so they are all grouped together.

Virginia https://www.virginiaroads.org/maps/VDOT::vdot-speed-limits-map/explore?location=37.356725%2C-78.949534%2C12&path=

North Carolina https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=2229ffaa3ea5470992d021023618e1e6

Texas https://gis-txdot.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/txdot-speed-limits/explore?location=33.705213%2C-100.174890%2C9

Florida https://gis-fdot.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/fdot::maximum-speed-limit-tda/explore?location=27.792987%2C-83.778658%2C7

New York https://gis.dot.ny.gov/html5viewer/?viewer=risviewer

If we get more people to check major roads and update their speed limits, routing engines like OsmAnd, Organic Maps, GraphHopper, OSRM, and Valhalla will be able to create routes that are much faster, safer, and more fuel efficient.

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That day, I received this email.

19 May 2026 (1:19 PM): We would also like to invite you to a special mapathon as part of the OpenStreetMap Community Building activities in Syria. This activity aims to train participants on using the OpenStreetMap platform and contributing to mapping buildings and roads to support humanitarian work in Syria. Date: 22 May 2026. Time: 11:00 AM (Syria Time). Location: Online (meeting link will be sent after registration).

11:00 AM Syria time is about 3:00 PM in UTC+7.

So, this afternoon, I attended the online meeting.

After that, I joined the mapathon hosted on the HOT Tasking Manager.

Even though, in the presentation, the speaker conducted the mapathon using the iD editor in the browser, this time I preferred to use my set of “powertools”: JOSM, Draw Buildings (B), and LastUpdated.

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I grew up in Nepal. Hills everywhere. Roads that don’t exist on any map. Communities that satellites can barely see through the cloud cover. When I first heard about OpenStreetMap, I thought: this is exactly what those places need.

That was a few years ago. Since then I’ve spent over 300 hours mapping, not because someone paid me to, but because I kept thinking about the person who might one day need that road to exist on a map before they could get help.

How I Started: Before I knew what OSM was, I was already messing around with maps, visiting new places, uploading photos to Google Maps, adding names, leaving notes about locations. I liked documenting places. That habit slowly turned into something bigger.

A hackathon in college introduced me to humanitarian mapping. That’s when it clicked: mapping wasn’t just a tech thing. It was about making communities visible.

My background is electrical engineering. My job is in the cable car sector. Neither screams “mapper.” But when you work in mountain infrastructure, you see how much depends on accurate geographic data, withdrawal routes, access to remote villages, disaster response. The gap between what exists on the ground and what exists on a map is sometimes jarring.

I’ve actually validated more tasks on HOT than I’ve mapped myself, which felt strange at first. But validation matters as much as mapping, maybe more. A wrong building polygon in a flood response map doesn’t help anyone.

On Women and Mapping: Most mapping events I’ve attended, online or in-person, are heavily male. So is the leadership in local OSM chapters. But whenever a woman shows up and starts contributing, the quality is often excellent. Careful, methodical, detail-oriented. And then they disappear. Not because they lost interest, usually because no one made space for them to stay.

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Just after the midnight of May 21 to May 22, 2026 the 5000th daily planet diff was generated.

• So I finally modified the boundary of Palo, Leyte, where Barangay Barayong is part of it. I was first putting a note to let anyone edit or find the boundary source from the local government, until I decided to do it myself. Not official, by the way. :-)