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

Today I started by drawing some houses around Hertfordshire, UK. A lot of detail seems to have already gone into the more populated areas (e.g. London) so to add further contributions to this open source project I will be looking into detailing more remote areas. For now my focus will be on areas I personally know and have visited.

Now I understand why .

It seems difficult to locate boules courts in Kuala Lumpur, using various sources such as pictures (and shadows), sat images, maps … For example, I contacted Petanque Uputra, to map their courts, but they seems resilient to release geographic information… This feels useless, because satellite data will eventually reveal their location… I finally nailed it.

While trying to locate Petanque KL (I think I found it), I discovered the difficulty of working with outdated sat data. THis is the location I thin I found : osm.org/?mlat=3.12394&mlon=101.73567#map=18/3.12394/101.73567 The sat image providers in OSM show this area as covered in woods, while Google Maps shows the most recent data…

This quest started when a petanque contact Bayarsaikhan (MN) drew my attention to the 2019-09-13/17 Asian Oceania Bocce Junior championships in Putrajaya.

It seems that many schools in Malaysia have petanque facilities.

In the last month I’ve started using JOSM. Big learning curve for me. Currently finding it useful for adding address to houses and resequencing Cycle Routes.

In this page, a collection of infos about how useful is OSM for tourist operators. Mainly fed by weeklyOSM news.

• The tourism organisation of the Durmitor National Park in Žabljak, Montenegro, recommends the use of OSM on their mountain bike maps and also on their homepage with the wording “For successful orientation in the region of Durmitor and Sinjajevina, we recommend that you use OpenStreetMap and Open Cycle Maps which are regularly updated and new information is added every day” -> http://www.tozabljak.com/old/eKontakt.html

• A touristic map in UK: http://bexhill-osm.org.uk

• Touristic map tiles from Poland: https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=5.5838643&y=49.7387028&z=14

• https://opentripmap.com/

While keeping a quarterly minor or major release schedule is a bit of an uphill battle, I believe the work on the next major version of Vespucci has progressed far enough that the first beta will be made available later this month (snapshot development builds are available now).

The fall releases always tend to suffer from porting to the next mandatory Android API/SDK version and this one is not different. I assume that this typically consumes a man-month of development work, this time around it doesn’t seem to be quite so bad however there are still a few issues I haven’t resolved that need to be fixed before release.

The bad news is that this will be the last release that will support an Android 2.3-3.0 compatible build. The reason is that to be able to continue to follow googles minimum target API/SDK rules we will have to switch to a new packaging of the Android libraries that provide backward support for older versions of Android (this implies that the estimated one man month for following google changes for next year is very optimistic). As all the package names have changed it is simply not feasible to use an old support library as we have done up to now for the legacy build with minimal addition version specific code. Undoubtedly it is a side effect of the packaging change that google is quite happy with.

My intent is to revive the legacy build for 4.0-4.3 devices when google drops support for them, which is likely not far away.

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My Last Changes in 2808 In OSM

I Was Completed 2500 My Edit

I am beginning to think that it is a mistake to include paid foreign mappers to help map your cities. They are creating as many imaginary roads as our country’s road department it seems. And yeah, they are incapable of drawing a straight line with just two nodes…

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Today Development Seed is excited to launch mapping.team. At the core of this platform is the new OSM Teams API, a platform-agnostic tool for mappers, organizations and developers to coordinate mapping and build communities. Visit dev.mapping.team to start creating teams of OSM users, or use the OSM Teams API to integrate the service into your own app.

Why Teams?

OpenStreetMap has over 1 million users who have contributed at least one changeset. Among those 1 million users, the motivations to map vary drastically. For some it’s a hobby, others voluntarily map to help people in need, and others are part of organizations who pay them to map, or students in classrooms exploring the globe. Regardless of the motivation, OSM has brought people together to collaborate and create the largest map database of the world.

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I Finished 2401 My Edit

Hello mappers,

I’m currently adding buildings around Ringland to the map, and I need your help.

I’ve also noticed that most buildings and houses haven’t been mapped in Newport, so it would be great if you could add them.

“The more we map together, the sooner we’ll finish.”

Happy mapping, FinB2000

I complete 1900 My Edit proud