To celebrate Osmgeoweek2019 and Birthday of Dhaka College #DC179, we(Youth Mappers Dhaka College) organize a mapathon “Map for Humanity “ on 22 November 2019. We along with new members work on an vulnerable area where we try to give support of that region and different NGO’s so that they can take steps on that vulnerable area.In and around Bossangoa in the Central African Republic, MSF teams provide consultations in hospitals and health centres, and support a network of community health workers. A better map of the region will help the teams to understand the exact situation in the area and will allow them to make rough population estimations.So,we updated the maps to help them with drawing building, highways, waterways and so on. Some new students sign registration and participate in this mapathon. First we arrange a training session where we discuss about OSM,Youth Mappers,and Map related other questions. Then we gave them handson training,how can we make map, how can we contribute on OSM, how can we draw a building with proper shape?How can we draw a highway or a waterway or a waterbodies? After discussion and answering remote draw related questions, we along with our new members contribute on Hotosm Tasking Manager -Task No.#7033 - Missing Maps: Mapping buildings in Bossangoa (city) - Ouham , Central African Republic At last session we discuss how can we progress and what may be our future plans.We also make plan organizing another mapathon for celebrating our Victory Day 16th December. In the end,we all take part in tea party.

My banquet speech at the North American Cartographic Information Society’s annual conference last month was not videographed, but a couple of members asked for recordings, so I used Power Point’s voice recording feature to run through the slides while reading the narrative into a microphone. I then converted the Power Point into an mp4 file using Office 365. The result is not perfect but if you are interested in learning how the mapping exercise in Turkmenistan improved quality of life, you can find the video on YouTube here.

Today I was in Best Buy looking for something else and saw it was selling the LG Phoenix 4 with 16Gb RAM and Android 7 for $39.99 plus tax (prepaid AT&T but I don’t intend to use airtime). I splurged on it, brought it home, connected to home wifi, installed Mapillary, and on my next road trip will try it as a new dedicated imagery collection device. I cannot really justify spending hundreds of dollars on a GoPro or other pricey dedicated device; my cartography habit has to be kept relatively low cost (I say that having bought a new PC a few years back, the specs of which were calibrated to creating wall maps using Maperitive…)

I also began my first “armchair mapping” of Turkmenistan, working on some imagery collected earlier to update the map, and correcting some errors inserted by novice mappers. I have not yet started a serious examination of the Soviet military maps but that will come.

Monday November 25, 2019 3am.

Note: The reason I signed up for this program is to find out who is tracking me from Chicago, Illinois using the GPS on my smartphone which doesn’t appear to be terribly smart nor am I finding there to be any real/effective security or VPN for portable devices or PCs’.

I had an idea that maybe you could make a little extra money when mapping, why not? It could be nice for kids especially, maybe some of them wouldn’t be interested in mapping otherwise, but money could be an incentive.

This could be possible in area which have some shops and businesses, but isn’t mapped well yet, perhaps small towns are the best candidates.

So I did my rounds, gathered data and made notes about potential businesses to contact and suggest to add them to OSM for a small amount of euros. And after I compiled a list, I emailed to them. Here’s a rough translation of the email.

Hello,

I noticed that your shop isn’t found in OpenStreeMap [1]. I can add information about your shop to the map, so that new customers can navigate to your shop using modern devices and will notice that you exist when they are browsing a map with a phone or a computer.

I have added hundreds of objects to OpenStreetMap which you can find following this link [2].

Price: 20€ (I explain how the can pay easily.)

Regards, weareborg

[1] I’m sure you already know Google Maps, but maybe you haven’t heard about OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap is a free map that covers the whole world. It can be edited by anyone and it can also be used anyone freely. This is why it’s used by a lot of people and sometimes it’s more detailed and accurate than Google Maps. Millions of people use it for various purposes. For example, this Android application has more than 50 million installations https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mapswithme.maps.pro.

Trip planner of Helsinki Regional Transport uses it https://www.reittiopas.fi/.

Here’s the city of Uusikaupunki on the “official” site osm.org/relation/2376177#map=14/60.8015/21.3991.

[2] osm.org/user/weareborg/history#map=17/60.80067/21.41081

… See full entry

Bangladesh Open Innovation Lab which is generally known as BOIL.It is an non government and non profitable organization.This organization was founded on 18 February 2017.From the beginning, BOIL go aheads with succeed and admiration.As it is a community based organization it’s mission is to support OpenData and make the environment of innovation and try the best for empowering everyone to innovate.It presents a real life test and experimental environment which helps one’s innovation.This organization works on Open Data based research, development and innovation of technologies and render services for well being of Human. The organization works with many international organization such as World Bank,UNICEF, Deltares,WaterAid etc.This organization believe in voluntarism.The organization has four departmental sector or team and each department or team has a teamlead who conducts the team.On Thursday, Weekly General Meeting was arranged and all the teamlead give the updates of the week. The four departments are categorized as Field Operation, Hr&Admin, Technology and Engineering and Data Science.The organization works for mapping development and it was done based on OpenStreetMap.For this purpose it renders free OSM remote drawing training so that the trainee can contribute on mapping. Overall,now this organization stands on that stage which bears the sign of brighter future.

We are excited to announce that we are going to be held an International Conference, State of the Map Asia.Like other country,this year the conference will be held in Bangladesh. The programme will be held on 1st and 2nd November 2019 at Krishibid Institution,Dhaka. Many international organizations and community and many Humanitarian activists will present threre and they share their experiences and views. Many proposals were submitted and one can take part speech session if his/ her proposal was accepted by the authority. To success the programme, we are trying our best.So now make plans to attend the conference and gather knowledge how one can keep pace with the present world and broadens and highlights one’s potentiality and creativity.

Bangladesh Humanitarian OpenStreet Operation Team (BHOOT) mainly conducts various humanitarian activities. As usual BHOOT Team has adopted a project for increasing public health service facilities. The aim of this project is to ensure public health through providing GPS location with full address of every individual health service centre of some congested area of Dhaka City. A number of volunteers were engaged in this project for collecting field data. The volunteers collected data through mobile devices using ODK and OsmAnd. They collected data with exact GPS location, capture image and full address of different health service centres such as Medical hospital, Diagnostic centre,Homeo Centre, Therapy centre, dental care,Eye care pharmacy and so on. When these data used on map and publicly opened,people can easily find different health service centre around them. Using this data we can find out whether these health service centres are sufficient for the residence of the area or not and we can also predict the conditions of the health facilities of the entire Dhaka city. The Health Ministry and various NGO’s can go ahead getting the ideas from this project to ensure public health service facilities for the congested city dwellers.

I’ve realized a few weeks ago that I’ve been tracing building outlines to non-corrected imagery.

At this stage, a lot of the road information seems correct except for the service roads that are between the main residential streets in the core of ladysmith.

I’ve been attempting to correct my prior traces slowly, while using a correction factor of 6.84, 1.19.

I’ve made the intersection which I’ve marked on the map (2nd avenue and white) my source of truth. This is assuming the location of the roads is correct.

I left my home in Nigeria, 16th November, 2019. I boarded a vehicle on the 17th November, 2019. On getting to the end of Nigeria border, we could not cross over to Benin Republic. We wasted a lot of time in this place. Cross over to Benin Republic, we spent 3 days instead of 6 hours or less than that. We eventually cross over to Togo we spent more than 1 hour for a journey of 1one. In Togo border, I was handed over to another vehicle just like the one I left. Crossing into Ghana with the vehicle, the motor got spoiled along the way. I was handed over to another small car which took me to a particular spot and then,I was handed over to another small car which took me close to Ivory coast border and again, I was handed over to another small car which carried me across to Ivory coast border. From here, I boarded a vehicle which took me direct to Abidjan I took another small car to the event centre. I spent six days on the road instead of two to three days journey. During this experience, I have been sleeping outside or sometimes inside the vehicles and mosquitoes fed on me right now, as I composed this write -up I am feeling feverish.

For those who haven’t been keeping track of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, there will be an election to the Board of Directors on 14 December, and I have decided to put myself forward as a candidate. ☺ There are 7 candidates in total for 4 seats. I am currently finalizing writing my manifesto, and writing up answers to the official list of questions. Stay tuned!

Last year Joost provided some interesting statistics on the OSMF membership numbers by country and how these relate to mapping activity. In other words: How far the OSMF membership in their geographic distribution represents the active mapping community.

Since it is interesting to see how this changed since last year i asked the MWG to provide the data on this and Pascal was so nice to provide yearly statistics on the active mapper numbers

Two things that need to be stated in advance:

• i asked for the numbers on members eligible for this year’s elections but this is of course still subject to change since quite a few memberships expire around this time of the year and possible participation of mappers depends on if they renew their membership or not.
• Pascal’s numbers for active mappers per country are only semi-reliable of course. They only tell us about where mappers are active, not where they come from. And it does not tell if those mappers are part of a genuine local community or if they are just paid to map in that specific country.

So all this needs to be taken with a grain of salt but none the less how things have changed since last year is something interesting to look at.

In addition to the values Joost calculated last year i also added another column for the absolute member count mismatch - i.e. how many additional members or too few members come from a certain country compared to what would be a proportional representation of the active mapper community.

The numbers

Here are the numbers for the top 45 countries sorted by OSMF member count (first) and sorted by active mapper count (second, that is the equivalent to what Joost showed last year).

For explanation of the columns:

… See full entry

Hi, It’s been some years now that me and other mappers are uncapable of editing in Sicily. Other users check every edit and revert it in a matter of minutes, with other big changesets that have misleading notes like “aggiornamento”, “survey”, “edit”.

Example situation: 1) I put a note online (I am afraid to map because of continue reverts) “on the ground”: that place changed name 2) user X “closes” the bug but doesn’t change that name 3) Osm mails me, I double check because i don’t trust that user anymore. 4) I change manually the name 5) I’ve a strange feeling that my small edit will be deleted soon.. …. then, less than 30 minutes later: reverted.

Ok, now that everything is like before, I’ll go back to another year without mapping or using OSM.

bye bye mapping

See https://osm.wikidata.link/browse/Q657

Most are missing. Does someone have access to this data? Anyone living in the area or who is willing to find and ask the relevant french/tchad government agency?

As you might know, as of this week, Juno is no more. It is ceased to be. We had a good run, helped thousand of NYC drivers earn money and provided them with a human, attentive support team. But the increasing regulations in the city benefited Uber and disadvantaged their competitors, especially small companies like Juno. So we decided not to continue this fight.

What happens to the GPS tile layer we were making? It is still there — but not updating anymore. I have loaded two days worth of tracks for the central part, and month for the rest. It should help validate some of the complex cases around the edges, but obviously won’t tell you what has changed in recent days. Sorry for not updating it, and I hope it still helps with mapping New York.

In the meantime we have published another open-source thing: a reverse geocoder. In fact, it seems like the first ready to use, open and strictly reverse geocoder. Unlike others, it is in no way optimized for forward geocoding, but does one thing better than the others: finding an address for a coordinate. You can learn more about why it is not an easy task from my SotM lightning talk. And head to the github repository to see the queries and test cases for yourself:

https://github.com/gojuno/jrg

The moment Juno was over, the whole R&D team, me included, was acquired by Lyft. Which means, instead of asking others to open more data for OSM and to help the community with improving the map, I get to do that myself. Just for the US though, but still better than NYC only. I’m pretty excited for this new opportunity, and looking forward to working with their mapping team and their data — and making OpenStreetMap useful and better for everyone.

Hi Today I set out to try to calculate the total length of paths in Sweden. I filtered all “highway=path”s using osmconvert and osmfilter from a dump and got an .osm-file.

Now what?

Script? JOSM?

I tried JOSM which failed because if just 1 of the 91,777 paths is closed JOSM refuses to calculate the length it seems.

Any ideas?

Common tags that have to do with food security–osm.wiki/Food_security

shop=supermarket

/* This has been generated by the overpass-turbo wizard. The original search was: “shop=supermarket” */ [out:json][timeout:25]; // gather results ( // query part for: “shop=supermarket” node“shop”=”supermarket”; way“shop”=”supermarket”; relation“shop”=”supermarket”; ); // print results out body; >; out skel qt;

shop=convenience

/* This has been generated by the overpass-turbo wizard. The original search was: “shop=convenience” */ [out:json][timeout:25]; // gather results ( // query part for: “shop=convenience” node“shop”=”convenience”; way“shop”=”convenience”; relation“shop”=”convenience”; ); // print results out body; >; out skel qt;

shop=social_facility=food_bank /* This has been generated by the overpass-turbo wizard. The original search was: “social_facility=food_bank” */ [out:json][timeout:25]; // gather results ( // query part for: “social_facility=food_bank” node“social_facility”=”food_bank”; way“social_facility”=”food_bank”; relation“social_facility”=”food_bank”; ); // print results out body; >; out skel qt;

amenity=marketplace /* This has been generated by the overpass-turbo wizard. The original search was: “amenity=marketplace ” */ [out:json][timeout:25]; // gather results ( // query part for: “amenity=marketplace” node“amenity”=”marketplace”; way“amenity”=”marketplace”; relation“amenity”=”marketplace”; ); // print results out body; >; out skel qt;

shop=department_store

/* This has been generated by the overpass-turbo wizard. The original search was: “shop=department_store” */ [out:json][timeout:25]; // gather results ( // query part for: “shop=department_store” node“shop”=”department_store”; way“shop”=”department_store”; relation“shop”=”department_store”; ); // print results out body; >; out skel qt;

🙂🙂🙂

A few days ago the notice was sent out to OSMF members on this year’s annual general meeting (AGM) which will happen in mid December.

In addition to the usual board elections - which are covering 4 board seats this year and for which 12 candidates have been nominated who will provide their manifestos and answers to the official questions (if you are a candidate you might want to look at my guidance for candidates) there will be a number of resolutions being voted on by the members. Since the time before the votes begin will probably be fairly busy with discussions of the board candidates and their goals and qualifications after the publication of their manifestos and answers on November 30 i will use the time now to discuss the resolutions. You can also find the full details in a PDF supplied by the board.

There are going to be 7 votes on changes of the OSMF Articles of Association (AoA) - which are called special resolutions and one ordinary resolution (which is essentially just a formal decision of the members instructing the board and working groups to do as said).

The AoA changes can only be voted on by normal members (that is members who have registered as such and had to provide their address for that) and require a 75 percent approval by those participating in the vote. That is a high hurdle and therefore none of the resolutions is probably sure to be approved. Yet any significant change in the way the OSMF operates will require an AoA change. So these are not just meaningless tweaks of internal procedures, their approval or non-approval could have significant effects on the balance of power and influences within the organization.

… See full entry