The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is opening board elections, and I am delighted to be invited by Miriam Gonzales a.k.a. Mapanauta, Nathalie Sidibe (both current board members) and Enock Seth Nyamador to run for it.

I am a long-time member of HOT, which I joined in 2013 when I was conducting mapping projects during my residency in Nicaragua. Since then I have supported HOT in many ways, from managing the website in the early days to working later as a project manager on the initial machine learning initiatives and leading the technical team to implement version 4 of Tasking Manager. Today I work as a Geospatial Data Systems Architect at the German Research Centre for Geosciences.

I know HOT well and from all sides: as community and project partner with OSM Nicaragua, as active volunteer, as supporting member and as key person in the technical staff. And I am confident that I have the deeper insights to contribute to HOT in an inclusive and constructive way.

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Conflation

1. Download the XLSX from https://opendata.transport.nsw.gov.au/dataset/traffic-lights-location
2. Open the XLSX in LibreOffice and add an extra column start_date with formula =IF(C2, CONCAT(YEAR(C2), "-", TEXT(MONTH(C2), "00"), "-", TEXT(DAY(C2), "00")), "").
3. Convert the XLSX to CSV
4. Open the CSV in JOSM (may need open data plugin)
5. Select all the CSV nodes and then update Equiptment_ID to ref, delete Date_install, Suburb.
6. Edit > Search, with search string Asset_Type=VEH with results set to select. Add the tag highway=traffic_signals and delete the tag Asset_Type.
7. Edit > Search, with search string Asset_Type=PED with results set to select. Add the tags highway=crossing + crossing=traffic_signals and delete the tag Asset_Type.
8. Add a new layer and download from OSM via Overpass using the wizard text (highway=traffic_signals or (highway=crossing and crossing=traffic_signals)) in "NSW, AU"
9. Active the conflation plugin, and configure. Select all the TfNSW nodes and then freeze that as the reference, then select all the OSM nodes and freeze that as the subject.
10. Change the distance to 50 (in meters)
11. Set merge tags and list highway,crossing,ref,start_date and then except STREET_1,STREET_2.
12. The other options should be Simple, Disambiguating method.
13. Generate matches

Now in the conflation tab there is “Reference only” which are ones in TfNSW but not OSM. Subject only are ones that are in OSM but not TfNSW, and matches shows ones that were found in both but have have a different location and/or tags.

At the time of writing there were 768 found in TfNSW not found in OSM and 5,306 found in OSM not found in TfNSW. But take this with a gain of salt as there are differences in how they are modelled in OSM.

Building a Maproulette Challenge

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My name is Namitala Gertrude (Trudy Hope). I am a Ugandan IT and GIS professional with over 5 years of experience in developing IT solutions, especially for mapping important features in remote villages and peri-urban areas in Zambia. I am currently working in Zambia where I co-founded OSM Zambia and a managing director TruDigital Technologies. I am one of the OSM Africa core team and have introduced OSM and HOT to different African countries,

I am part of OSM Africa and have supported different countries to establish OSM operations and given them guidance where need be. I got to know about Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in 2016 when I wanted to use the tasking manager and was impressed at what HOT does. HOT’s ideology resonates with what I believe, so I wanted to contribute more. That is the reason I decided to join the HOT fundraising and HOT summit working groups.

I have led OSM Zambia for two years now and within this short period, the community has grown to over 800 mappers from a handful of mappers when we started out. OSM is now being recognized by the councils all over the country. Open map data sharing has gotten more recognition in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi. I have also been advocating for women participation and inclusion in the mapping community. I have established partnerships with international organizations, government, NGOs, private companies, schools that have all supported our community.

I have been a board member and below are my interests in wanting to run again: To complete some of the topics that I believe should be done like board advisory and encourage the set up of a community engagement strategy To grow gender inclusion and get more women involved in HOT and OSM to increase diversity in the community. To get more partners supporting HOT’s mission

Thank you for taking time to read and I hope you vote for me and change the world together. `

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team develops on a 5 year cycle. From 2005-2010, HOT was a crazy idea within the crazy idea of OpenStreetMap. From 2010-2015, HOT showed that the use of OSM in humanitarian response was a viable idea, we built an organization and operations and tools, and weathered some chaos as an organization growing out of a community project. At this point in 2015, I recognized the 5 year pattern in my HOT Summit talk An Incomplete History of HOT. That’s where I first met HOT’s Executive Director, Tyler Radford, who from 2015-2020 stabilized and grew HOT in a well structured way. Confidence in this foundation has led to the Audacious grant to expand OSM community centered mapping from 2020-2025. I am very excited and very much want this to succeed wildly.

This is HOT’s most difficult transition. A well structured organization has a lot of momentum, and the intention of the next 5 years looks very different from the previous 5 years. HOT has focused on project work, building up staff, and delivering on specific commitments. All of which is great. But this naturally generates friction with community centered approaches, and I think HOT’s relationship to OSM has suffered because of lack of investment in the community and consistent data quality, and a disregard for the responsibility of HOT to engage in both the good and bad of OSM. It also means working for to contribute the many positive things in HOT’s work and culture to OSM at large. By “investment” I don’t focus on money, but on the time to build relationships, and use, support & develop processes to make OSM better. However, when operating at the scale of HOT, community effort needs to be resourced and part of the plan. I made this point in my HOT Summit 2019 talk Data, Operational Excellence and HOT.

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HOT, it seems, is at another inflection point.

I would like to contribute and lead now to this new set of challenges.

I got involved with HOT 2011 and later served on the board from 2015-2018 focusing on stabilizing and foundation building to create a sustainable HOT. That sustainability has just been secured, at least for the next 5 years. The security that comes from long term guaranteed funding also has many pitfalls. I have the strategic and practical experience to return to the HOT board and make a difference.

I am a very strong advocate for local mappers and have helped train people throughout the world to map their own communities. Having contributed training and seed funding to mappers in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Haiti, West Africa and many other places. Local communities are the heart of OpenStreetMap. They are the reason HOT exists. They are the reason we must continue to be vigilant about the type of NGO HOT can and should be.

In my last days in my old job leading the GIS team at American Red Cross I secured the funds for Tasking Manager 4. I lead the team that created Portable OpenStreetMap, OpenMapKit, and many other technical tools related to improving map workflows and map quality.

Today, my day job is not day to day to mapping nor to OpenStreetMap. After some time away from the HOT board and Missing Maps to focus on my new job for a little bit I’m excited to re-engage and contribute again to the leadership of an amazing organization. I have strong strategic, fiduciary, and board experience that is needed at the moment to help HOT scale effectively.

I’m not going to give a list of priorities for the things I will focus on. I think it best to list my tenants that will guide my conversations and decisions on the board.

1. What is in best interest of local mapping communities?
2. Is this in the best interest of HOT’s volunteer mappers?
3. Is this making HOT just another INGO?
4. Are HOT paid staff best supporting local mappers?

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Hello to everyone am Benjamin Okeyoh ,I would love to thank the entire team for their efforts towards this important project towards the development of country Uganda in this very hard times of the global pandemic.I personally it has been grate since i have been able to team up with very grate and intelligent minds in the country when it comes to mapping. Am very grateful and thankful to you members who not only trained us but also have guided every day when it comes to mapping using JOSM and as we talk now am an advanced mapper . it is real good for me because i have been able to participate in mapping my own place of origin which is Sigulu Islands thanks team .I would also love to say that thanks for the facilitation so far it has enabled me personally to be able to map very day and meet the required edits . Also if their comes such important calls and opportunities to help i will be there any time am required to help thanks..ALL THE BEST TO THE ENTIRE TEAM.

Serving as the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s Voting Membership Chairperson for the past year has been a privilege, a challenge, and a learning experience for me. I greatly appreciate that the Voting Membership elected me to this role last year, and I hope for the opportunity to continue serving in that role for the next year.

Serving in the role of Membership Chairperson for a second consecutive year will allow for consistency in the role in supporting the business of the Voting Membership. Starting off in the position, I faced, what I considered, a large learning curve. There was no shortage of, and I am thankful for all of the, support from Russell and Mikel (former Chairs), Board Members, Voting Members, and HOT Staff in my transition into the role. Understanding the procedural side of our organization was a larger lift than I had originally anticipated, but I have a new-found appreciation for our Bylaws and Robert’s Rules of Order.

Over the course of the last year we’ve been able to identify many strengths and opportunities for improvement within our Voting Membership. At the 2019 HOT Summit in Heidelberg, many of us had the opportunity to talk in person, setting aside time to talk through ideas for 2020. We conducted a survey of the membership, which resulted in a newly offered Voting Membership on-boarding session for new Voting Members.

There is much I would like to support the membership with this year, including identifying ways to improve our asynchronous collaboration, which in my opinion, would allow for more Voting Members to contribute. This includes identifying ways that our Voting Members can be more empowered at a local level to support HOT’s programs, including new efforts as a part of HOT’s Audacious Project.

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Since OSM Smart Menu version 0.13, users can add their own links using an URL Template!

For example, you can create links like:

• https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?params={latitude}_N_{longitude}_E
• https://disfactory.tw/#map={zoom}/{longitude}/{latitude}
• and https://hiking.waymarkedtrails.org/#route?id={osm_relation_id}

Please give it a try! More information is available in the respective OpenStreetMap Wiki page!

Facebook is releasing an update to Daylight, our complete, downloadable preview of OpenStreetMap data.

📥 Download Daylight Map Distribution right now in OpenStreetMap PBF format: 📦 planet-v0.2.osm.pbf (56GB).

Earlier this year, Facebook released Daylight as part of our work with OpenStreetMap. We use maps to let our users find friends, businesses, groups and much more. OpenStreetMap (OSM), the open source wiki map, has a substantial global footprint of map data built and maintained by a dedicated community of global mappers making OSM a natural choice for Facebook.

Every day, our mapping teams work to confirm OSM’s millions of community contributions for consistency and quality by excluding intentional and unintentional edits that are incompatible with our use cases. Daylight is the result of that process.

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Well, after a good 2 years of mapping Saint Petersburg, Florida, I’m finally moving.

It’s been a real good time here, and there was (and is still) and lot of work to be done. I found myself adding entire skyscrapers that were new since the last major batch of changes to the area. Massive changes in property from gentrification and the constant shuffle of downtown businesses means that much of where I mapped had to be updated, and after COVID, I’m sure many of the businesses I added will have to be removed.

I started adding sidewalks to the general Downtown Saint Pete area, and worked to expand them. I think sidewalk routing as an accessibility possibility is important. I also think bicycling is important, so I made sure to add as many bike parking amenities as I could find.

There is still so much to do here. There are many addresses missing, many businesses still missing and the new pier has yet to be updated as it was only just completed. I doubt there is adequate aerial imagery of it yet.

Mapping St. Pete also taught me a first hand experience of the privilege inherent in mapping. The more affluent areas of our city were far and away better mapped than the poorer sections. As I was fortunate enough to live downtown, this was where I focused, especially since I didn’t often have time to go on mapping exclusive expeditions. So, as I write this, and having spent countless hours updating this part of the world, I reflect that there’s more that I can do and could have done. There are large swathes of Pinellas County that are no more than a road and increasingly out of date building footprints. There are many businesses missing, sidewalks are missing, addresses are missing, much less fire hydrants, benches, trash bins and other amenities that make life better.

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I am a physical planner, working for the Government of Lesotho. I am an experienced GIS user within a very focused context of laying out Land Use and Settlement Plans in the section of Forward Planning. I am very committed to using opensource approaches and this includes OpenStreetMap. My HOTOSM record as a mapper dates back to 2015, and in the 5 years I have grown to understand that HOTOSM is the most important humanitarian platform when it comes to supporting logistical responses to disasters. I have also noticed that, while not fitting into the “crisis mapping” definition other HOTOSM projects have the capability of recording and documenting environmental damage and other larger scale threats caused by climate events, and in particular I was a big contributor to the #MapLesotho mapping tasks supported on the hotosm tasking platform.

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If you have a bunch of geospatial data (e.g. buildings, banks, hospitals, schools, etc.) and you want to ensure that the tags/attributes on each of your data is “complete” before uploading it to OSM, you may want to check its data completeness first. To assess whether your data is “complete”, make sure you have a list of tags that you expect from your data.

Sample houses data opened in JOSM

I wrote a simple python script to check the data completeness of a specific dataset.

Generally, the script opens and reads a geojson file and uses a json schema that allows us to annotate and validate every feature of the geojson file. The defined json schema is the set of attributes you expect from your data. If all of these are met, then the object is tagged as valid (complete), otherwise it is tagged as invalid (incomplete). The output from the function is then saved to a new csv file.

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When I first noticed this program, I was so excited that I can help saving lives worldwide. It was April when I saw it, and during those two months, I revised some places which they are so wrong that people could be confused. I also added many of hospitals near my house, helping the entire quality of medicine to be improved. I think this project is really meaningful as it opens the opportunities to public to help people around the world. They can just revise some places near their house, and it only costs 10 to 15 minutes per day. I want to recommend this program to my friends too, and I wish this can finish successfully. Until the day no one dies from poverty, let’s cheer up!

While revisiting some favorite songs on Youtube I listened to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zotaRLROtw That song talks about putting people on the moon, a task that was once considered impossible but that has been accomplished by many people working together, each one doing their part. Our goal of building the best map and geo data collection of the world did look about equally impossible when a few people set out to collect GPS traces and add data to an empty database. But look what the work of those many many mappers, programmers, designers, admins and a lot more OpenStreetMap Enthusiasts has created so far! Suddenly that goal doesn’t look all that impossible any more. So I raise my glass to the many unknown heroes of OpenStreetMap that have brought us to where we are now and the many that will still join us to get us even further along: Have a wonderful time, all your work is very much appreciated!

Any level of automation of over tracing buildings, using AI, would be a game changer for OSM allowing us to populate the map with detail much more rapidly.

Over tracing is normally a laborious task. In my case even using a wacom drawing pad to over trace. If you haven’t got a wacom drawing pad, get one, it makes over drawing much much easiear vs using a mouse.

Here is a 13 minute screen cast of my experience of using “mapwithai-dev” plugin with the latest “josm-latest.jar”.

https://youtu.be/JtyhdFH39cY

My intention was to discover if I could over tracing buildings in Aberdeen, Scotland, Europe.

The guidance on how to do this is posted at this page https://gitlab.com/gokaart/JOSM_MapWithAI/-/wikis/Testing-the-development-version

If anyone can shed any light on how to make this plugin useful, for specific locations, that would be very helpful,

thank you

During the Esri User Conference, Esri and Facebook today announced the availability of ArcGIS datasets in updated versions of two OSM editors, RapiD and JOSM. You can check out the Esri blog post and Facebook blog post for details, but I also wanted to provide a little more context and contact info for the OSM community.

In addition to the local knowledge and field surveys of OSM contributors, another source of OSM data is government data that has been released with appropriate licenses. Many government agencies in the United States and around the world are Esri customers, and they use ArcGIS software to create, publish, and share their GIS data.

Esri would like to help OSM mappers by providing more convenient access to this type of data where it would be useful in OSM and it can be provided with an appropriate license. Esri is encouraging our ArcGIS user community to share their data as open data, preferably with licenses that are compatible with OSM.

In the past few months, Esri has identified some open data (e.g. building footprints and address points) that can be used in OSM and processed that data so that it is more ready-to-use in OSM. To enable access to this data for OSM mappers, Esri has worked with developers at Facebook to expose this data in OSM editors through a new version of RapiD and an updated Map With AI plugin for JOSM.

As described in the Esri blog post, these tools will enable OSM mappers to choose a dataset they’d like to use for mapping, select a feature in the dataset that does not currently exist in OSM, review the geometry and available fields (tags) for the feature (such as below) and make adjustments based on local knowledge or other appropriate sources as needed, and then upload their changes to OSM.

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Today I finished fleshing out all the sidewalks and crosswalks (both marked and unmarked) in the Licton Springs neighborhood of Seattle! This includes details on curb ramps and tactile warnings (or lack thereof) at each crosswalk so that pedestrians that need one or the other to get around can more easily plan a walking route using OpenStreetMap.

Although a lot of Seattle’s neighborhoods don’t have very well-defined borders I believe the ones for Licton Springs are fairly consistent across maps that I’ve seen:

• North border: Northgate Way
• East border: I-5
• South border: N 85th St
• West border: Aurora Ave

Now that I’m done, I determined that Licton Springs makes up about 1% of Seattle’s land area, so I consider this a pretty major win in the amount of pedestrian infrastructure mapped!

I took on the project of mapping all of the sidewalks and crosswalks in Licton Springs because I have been walking my dog around this neighborhood quite a bit and noticed that OSM didn’t have any of the sidewalks mapped in the neighborhood (though a few marked crosswalks had been). Particularly surprising was that none of the sidewalks along this section of Aurora Ave had been mapped! This is a pretty busy street that has a lot of foot traffic normally due to the density of businesses and the RapidRide E bus line running along it.

Though I have been mapping for a while now, this was certainly the largest task I had undertaken so far and was able to see it through from start to finish! I hope the Seattle OSM community can continue mapping more of the sidewalks and crosswalks around the city!

Removed Oracle Java (version 8) packages, with intention to replace it with OpenJDK (11).

OpenJDK is installed, now JNLP won’t work. JOSM’s JAR file just works, but I’ll definitely miss any auto-update feature.

Tried and tested several other guides… nope! JNLP would still not work.

Finally, purge everything Java and… attempt to reinstall someday.

A little over a year ago, I wrote about Observe — a new field mapping tool for OpenStreetMap that works offline. There was a lot of interest from the community to use Observe and we got a lot of great feedback. Ever since, we have slowly been working on adding new features and improving the overall performance.

Few weeks ago, we released a new version of Observe. I’m excited to invite you all to test this version and give us feedback. I’ll highlight some of the changes in this release.

You can download the development version of Observe for Android and iOS from here. Note that this uses the OSM Dev API. If you don’t have an account, you can create one. You can read about all Observe features and how to use them in the user manual.

Taking photos and recording traces

Two important features that we wanted to add to improve the field mapping experience of Observe is being able to capture photos and record traces. Photos are critical when it comes to mapping outdoors, as we tend to take pictures of features so we can refer to them later on to create additional tags. For example, I take pictures of the sign boards of businesses so I can enter address and opening hours when I’m back at my computer.

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Moving objects is a typical thing to do and because most times the objects are attached to other objects, if you don’t do it carefully you may end up messing up the outlines of the attached objects.

If you are beginner to such thing, it’s ok and understandable. Try and learn from your mistakes.

But if you are somewhat experienced map editor, moving objects, messing up outlines of other objects, and leave them there without correcting them, that is NOT OKAY.

Last few days I see someone moving buildings and roads while messing up the outlines of other attached objects, and in the end it looks bad. And they move in such way that they don’t resemble the actual appearance at all. For example, moving a building with an attached parking space, but separating them + messing up parking space’s outline.