I Just had a brief orientation with Oluwatosin and Ijeoma on OSM and how Unique Mappers contribute to OSM project . I look forward they will pick it up from there… How brief can you make an orientation about OSM? just to get newbies excited and get on board as active Local OSM Mappers?

Over the past years, the OpenStreetMap Foundation has worked hard to expand the membership. On the one hand, we want the core of the project to be run by people from all backgrounds. On the other hand, a larger membership makes it harder to buy your way into power.

Over the past year, MWG and Board worked on the implementation of the Active Contributor Membership (ACM). You no longer need to pay, or say you cannot pay to join. We now welcome anyone who is contributing significantly to the project by mapping or in other ways. The project was launched by the end of August 2020, and has already had a significant impact. A previous iteration of this was “the fee waiver program”. It was only available for people for whom the subscription cost of 15 pound is very high, or for whom making the payment is difficult (because of international banking issues). This program was launched around new years 2018.

Main impact

We compare the status at the end of the year 2018, with the membership right before the launch of the ACM and a few months later - mid November. Note that with the 90 day membership requirement for voting in the AGM/Board election, no snapshot exactly represents the voting population.

According to my count, membership rose from 1503 to 1939 in the period since the introduction of ACM. That’s over 400 new members or a growth of almost 30%. In this short time, the membership has grown more than in the almost two years before.

A lot of the motivation behind ACM is increasing geographic diversity. There has in fact been a significant shift. Where Africa was virtually unrepresented back in 2018, it is now at 5,2% of the total membership. Asia shows a steady growth. South America did not profit much from the fee waiver program, but has seen a significant rise recently.

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I had been working on trails in Westwoods for years, but in 2011 we moved to Guilford adjacent to Westwoods so since then I have been doing extensive editing in Guilford Land Conservation Trust properties and also some adjoining towns.

As part of working with the Westwoods Trail Committee, I have created a display that relies on OSM maps and in particular on waymarkedtrails.org layer. In that app (based on a Leaflet map using OSM data) I have been displaying an inventory of bridges in GLCT properties. I also use it to display trail issues that need to be addressed and points of interest relevant to GLCT.

I have been paying much more attention to hiking route relations because of how well waymarkedtrails.org uses that data in its displays. In particular, I’m getting better at recording osmc symbols so that they will appear accurately on the waymarkedtrails.org map.

Apart from taking part in the OSM Ireland project to map all buildings on the island, most of my constributions are of historical features. I’m also always trying to convince other historically interested people of the merits of OSM. So when a friend and fellow member of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society asked me whether jostle stones (Wiki link) could be mapped on OSM, I said “sure”. Only slight problem being that there is no key for them - yet. So I started a proposal on the OSM wiki. Please join the discussion and the vote, once it starts.

While I was preparing the proposal, I asked around in my family if someone could send me pictures. I was 90% sure my aunt in Leipzig, Germany lives in a house with guard stones, because it used to be a printing house in the 19th century and has a huge gateway. She didn’t think so, but she checked, and there are. I just thought it was funny that I remembered them being there (I haven’t seen that house in about two years) and she has been living there for at least five years and never noticed them.

It took us a while to find out the name for them in German - there are actually a few. I put all my hopes unto my grandmother who used to work for the Heritage Council, and she did deliver. She didn’t know right away, but she knew where to look it up. It’s curious, that very few people know the name for them, even though they are omnipresent in historic town and city centres. At least that is the situation in Ireland and Germany. But raising awareness might keep the word(s) in the collective vocabulary a bit longer.

I think it would make for a nice Heritage Week project to map jostle stones (that seems to be the Hiberno-English word for it) in Kilkenny or even the whole of Ireland. It could be a way to get new mappers with a local history background. Or people who map for visually impaired map users.

It is a privilege to address 2020’s humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit today. This year marks HOT’s 10th anniversary, and my own 5th anniversary with HOT starting from 2015. Today’s theme is the past, present and future of humanitarian OpenStreetMap and we have been thinking a lot about the future.

I wanted to share my Summit address (which you can watch here) on an OSM diary simultaneously, so that people can engage in the comments if they want to.

This is something of a statement of intent for HOT within the humanitarian and OpenStreetMap ecosystems and, while it has been shaped by many conversations with community groups, collaborators and contributors in the universe in which HOT exists, it only seeks to represent my own perspective and some of the recent thinking within HOT the NGO. Please think of it as an early draft and a contribution to a conversation.

I also acknowledge that HOT’s presentation of itself has increasingly highlighted our successes while smoothing over or not acknowledging challenges and failures. Today’s Summit features “failfest” sessions for the first time where friends and colleagues are sharing learnings from where they didn’t necessarily get it right. This statement is not about what we’ve gotten right, but about how we’d like to embrace a stronger culture of feedback and learning and hope that, by doing so, we can achieve great things, with all of you.

… See full entry

Objective

My objective is to represent Dominion Land Survey (DLS) land descriptions in OSM to aid with agricultural accounting and navigation in areas of Western Canada where civic addressing is either not fully implemented or not known. To that end, this entry serves as a draft proposal.

Background

Approximately 800,000 square kilometres of Western Canada (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and parts of BC) were subdivided according to the DLS. While many regions have implemented civic addressing (e.g. 12345 Road 321 W) for yard sites, DLS land descriptions (also known as legal descriptions) are still prevalent. Agriculture in particular relies on them to identify fields for crop insurance and on-farm food safety programs.

It it not uncommon for a field to span four land descriptions; I have personally worked with fields that spanned six due to their shape and placement. In the other direction, it is not uncommon for one land description to have multiple properties on it.

My initial focus is on Manitoba but I believe the process I’ve outlined below can be applied to the other Western provinces with minimal changes.

Steps to Implement in Manitoba

1. Import municipal boundaries from MLI (admin_level = 6). The datasource in question is named “Municipalities/Local Govt. Districts”. Cities and towns also show up in this dataset and will need to be filtered out.
2. Clean up shapefiles representing quarter sections, river lots and wood lots so each one is its own entity. They are currently a collection of lines with a centroid label.
3. Import land descriptions into OSM, ensuring a relationship marks them as part of their municipality. I suggest admin_level = 10 to put them on par with neighborhoods in urban areas since these, too, can contain more than one property.

Steps to Implement in Alberta

TBD

Steps to Implement in BC

N.B. admin_level = 8 for municipalities

TBD

Steps to Implement in Saskatchewan

TBD

Closing Thoughts

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Yet another big issue with a user mapping with Maps.Me In Bamako (Mali) this user https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/seydoukone mapped 3000 POIs, all with the office=government tag. You can left comment to his/her changeset, but Maps.Me doesn’t implement any messaging system. So, what can we do? Erase all the POI is not a good idea, because the user add pharmacies, fuel, etc. The only way is make pressure on the Maps.Me developers I think

test

I used 10 foot long 0.5 inch diameter electrical conduit for mapping outside. I connected pieces with some screw fastener thing.

1 pole works and is short.

2 poles kind of bend.

3 poles result in a tube bending and the far tip never leaving the ground.

The OSMF Board is asking the membership to approve an amendment to the Articles of Association that will allow Board committees (specified in the AoA as only consisting of Board members) to include any Foundation member, associate or full, to serve on a Board committee. The reason for this is that some of the Board’s administrative work, such as handling our finances, has proven very time consuming, more than one person can handle. Another sphere is the budget preparation, and yet another is fundraising. Since the Board is also hiring fulltime staff and engaging contractors, it needs help with oversight.

Some board members have been asked if this is intended to supplant the Working Groups. At least one diary entry has been posted by a community member asserting that this is the case, and urging Foundation members to vote against the amendment.

The proposed AoA amendment is NOT intended to supplant Working Groups. The Working Groups handle the substantive and administrative issues of the community, which is separate from the Foundation and the Board. The Working Groups would therefore not be affected. As I envision it, the Board committees would deal with personnel, budget, and fundraising, none of which fall in the remit of any Working Group.

I urge Foundation members to vote in favor of the AoA amendment, and then to volunteer to serve on one of the Board committees (and on Working Groups, too, but separately!)

I pointed out some of my concerns with the change to the OSMF articles of association and changes to who is to become eligible to a member on the the OSMF mailing list a couple of weeks back, see https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2020-October/007231.html

Those comments were just on the general concepts that were being proposed not the actual text, which we have now received as part of the formal general meeting announcement.

Unluckily my concerns not only persist, they have increased with respect to the proposed change to the OSMFs articles that will allow the board to create committees that include non-board members.

Currently a large part of OSMFs business is carried out by working groups, in particular the OWG running the infrastructure, the CWG communicating on behalf of the OSMF and the LWG handling licence and other intellectual property matters.

The working groups go back to a OSMF board meeting in November 2008, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OcoOqas1NnOLyhiyFZk12K_BpjhWeXvVU7Nl4MDSGeU/edit?usp=sharing and it is clear that these were established to have topic specific groups in which the board could work on OSMF business with additional participants without having to have the full board present. With other words, working groups have always been board committees with additional members, that this practice wasn’t quite inline with the foundations articles was and has been just a bit of fuzziness among a lot of other issues that the OSMF has had.

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I live in Fort Worth, TX, and have recently geolocated 367 emergency location signs that appear in parks and trails in Tarrant County, of which Fort Worth is the county seat. I would like to contribute them to OSM, but so far have not figured out the best/correct way to tag them. Any ideas or help out there? Thanks in advance!

I’ve made OpenStreetMap a major part of my life and work since 2005. It’s not just an audacious, community-built, complete, freely-licensed, street-scale map of the world. OSM is also a big tent that collects the skills and support of a huge range of individual and organizational contributors.

In 2021, OSM’s community has two opportunities to grow stronger together: we should make the OSM organization support a wider diversity of participants and we must succeed at starting to manage our technical operations professionally.

I’m a good candidate to help with both of these existing 2020 OSMF board goals. As a product and engineering leader in several organizations, I can help the Foundation succeed at finding and keeping great engineering talent. With my history on the community and business sides of OSM, I am experienced in making open data attractive to new community members and soliciting support from large organizations.

I’d like to make myself available for conversations with anyone who has questions about my candidacy, manifesto, priorities, or really anything else. I’m blocking these four times over the next two weeks prior to the close of voting and AGM on Dec 12; get in touch here or via my personal email if you’d like to chat by text, voice, or video!

• Dec 1, 16:00 PST
• Dec 3, 8:00 PST
• Dec 4, 16:00 PST
• Dec 9, 8:00 PST

Read my complete manifesto on the Wiki for more about why I think I’d make a good OSMF board member.

While working with the high-resolution data of the German census 2011, I noticed that there are still surprisingly many residential areas that are neither recorded as landuse=residential nor as building=*. This concerns mainly linear settlements or farms in the northwest of Germany.

There is now a MapRoulette-Challenge to map at least the landuse for these areas:

Unmapped residential areas in Germany

Please jump in and help if you are interested!

As a source for the challenge I compare the 100m×100m grid cells with the landuse and building polygons, which indicate residential areas: landuse=residential, but also landuse=farmyard, landuse=allotments and some more. For the buildings the residential types building=detached, building=house, etc. are used, but also building=yes.

In the process all census raster cells are deleted, which are at least touched or covered by these polygons. Then all clusters of connected grid cells are combined into one polygon. Of these, again only those are used, in which there are at least 12 persons living according to the census and which contain at least 2 raster cells. The priority of the tasks is set according to the number of inhabitants, so that “worse” cases are presented first in MapRoulette.

With this rigorous filtering I hope that really only the legitimate cases will be left. After all, there are still 2760 cases, so enough to do. The 2011 census is already quite old. Where several people lived 10 years ago, hopefully some of them will still live today.

A map of the mainly affected areas in northwest Germany:

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How to we know that a node is snapped or not to a building for making its entrance , I mean is there any script or java script which we have to write for checking a node is snapped or not with a building which we want to make its main entrance of that building , plz share me some context to this and how to write and check different things by writing scripts.

Buildings in cities are often aligned along the streets, so, when squaring them, it also makes sense to align them along corresponding streets. To do: add a step to the data-preparing script that finds clusters of buildings based on their locations and azimuth to the north of buildings’ walls.

On 17 May 2020, I apparently had an invitation from fellow contributor GOwin for an interview in connection with a WeMap session featuring local mappers who, in GOwin’s words, “have been quietly contributing to OSM all these years”. Since I was busy juggling schoolwork and work-related stuff during this stretch of the year, I missed seeing the invite on time, ergo, missed the opportunity to share my story. Also, I just came back to mapping at OSM in November this year when I found out that our internet speeds here in Bontoc have improved a bit (not ideal, but far better than the last five years) to handle in-browser OSM mapping. Moreover, I finally installed JOSM successfully after many failed attempts in the past due to hardware issues. Now, I am adding my changesets using JOSM (still buggy with the most stable version, but working to my mapping needs at the moment nevertheless).

In this blog entry, I’ll share my would-have-been / could-have-been responses to the audio-visual interview that GOwin requested that we do. Of the eight (8) questions, I only managed to answer five (5) of them. The other three (3) were deliberately left unanswered because it felt I lack the experience to answer them substantially. My long absence from OSM also kept me away from updates within the OSM/FOSS4G community. For transparency, I’ll share the unanswered questions.

Here it goes:

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Sumatra is currently underwater. I haven’t been here in a while and I don’t know where the opening is.

I’ve always being irked by OSM giving the wrong Postcode for some roads near my home area. Some roads give postcode 42000 but for some nearby it gives 41200.

Reading what Ionvia says enlightens …

• Nominatim has to go a different way to determine the most likely postcode for a place where no addr:postcode tag exists.
  • First - search address from specific up to country, use postcode for first found addr:postcode tag.
  • Second - area search, the closest postcode centroid is used

It turns out the roads in my area are almost exactly in between 42000 centroid and 41200 centroid as overlayed screenshot below shows …

Looks like long term solution to wrong postcode for my local area would be to tag Bandar Bukit Tinggi 2 with addr:postcode=41200 …

Since October, I started adding municipal units and communities (admin_level 8 and 9 respectively) in Greece, wherever it’s easy/sorta easy to do, because half of Greece lacks boundaries for anything lower than municipalities (admin_level 7).

I add them whenever I’m in the mood of dealing with it, just like today, when I tried to find an “easy” in boundaries perspective area to do so. The metropolitan area of Thessaloniki had most of those boundaries ready, and it already had few municipal units (from those which exist there) but with partially wrong info.

I even found two wrongfully drawn boundaries of two municipal units. Couldn’t find if this occurred since the first version of those boundaries or later, but for some reason both of them looked like the boundaries of the respected residential area rather than the administrative one. But I confirmed with geodata.gov.gr (Greek open geospatial data) and other online maps the proper positions of the boundaries and re-draw wherever needed. These two municipal units where Agios Pavlos of Neapoli-Sykies municipality and Triandia of Thessaloniki municipality.

In general, I added the missing municipal units and communities (or communes) of the municipalities: Ampelokipi - Menemeni, Kordelio - Evosmos, Neapoli-Sykies, Thessaloniki, Pavlos Melas and Pylaia - Chortiatis.

Reason for this post? Not any specific, I just liked that I added those missing in the metropolitan area of Thessaloniki, unlike the metropolitan area of Athens and Piraeus which is mostly complete in such boundaries.

Now the area in overpass-turbo looks more complete by admin-level :P