This year, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) community received funding from The Audacious Project. Over the next five years, this funding will enable us to scale up its support for local mapping communities with the aim of mapping an area home to one billion people, adding places at high risk of natural disaster or experiencing poverty.

Over five years, HOT plan to:

• Set up a network of regional hubs in South Asia, East Africa, West Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean, which will engage with local mapping communities, facilitate knowledge exchanges, distribute funding, and provide training and support in order to massively scale local edits to OpenStreetMap in 94 countries
• Invest in technologies that enhance mapping contributions on mobile to enable scaling of local contributions to OpenStreetMap
• Invest in map data quality and ethical collection and use of map data
• Work with humanitarian organizations, governments, and other actors to help them use OpenStreetMap to deliver more effective and efficient aid
• Work more closely with the OSM community/OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF), supporting the community and core systems and software

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every good conversation starts with good listening - unknown

And that’s exactly what we plan to do.

The format will be mostly similar, however, less connecting as a team and more connecting with others connect with from day 2. While we are on the hunt for answers, we will actually be capturing a whole lot more questions in the form of HMWs, or How Might We…

The way these conversations work will be pretty straight forward. We will use our conversation starters based on our open queries and assumptions that are linked to our big question from day 1. We will open up any range of conversation paths and let those like you guide the conversation where is most important for you to take it.

As we go through this process, the team will be listening and everytime we hear something of interest it will be captured as either a note, or a ‘How might we…‘ Let me give you an example.

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Im not rly sure how to add a business spot to map, was trying several times but seems like no success, main target is to show it on Snapchat map.. Maybe i have done it right this time and just have to wait a bit for Snapchat to update map..

great conversations begin with great connections - Oprah (kind of)

So at the end of RaDs day one (start) we have three takeaways:
_ A big question
_ A list of open queries
_ A list of assumptions

Great, easy, now we just need to some answers. Actually we have some more questions.
_ Who will be best placed to answer our big question?
_ Who can close our open queries?
_ Who will be able to validate our assumptions?

It’s time to connect

Following the same format as w1_monday, we will aim to do two main things here.
1. Connect people to the big question, our assumptions and our open queries.
2. Literally connect with the people we would like to have conversations with.

Would you like us to connect with you? Do you have something to tell us? If so, please fill out this form >

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Start where you are, with what you have, do what you can - Arthur Ashe

If you want to be involved, please join in by completing this form

To start we need to begin with a single step, a single idea, a single question.

The play by play for each day will look somewhat similar. It will be a mix of individual, group, sync and async work. This is to accomodate multiple timezones, multiple technologies, multiple working styles and most importantly, multiple people :)

Below is a quick snapshot of what each day’s sessions will look like and also shows what the activities we will be undertaking on w1_monday.

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Context on why this post-question:

Two days ago there was an incident in my area where a truck went through the city center even though it shouldn’t, and damaged a street sign while trying to turn. According to the article of a local blog, the truck driver said he was confused by the GPS and went the wrong way. No mention on which GPS he was using, but regardless that made me wondering of how I would tag to make such trucks go the proper way.
At the point where the driver took the wrong turn, there’s a visible traffic sign (the one shown below). Personally, that raises the question on why he followed his GPS routing instead of the traffic sign, assuming he saw it beforehand, but that’s not the point of this post anyway. (photo is mine)

The traffic sign, which is not listed in the Greek Highway Code, means that if the heavy truck is above 10 tons, then turn left.

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As of today, I am ending my contributions to opensteetmap. I have come a long way in OSM from the day I first started editing the map in my local area of Glendale, Arizona. To see the influence of corporation’s & the impact of corporate editing on OSM since then has made me realize that I no longer feel the excitement I use to have for editing maps. I have enjoyed the time I have put into OSM, but today is the end of my contributions. Thank you to everyone who has helped me along the way with suggestions and guidance. I appreciate all the help that was given.

Name - (Hans De Kryger) Username - (TheDutchMan13) Start & End Date Of Edits (April 05, 2013 - December 20, 2020)

The best journeys answer questions that at the beginning you didn’t even think to ask - Yvon Chouinard

For the next two weeks, I’m going to be posting (short) diaries about some design thinking that hot_tech is going to be undertaking to kic-off 2021. After such a bumper year and the welcoming of some fantastic new members, we thought now would be the perfect time to get to know you and what you need from us. To do this, we will be undertaking a series of two week sprints, that are a combination of a rapid assessment & design sprints.

So what are RaDs?

The goal of RaDs is to better understand what people need (or don’t need) from the OSM and [humanitarian]OSM - [h]OSM - universe. We want to know why people come to [h]OSM and what matters most to them when they are here. Most importantly, we just want to get to know more about groups of OSM users to learn more about your common goals, interests, values and purposes. We want to know what makes you feel whole and included.

If you don’t know what a Rapid assessment or a Design sprint is, great! Follow along for the next two weeks and each day I’m going post an overview of what the day will entail once the sprints are underway.

If you’re still not hooked, here’s a quick visual to give you an idea of what we will be doing.

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Vespucci 15.1 has been available for a couple of days now from googles play store marking the third larger release (14.1, 15.0 and 15.1) this year and our traditional release for the holiday season.

Details on what has changed can be found further down, but first let me point out a few important points from the past year and things to be aware about that will be happening in 2021.

The OSMF and iD

2020 marked the OSMF becoming a participant in the OSM editor market place, you might say what does that concern me? Well, even if not all the developers are competing for funding (like iD, Rapid, StreetComplete and many others), all are competing for relevance. Or put differently: mapper market share. How exactly this will play out going forward isn’t clear yet, but it already has consequences in development, for example I’ve put all tablet related improvements on hold. The required effort just doesn’t makes sense with the OSMF expanding iDs use outside of the classic desktop on to tablets..

More https/SSL woes

A couple of weeks back Let’s Encrypt dropped a bomb. Let’s Encrypt is by far the most popular provider of free encryption keys for https use, and are widely used throughout open source and data, and the OpenStreetMap ecosystems. For example Let’s Encrypt certificates are used on all OSM infrastructure that has so fully migrated to https that use without is no longer possible.

Android 7.1 as the oldest version that will no longer work with Let’s Encyrpt is fairly young, and lots of users are “still”* using it. An estimated 33% of the 2.5 billion Android devices will be effected. So we can’t simply ignore this happening.

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OSMCha helps analyze, inspect, and verify changes in OpenStreetMap as they happen. The entire team building OSMCha has been proud to see its wide adoption by individual contributors and companies in the OpenStreetMap community. I continue working on OSMCha through support from Mapbox, who have been using and helping develop and host OSMCha for years. The Mapbox Data RAVE team uses OSMCha everyday as part of their work validating changes in OpenStreetMap.

That’s why it’s essential that OSMCha is operationally excellent, with dependable uptime and a team on hand to handle issues and deployments. Since the beginning of the year, I worked closely with the “RAVE tooling” team to improve the infrastructure setup for OSMCha for better performance, instituted on call support, and moved the service to the osmcha.org domain. I continue to work hard to maintain the OSMCha open source code base and community and develop new features. There’s many useful new features and more to come.

Improved Visualization

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Welcome to hot_tech…Hya, Diana, Lily, Rob

So as everyone is well aware, it’s time to scale up time over here and hot_tech is no exception. We have been afforded an ‘Audacious’ (https://www.hotosm.org/projects/audacious/) opportunity to welcome some impressive new talent into the fold. I was once told never to assume you’re the smartest in the room and with the addition of these four new team members, I know for sure that I am not.

So, let me be the first to share with you a quick intro to each of the new team members, why they decided to join us and why we wanted them to be a part of the team. I have just done a short bio here for each, but you can read the full post over here » hot_tech blog

Hya Umaran

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OpenStreetMap Calendar is here for over a year and now we’re ready to make the next step: Let’s unify forces and put osmcal onto the wiki’s main page. Thanks to the microgrant, I was able to dedicate a good amount of time to extend the software ecosystem and make osmcal ready for everyone.

The OSM Wiki now has an osmcal extension, which makes integrating a calendar into any wiki page as simple as typing <osmcal />. It even supports filtered calendars, e.g. the United States wiki page contains all upcoming events just in the US.

The logical next step is to deduplicate the work needed to publish an event, so we’re aiming to switch the calendar template inside the wiki towards the end of 2020, so for 2021 events you only need to put events into osmcal and they’ll be available anywhere.

There are some cool external integrations which reach even more people:

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Hello OSM.

Shamed to think that after almost 4 years of contributing (under various usernames) that I’ve never properly indulged in writing my experiences in an OSM diary. Today this changes. Hilariously, the first post feels like the hardest to write (in fact, it’s been on my ‘to do’ list for about 3 months).

There are many things that I want to write about: reflections on recent events, inspiring statements and stimulating conversations around hOSM community, joining LCCWG, my admiration for the speed and vitality of the development of the “Call to Take Action and Confront Systemic Offensive Behaviour in the OSM Community”, and even my frustration in differentiating between flat number and house number tags (more of that exciting topic to come in future posts!).

But for now, I’ll start with introducing myself:

Hello, I’m Sophie. Contributor to Maps.me since 2016. Missing Maps volunteer since 2017, MM facilitator since 2018 (corporate mapathons), HOT employee since April 2020. Lives in Cambridge, UK.

Nice to meet you!

Suddenly I discovered that everyone’s favorite Strava, Komut, as well as bike navigators are using OSM as work maps. And all these paths in the forest that appear out of nowhere on the route (there weren’t any on the map!), You can add yourself. Which I did, importing tracks from Strava and looking for unmapped places where I drove. I feel like a cartographer of Mars

I am writing (again) about the Divide and map. Now. The idea of the project is to divide up a big area to organize mapping better. In this note, I will share how I was thinking about the mapping workflow from the beginning, how I finally improved it, and how I hesitated but broke the workflow in the end. And I am sure I did right.

The mapping workflow

The workflow copies a mapathon. Many guys are mapping one area. Few of them are reviewing the work of colleagues. They are locking squares of the area to avoid rewriting the data under their hands.

Since the beginning, it’s possible to lock random or recent square. Mapping guys lock random squares. The reviewing guys lock recent ones to provide feedback to the mappers as soon as possible.

Implementation details
----------------------

Feel free to skip code notes if you are not interested in the code.

There is some background I need to share before showing the SQL query: 

- The server is RESTful.
- Changes to squares work the same as git commits.

(It means that the first commit of any square is `to map`. Then mapper locks a random square adding the `locked` commit to the database. When finished, the mapper adds the `to review` commit. Then the `locked` commit is added again by a reviewer who finally adds the `done` commit.)

The important thing is that no one can delete a commit. Just add. Also, there is no square state. Square consists only of area identifier, square identifier, and border. If you need to know the square's "state," you need to look at the square's last commit.

Finally, the query to map random square is:

    WITH last AS (
	SELECT DISTINCT ON (sid) cid, sid, aid, type, author
	FROM current_commits
	WHERE aid=$1
	ORDER BY sid, cid DESC
    ),
    tomap AS (
	SELECT *
	FROM last
	WHERE type='to map'
	ORDER BY RANDOM()
	LIMIT 1
    )
    INSERT INTO current_commits (sid, aid, author, type, message)
    SELECT sid, $1, $2, 'locked', 'I am mapping'
    FROM tomap
    RETURNING sid

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In the context of the 2020 OpenStreetMap Foundation Board Election,
- The Call to Take Action… has been collaboartively produced and endorsed by hundreds of individuals and dozens of organizations from OSM, Open Data and FreeSoftware mouvements
- It triggered discussions Archive as well as a Board decision
Below reads a few thoughts on the recent email conversations [1] at the origin of the “Call to Take Action and Confront Systemic Offensive Behaviour in the OSM Community” which lead to this 10-Dec 2020 Board decision and the proposed course of action.
I added a position statement following a comment on the first version of this diary entry.

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Sharing my reflections about certain responses to the recent “A Call to Take Action and Confront Systemic Offensive Behaviour in the OSM Community”.

I am worried by those who claim to treat everyone equally while discriminating against those with fewer edits and other kinds of contributions to the OSM project.

I am also perplexed by those who claim to dislike identity politics, while taking pride themselves in being a craft mapper and long-time contributor, which is also an identity.

I think and feel that it is important for us OSM folks to collectively reflect on what we mean by “free and open” and move it away from simplistic and monocultural ethos and philosophies. Let’s do it.

Whose freedom? Whose openness?

OpenStreetMap Uganda has applied to become an official Local Chapter of the OpenStreetMap Foundation - information application.

The elements enclosed in this diary note read as well as an email contributed to the community discussion as part of this Local Chapter application process.

Important work has been put into this Local Chapter (LC) discussion which provides the LCCWG, OSMF and OSM folks with important materials to consolidate parts of both LC (vision, processes) and OSMF.

Here are a few contributions to this on-going conversation from the perspective of someone heavily involved (HOT US Inc until 2013 and afterwords ProjetEOF and LesLibresGeographes) in Haiti and French-speaking African countries over the last decade starting and supporting local grassroot OSM collectives. I will not get back on how MapUganda relates to the current LC “doctrine” and processes, this has been well covered. I think that we need to keep looking at the question phrased by Frederik about possible “issues with granting local chapter status to a commercial organization with the main chartered purpose of providing paid services?”.

But first like others, I’d like to highlight the accomplishment that represent establishing MapUganda in its current shape through 10 years of work in Ugandan challenging environment.

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Hello All,

First, I wish everyone in the global OSM community and their families good health and safety during this time of the global pandemic. I offer my deepest condolences to all who have experienced loss and hardship this year. My name is Logan McGovern and I am a candidate running for election to the OSMF board. Due to recent events, I feel obliged to share my thoughts and briefly reiterate what I stand for as a candidate.

A statement signed by a coalition of organizations and individuals has been circulated in recent days. It states that the OSM community has failed to confront systemic offensive behavior against women and minority groups. I signed the statement. OpenStreetMap has the potential to become the greatest geographic resource in existence, but only after everyone is proactively brought into the fold. Work remains to be done towards this end. I will give this cause my ear and my voice, pursuing all potential remedies, including a potential restructuring of the board.

Other Priorities:

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