Hi everyone!

Delighted to announce that proposals are in for the hOSM Summit Grant 2020. One grant of $5000 is available to an OSM community that attended at least one of the sessions at the summit (supported by ESRI). In addition to being provided support, mentoring and training during the grant period, one team member will attend and present their project at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit 2021 (date and location TBD).

Proposals can be found here: osm.wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Team/HOT_Microgrants/Humanitarian_OpenStreetMap_Summit_Grant_2020

If you have some time and would like to give comments/feedback you can do so on each proposals Discussion page. And if you’d like to endorse a project, please do so (this will be taken into consideration during the final selection process).

Instructions to add an endorsement: 1. Log in to the wiki if you are not already logged in. 2. Scroll down to Endorsements and click ‘Edit source’. 3. Add your reason for the endorsement followed by four tilde signs: ~~~~ [Note: The ~~~~ automatically inserts your name and the current date.]

Final review will take place on Monday 18 January so please make endorsements and/or give feedback before then, so that we can take your opinions into consideration.

Thanks!!

Lately I’ve been using uMap to map the local fat bike trails to let local riders know where they are. The trails are just snow so they can get buried by more snow and shift position when re-groomed or abandoned. Come spring they melt away.

I like that I can do most of my gpx line editing in JOSM then import to uMap for final formatting.

http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/regina-fat-bike-trails-winter-20202021_538851#12/50.4510/-104.5992

Greetings!

All the changes and contributions are being made for research and educational purposes, through the MSc Program Degree “Leading Innovative Organizations”. Any comments/suggestions on how to productively participate in OSM would be gladly welcomed.

I’ve just updated the contributor statistics for the whole year 2020.

As maps.me has hit the news again, this time in a more negative way, I thought it might interesting to give the influence of the app on new contributors another look.

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you get credit for what you finish, not what you start - unkown

Today is the day to put our ideas into the hands of the people that face the problem.

For those that haven’t heard of Paulo Freire, to introduce him here would not do him justice. However, he fundamentally shaped me both personally and professionally.

‘The people that face the problem, are those best placed to solve it’. - Paulo Friere

There is little I am more passionate about in this world than this statement.

It is for this reason, that Friday is one of my favourite days in the design sprints. It’s the day where we finally get to see if our listening and learning was translated into something that will help people solve their problems. Ultimately it is a day of practicing deep humility.

Whoever teaches, learns in the act of teaching and whoever learns, teaches in the act of learning. - Paulo Friere.

And that’s what we’re here to do. Learn. We are in search of the golden equation: problem + solution = value. Ultimately this is what matters most - no value, no solution.

And once we have found a solution of value? Evolution.

To be continued…

The end of one story, is the beginning of many more. - unkown

Divide and map. Now. helps mappers by dividing some big area into smaller squares that a human can map.

It’s been a year already since I announced the damn project, so it’s time to summarize the first year of development.

For mappers

I finally managed to make the manager manager-friendly. There is news for the client, too. Along with mapping random or recent squares, a mapper can choose to map the nearest square. Moreover, reviewers can review a newbie square.

I added background OpenStreetMap for the squares. When you click on a square, you may lock that square manually. When you lock multiple squares, you can merge them.

A mapper can share the link to an area or a square. A mapper can download the client and open it on the computer (saving 96KB of bandwidth next time.)

I fixed bugs of the damn plugin reported by #OSMWorldDiscord guys (Thanks again!) and added the “lock & open in JOSM” link to the client.

I wrote a new client. Wondering, how the integration without integration to iD editor looks like? Open the panel and check it out.

For communities

Divide and map. Now. has a separate repository for the deployment. You need to change seven rows in the config files (five rows with security and OpenStreetMap OAuth tokens, one row with the domain, one with the email address) and create one empty file. And you are ready to go.

I was wondering what is missing in the basic setup. I mean – the minimum you need to run is the server. You probably want a client and manager, too. That’s all. You know – the damn project helps mappers …

However, you are part of a community changing the world. The client and manager are OK, but you probably want to tell others about the community.

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Deja Vu, again :)

This is now the 3rd annual instalment of a crazy naval-gaze about my mapping. Blame it on whoever called this part of the osm space a diary. If there is a chance to speak about my personal reflections I’m grabbing it. And what better time of year than now, since I see other people reflecting and goal setting.

My Targets

I wrote about measuring my own commitment to mapping in 2019 and then again in 2020 for the years ahead. It was fun to see my objectives shift around and good for me to test myself against them. In 2020’s diary I then had to be like the Roman God Janus; to look to the previous year by way of review, and to the coming year by way of promising some targets.

My Hot Spot

Last year I undertook to have my hot spots look less like the measles and more like a large boil, and for that boil to be in Ireland. This is definitely the case now, as the graphic shows (use the slider to see the expansion of mapping in Ireland). Having achieved this I’m not concerned with continuing to make a target for this in 2021.

My Ireland Contribution Rank

Again, the target was to stay in the top 10 mappers in Ireland. It was sustained in 2020, but there was one occasion in July where I dropped out of the top 10. I am presently the 5th biggest, without too much effort. Since I technically didn’t keep this one I will go forward with it and try to stay in the top 10 in 2021.

In the past year I realised that Pascal Neis’s “Ireland” is in fact only the Republic of Ireland. A lot of my mapping is in Northern Ireland, and as a consequence shows up in the UK. This about 20% of my present mapping.

As an extra kick I’m going to try to develop a tool that shows all the mapping on the whole island of Ireland, and this itself can be a target since it would be of benefit to everyone involved in mapping Ireland.

Map on the move

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As many of you will be aware, Flash Player is about to be disabled in web browsers.

I’m pleased to announce that Potlatch continues to be available, now as a desktop application. You can download it for Mac and Windows at

 https://www.systemed.net/potlatch/

Potlatch 3 includes OAuth login, support for Remote Control, and other features to ease desktop editing. Other new features include support for Overpass API queries in the Tasks palette, and there’s some exciting stuff to come soon… but more of that in due course. As yet we haven’t found a way of reliably running it on Linux but investigations continue.

Potlatch is of course open source. You can get the source and report issues at https://github.com/systemed/potlatch3.

Thank you to the OpenStreetMap Foundation for supporting this work and to Potlatch’s many users for their edits.

Over the past months, I have spoken to a few different people about the friction that can exist when groups of new contributors engage with OpenStreetMap in areas where there is already existing and active community. Whilst the prompt for writing this diary entry has been recent issues in Panama (between a local YouthMappers chapter and a small group of active local mappers), the content isn’t specific only to that situation and has been informed by multiple people across multiple continents (as well as my own experience).

The issue in itself is also not at all new - I remember if from 2014 when we started the Missing Maps project. What is new is that I now work in HOT’s community team and it’s actually my job to try and work out how to grow the OSM community in a way that respects the past and the future of the project and the community.

You may wonder what the situation in Panama has to do with HOT and I think there are two answers to this.

Firstly, we run the HOT instance of the tasking manager (TM). We see the TM as a community asset and, whilst we don’t originate every project on there (for example, in 2020, HOT originated 17% of all published projects), we do develop and maintain the technology as well as providing the workflows and onboarding for people that want to create and manage specific projects. For example, a majority of YM chapters contribute by mapping through the TM (including the Panama chapter who organised local projects to be set up in collaboration with the global YM team).

Secondly, it is HOT’s mission to radically increase quality local map contributions and contributors from across 94 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America / Caribbean over the next five years as part of the Audacious project. We need to be good at making sure that new mappers build on what already exists in collaboration with people and communities already actively engaged in the OSM project and that they are welcomed into those same communities.

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To do good, you actually have to do something - Yvon Chouinard

Well today is the day, straightup hackfest. The team will spend the day developing a prototype ready to be tested tomorrow.

We break from the daily structure on this one and the team will break out into smaller groups/pairs to hack together a prototype based on our decision yesterday. This all has to happen in one day, so this is an exercise in effort estimation and making sure we don’t bite of more than we can chew. The goal isn’t to have a refined product, rather something we can use to test our Big Question…

Want us to prototype a solution for your biggest problem? tell us about it here »

The historical society I am a member of does surveys of their main shopping streets about every ten years and I suggested they do one after Covid, because it will affect and has affected the high streets already. They’re not the fastest to realize projects, so I just started already, because OSM will benefit anyway. I’ve done High Street, Kieran Street, parts of Patrick Street and today Rose Inn Street. I’m using a combination of StreetComplete and osmtracker, because StreetComplete doesn’t allow for adding shops etc. But it allows to add housenumbers, which is about time. I’ve noticed that very few shops have their opening hours on the door, so if they’re still open, I usually go in (all masked up, of course) and ask. Sometimes, I have to do that for house numbers as well. I’m looking forward to the streets being less busy (the advantages of lockdown and shops being closed, ironically), because the sidewalks are often very narrow in Kilkenny and surveying takes a lot of time and I don’t like being in the way.

2020 is coming to an end and we are all taking a moment to appreciate on the past twelve months. The HOT-Philippines Mapping Team members are hard at work to provide the best quality of data in our field operations and our remote mapping and training activities. To help you look back, we prepared a year-end report that summarizes our accomplishment for the year.

PhilAWARE Project

HOT-Philippines started the PhilAWARE Project last July 2019 which is a local installation of DisasterAWARE, a disaster risk reduction and integrated early warning and decision support system that also incorporates many data layers form OpenStreetMap.

Part of the activities of the project included remote mapping in the province of Pampanga and municipalities of Quezon City and Marikina City. Remote mapping and validation activities for Pampanga and Quezon City have been completed with the help of volunteers, organizations, partners, and other stakeholders while Marikina City is still in progress.

Aside from the remote activities, we also began collecting the data from the ground in the municipalities of Pampanga last August. Our field operations was made possible through the support of the local government offices and volunteers in Pampanga despite the restrictions of COVID-19.

OSMaPaaralan

Alongside the PhilAWARE Project, we supported OSM Philippines’ OSMaPaaralan Project which is an initiative to collaboratively map public schools (paaralan) in the Philippines using OpenStreetMap. Our team is validating location of schools in Pampanga and updating information related to emergencies. If you want to contribute and learn more, head over to the MapRoulette task and help OSM-PH complete the project!

Mapping in a Pandemic

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The latest version of Go Map!! is now available on the iOS App Store featuring:

• A new modern look.
• Updated presets drawn from the recently-independent iD Tagging Schema and Name Suggestion Index projects.
• Support for a number of languages beyond English (finally!): Russian, Japanese, French, Croatian, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Norwegian, Finnish and German.
• Support for Dark Mode.

Unfortunately the current tagging of capacity on campsites is ambiguous at best. While on backcountry and scout sites capacity is often seen a the maximum number of persons allowed, on tourist sites mappers often tend to tag the number of pitches available for tents or caravans using this tag.

Thus following a recent discussion on the tagging mailinglist I changed this to be more consistent and similar to existing tags (caravans, tents).

I also changed the bugs view on https://opencampingmap.org/ to warn about the now obsoleted tags capacity and maxtents.

Now mappers should use the following tags instead:

capacity:persons for the maximum number of persons allowed to stay at a site if limited.

capacity:tents for the number of tent pitches available or maximum number of tents allowed.

capacity:caravans for the number of caravan pitches available or maximum number of caravans allowed.

I already changed this in the Wiki for German and English Language.

Please help me changing this in the Wiki for other languages as well.

I also need some help for fixing the localization of https://opencampingmap.org/ for French, Spanish an Russian language. Please contact me if you are a native speaker and can help me with a couple of sentences. Or just send a pull-request for the sourcecode at https://github.com/giggls/opencampsitemap

You cannot make progress, without making decisions - Jim Rohn

So, are you sick of reading me yet? Well, the good news is only two days to go. If you’ve been following along or read this far hopefully it’s been useful, or at the very least, tolerable.

Today we decide

I’m going to start by showing an image of how decisions are typically made by consensus.

The problem with this approach, is that all the regular voices are heard (typically also the loudest or most relentless ones), if you’re lucky, most people are ok to let the decision move forward (even if they don’t love it) and you end up most probably with a camel (a horse designed by a committee).

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I’d like to start giving thanks to everyone who participated in our Mapathons, specially Qeef for developing the DAMN project and Karl Prieb for being that incredible person that keeps mapeia.space working!

Since the beginning of the year I wanted to map entire cities, starting researching fields, adding unclassified highways of my city and rural buildings, and, of course, I had plans, as some may know, to take this to another level but it turned out that the COVID-19 came. So I started to focus more on what I could do remotely and inf 4 months through our DAMN instance we managed to improve the map considerably, I wouldn’t say that it can be used for projects that need precision, besides the lack of data, satellite images are not the best way to map.

Before

After

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Occasionally, I (like other people I’m sure) have noticed that things “disappear” from maps they should appear on. In the case of “national parks” and “areas of outstanding natural beauty” in the UK, they’re mapped as multipolygons. This might be simple, like Nidderdale or more complicated, like Ynys Môn. What usually happens is that someone accidentally “breaks” the multipolygon, for example by creating a gap in an outer edge, so that rendering software sees it as invalid and ignores it.

What I’ve typically done in the past is, whenever I’ve noticed a problem tried to find the problem using something like the OSM Relation Analyzer or JOSM’s validator. The “area” view at Geofabrik’s OSM Inspector is also useful.

That works, but “happening to notice a problem” as a first step is not ideal. This map does show national parks / AONBs and not a lot else at zoom 7, but those tiles only typically get updated every 4 days, so it can lag behind problems.

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Drawing is exercise for a restless imagination - Tim Burton

Finally, it’s time to put some pen to paper and start to turns problems into solutions. I can almost hear a collective sigh of relief from some of the hot_tech members, ‘finally time to get hands on’.

Do you want us to sketch a solution to a problem you’re facing? Hit us up here »

For the sole search today, each of us will be undertaking a redux session. Basically a redux session is us o’oking further afield to collect ideas that inspire us toward our solution. We will then prepare these ideas to be shared in the remix session thought ‘Lightning Demos’.

Remix
In our remix session today we will be conducting Lightning Demos. IThrough a three minute tour, each member will share their sole search inspirations and focus on what’s cool and what’s the big idea that may be useful for our Big Question.

And then, for async action we will be putting pencils to paper (yep, actualy paper) and starting to sketch out our individual ideas for our end. Sketches can be simple or sensational, weird or wordy. The main goal is to get an idea into an easy to understand ina structured process for even the least artistic amongst us. It’s a simple as 1, 2, 3…ok, 4.

1. Notes - You collect notes on all your inspirations and insights.
2. Ideas - You turn those notes into ideas
3. Crazy 8s - You sketch like crazy 8 images in 8 minutes
4. You then choose the one you want to ‘sketch’ for the group and give it (or them) a cool name (which will be important later).

And then today we’re done, for tomorrow we decide!

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Vector Map Bundles are the follow up to Minutely Extracts which I posted about previously.

You can download map bundles for up to 500,000 nodes at protomaps.com/bundles.

Self-Contained, Batteries Included

Map Bundles are cartographic basemap tile pyramids built from a minutely-updated snapshot of OpenStreetMap. That means within sixty seconds of uploading your changeset, you can download a new Map Bundle and have a self-hostable or offline-friendly zoomable map with those changes.

A Map Bundle includes example HTML and JavaScript code to serve and render the vector tiles in the browser - just run python3 demo.py after you’ve unzipped the ZIP archive. You can even interact with individual elements on the map to view their tags or OSM identifiers.

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Plan your work, then work your plan - Napoleon Hill

w2, already! And awayyy we to go. We’ve had time to rest, relax and reflect on our insights and surprises. So now what? Now we gotta actually do something…

Which brings us to week 2One of the main reasons I thought a design sprint would work for our team is everyone’s work ethic tuned to tangible, practical solutions. I knew a full 3 months of user research and no building might make the team go something something…

The great thing about the design sprint is the focus on putting something in the hands of our users.

So let’s start at the very beginning, the very best place to start…the end.

In Monday’s sole search, we have two goals.

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