If you have a beautiful bunny sadly you can’t take them to a regular vet. You need “exotic experts”. This is true at least in Italy.

That’s why I tried to expand an OpenStreetMap RFC about veterinarians, to cover this case.

• osm.wiki/Proposed_features/veterinary

The result? See with your eyes:

https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1c7F

It’s absolutely amazing how somebody can expand OpenStreetMap so quickly to add useful metadata and being able to query them in realtime.

https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1c7F

Happy bunny!🐇

Village comes under Pusad Tahasil of Yavatmal District, Maharashtra, India,

This entry will be constantly updated based on my findings in USA.

Please be advised that a correct solution depicted below is not the only one. You are welcome to brainstorm in the comment section!

Hint: Right click on the picture to view in a new tab so you will see it in a better size.

1:

Wrong:

The reason why the intersection originally looks like this is to prevent reckless driving in rural area.

… See full entry

Versions: French /

Portuguese /

HOT website (English)

Together with the local communities/contributors from Vietnam, Madagascar and Mozambique, and Open Mapping Hubs (Asia-Pacific, and East & Southern Africa), I am very happy to share with you the collaboration Project: Localization as an Inclusion and Participatory Enabler (also available in French, Portuguese and Spanish).

Summary of the project details:

Context

Language barrier and the default to English puts non-English speakers at a systemic disadvantage throughout open mapping communities and humanitarian open mapping activities that HOT tries to support, resulting in significant missed participation and impact (Gayton, 2021) .

Motivation

We believe that language localization will enable inclusion and participation of underrepresented groups in mapping, dialogues and other humanitarian open mapping activities.

Goal

We aim to develop baseline data to inform a self-sustainable localization strategy to bridge the gap between language and accessibility of Open Mapping resources that serve communities involved in humanitarian / development work (see HOT’s Priority Countries).

Methodology

We will be running small experiments (i.e. translation workflows, and engagements) with local communities to test how localisation of resources could work in the main languages of 3 priority countries: Vietnam (Tieng Viet), Madagascar (French) and Mozambique (Portuguese).

Timeline (subject to change)

• June-July: Initial brainstorming, set-up and analysis on requirements (complete)
• August- September: Engagements with communities as collaborators in the experiments (complete)
• October - November: Experiments/Translations running

… See full entry

I can’t find my neighbors house or my front yard. Yep! This seems perfect for me

It was great going through the challenges in part 1. We have a few more interesting tasks as the next maproulette challenges for you all. They are for mappers who are just starting or are experienced. Here are the tasks for you all:

1. Connectivity checks: https://maproulette.org/browse/challenges/21203
2. Building-Road intersection checks: https://maproulette.org/browse/challenges/21201
3. Inconsistent Road Classification checks: https://maproulette.org/browse/challenges/21207
4. Intersecting Buildings checks: https://maproulette.org/browse/challenges/21208
5. Correcting mixed name case: https://maproulette.org/browse/challenges/21215
6. Connectivity checks: https://maproulette.org/browse/challenges/19892
7. Invalid Turn restrictions checks: https://maproulette.org/browse/challenges/19890

Put your mapping hats on and let’s do some mapping!

We would love to hear suggestions and feedback from you on these tasks so that we could better ones next time.

… See full entry

HOT Tasking Manager (TM), SimpleTaskManager (STM), and Divide and map. Now. (damn) are tools for collaborative mapping, with different philosophies and different approaches. In this diary, I discuss some issues of the first two from the perspective of the third one.

DISCLAIMER: I’m the damn project developer.

Which issues to consider: I filter out bug reports and issues that oppose the damn project philosophy. Then, I pick up issues I think are interesting and categorize them, describe the category, and provide some comments how the particular issues are or would be solved.

About naming: TM’s and STM’s project corresponds to damn’s area. TM’s and STM’s task corresponds to damn’s square. Where TM uses validation, damn uses review.

Solved by design

There are many issues of both managers that wouldn’t be an issues for the damn project because of it’s design. Let’s quickly recap that design.

There are areas divided to squares. Any change to an area is stored as commit. So, creating new area leads to creating new squares as well as new commit with to map type for each square. During collaborative mapping, new commits of different types like locked or done are added with area and square identifiers, always updating particular square of the area. It’s not possible to delete something.

… See full entry

One of OpenStreetMap’s greatest strengths is our worldwide platform backed by a worldwide community. As such we need to give our full support to our mappers around the world, including the ones in countries whose cultural and legal norms you may dislike and wish to work against. Supporting these mappers isn’t an endorsement of those norms; rather it is a commitment to worldwide mapping.

Any suggestion of ostracising countries would be a stand against inclusion of mappers, depriving them of the opportunity to talk about their specific issues both with each other and with the rest of the world.

StreetComplete is an application allowing to contribute to OSM by answering simple question. It makes possible to contribute without learning about tagging schemes and without learning how to handle interface of more general editor like JOSM, iD or Vespucci.

I contributed to StreetComplete in past. Recently I received a grant that will allow me to spend more time on improving it.

Grant is funded by a NLnet as part of NGI Zero grants. StretComplete grant is mentioned by NLnet at https://nlnet.nl/thema/NGIZeroDiscovery.html and https://nlnet.nl/project/StreetComplete/ pages. It will allow me to spend far more time on improving StreetComplete.

I will participate in project as usual, sending pull requests that will be reviewed and accepted (or rejected) by StreetComplete author, Tobias Zwick and minor changes commited directly (and still subject as review).

Note that I selected topics of work to be done (based mostly on open issues on the bug tracker) on my own, and it was accepted without any requested changes. I am sole beneficiary of the grant.

Total grant will depend on how much I will manage to do before deadline.

See osm.org/user/Mateusz%20Konieczny/diary/368849 for earlier, very similar entry.

I created osm.wiki/NLnet and submitted it OSM weekly as it seems to me that other OSM projects also may be funded.

I just converted over from mapbox tiles. I think I did everything right?

Looks nice to me Fediverse Observer

A well.. appears I cant accurately add building to this map since the satellite images are old. The images available show the site before the foundations where put so it is hard (or maybe impossible) to add buildings without any reference point (plus I’m new to this so I know nothing).

Anyway, I’ll just keep studying the site and hopefully, I may figure out a way to add the buildings.

People should be wary of the imagery offset especially using high resolution products. In OpenStreetMap, Mapbox often provides high resolution images in densely populated areas within the US. However, just because Mapbox provides high resolution imagery does not mean the offset is not a thing. In fact, Mapbox has created a lot trouble as it pretends to be accurate but actually not.

Keep in mind that whenever your local municipality has its own orthoimagery published, always use it to draw features (of course it has to be compatible with OpenStreetMap, if it is missing in iD, maybe you can bring it in). The imagery could be dated, but it is accurate. Your local municipality will spend more time to process with the data. These “commercial” providers, like Mapbox or ESRI or Bing, do not have a lot of time to carefully examine everything in a specific area especially when it is not that popular.

I’m going to post an example here. The orange area is OSM data fetched by QuickOSM in QGIS, drawn by a random person who has not noticed the offset for years.

… See full entry

Just realized that I didn’t notice that on Tuesday (the 5th) I sent out the 10’000ths welcome message to a contributor.

I’ve been doing this for SOSM since December 2013, nearly 8 years ago, averaging a bit over 100 messages per month.

I’ve discussed our expectations (or rather the absence of them) before see osm.org/user/SimonPoole/diary/40071

PS: The happy “winner” was osm.org/user/JFischli

I was surprised no one had added the historic Green Gables house near the intersection of U. S. 1 (Harbor City Blvd) and Hibiscus Ave.

Added that and may add more buildings of historic interest later.

Dear HOT Voting members, HOT staff, HOT volunteers and people interested in HOT, Humanitarian and Open Mapping,

I hope this message finds you and your loved ones well and healthy. I would like to present to you my end of term report as President of the Board. On 10 February 2021 I shared a detailed annual report for 2020. In this new report I would like to focus on challenges, ongoing efforts, key learnings and achievements.

Challenges

Of all the anticipated challenges while participating as a Board Member, a global pandemic was not on our list. It was a difficult and challenging time for Voting members and staff and the Board members were not an exception. Board members, like many other people, were facing difficult situations with loved ones getting infected, trying to find a balance between working from home and taking care of their families, among many other difficult situations.

This could be one of the reasons why not every Board member was contributing equally. Being part of a Board requires certain commitments such as time and asynchronous participation to be able to be part of the decision making process, often outside of Board meetings. Some Board members were not responsive or slow on providing feedback in discussions, this caused delays in progress and decision making.

My suggestion to future Board participants is to review in advance the Board Procedures and other relevant documentation to make sure you can commit to this two year period.

… See full entry

Hi all,

I hope you are all well and safe.

As many of you know, we have been working on a new model to ensure Tasking Manager (TM) continues to get the love and attention it well deserves. As we unpacked the value of the project, we started to realise just how much we value the inputs and contributions of a large collective of contributors lodging issues, PRs, code, resources etc. I went through every single issue on TM’s Repo and was really blown away by just how much support the project gets both in front of and behind the screens.

Moving forward, we really want to return TM to its former community-lead glory and as such have put together this proposal for what TM’s Tomorrow could look like.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tTT4oKUN34FThzbNFZKfj0lhQOMRB4uTF1n2rO1iHrc/edit?usp=sharing

I invite everyone to comment in the doc on things they like or don’t like or questions they have so we can reenergise our love for the TM and it’s sustainability and evolution. There is a long list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s) at the end of the doc, but I also invite you to add your questions as a comment to the FAQs so we can endeavour to answer them as well.

I really look forward to your feedback.

Kindness,

bo

p.s. we are also now on the hunt for a possible community representative product owner for TM, so if this sounds like something you could be interested in, please get in touch.

Now it is one week since I started working with OSM. Sadly, my initial enthusiasm has waned. While there were many nice experiences, above all encountering some helpful fellow mappers, a feeling of meaningful connection with the purpose of the project did not develop.

The apps I used show little consideration for what’s meaningful to the average mapper or end user. The below example from iD may serve as an illustration for how haphazardly it has been decided what gets displayed and what gets hidden. This matters because the UI displays no settings button to override that decision.

… See full entry

Hi everyone,

A new version of MapComplete has been deployed. It has a lot of exciting new themes and features, which I’d like to highlight in this diary entry.

New themes

The Flemish touristical agency (Toerisme Vlaanderen) has asked me to create a tool to help them to map charging stations, restaurants, café’s, …

This has resulted in quite some fun new themes:

• The theme with charging stations has improved tremendously and now asks which plug types are available, how much power these plugs output, …
• One with pubs and cafés
• One with restaurants and fast food
• One with publicly accessible towers with a panoramic view
• One with binoculars

At last, the theme I’ve quickly made as demo with hackerspaces and makerspaces is online as well.

Other improvements

At the same time, I’ve been doing lots of work on improving performance. A lot has changed under the hood, resulting in a way more robust and fast experience. On high zoom levels, the OSM-API is used directly, bypassing overpass all together. If overpass-api.de is down, failover to other instances is now builtin. At last, caching is a bit more aggressive and if the data on your machine is recent, no new data is loaded at all.

Earlier releases had some important features to, which I’d like to highlight as they can be important for theme builders:

• A layer can configure filters
• A layer can demand to have ‘precise input’, showing an extra draggable map (with e.g. aerial photography) when a new point is added to the map.
• A new point can be snapped to an already existing road, e.g. when adding a bollard
• A layer can define that a point can be (soft) deleted
• The new Mapillary-API has been integrated
• Some themes have a download-button enabled to download as GeoJson or as CSV

I need your help!

… See full entry

On 23rd of September 2021, I trained a group of students of 200 plus on how to contribute to OSM using mapswipe. After their examinations, they will be officially added to Youthmappers and to our local chapter OyomappersTeam (OMT).

Disclaimer #1 I’m not used to speak english anymore, I apologize if some sentences sound clunky.

Disclaimer #2 Last time I added pictures in the diary post, they would not always show up. Click on the link if it happens.

Introduction

So now, I’d like to start with a provocative joke :

Marck Zuck. comes into his office and asks his colleagues :

– Hey, do you know why there’s a magnifying glass on the OpenStreetMap logo ?

– Well, it means that OpenStreetMap helps you find places and amenities on the map.

– Not a all ! It’s because you won’t notice the credits without one.

Text Vs Logo

My point is that OpenStreetMap lacks a strong visual identity. I believe I started to notice it when I read some Facebook employee saying that a logo would be easier to credit on a map than the (c) openstreetmap contributors. 🤨

Dishonesty aside, he makes a point. The (not so) new OSM logo is gorgeous and deserve more consideration and would help OSM maps being more recognizable and popular. In times where we are constantly facing pictures, logos, visuals, a brand/company/project/whatever need a clear visual identity to exist in our digital world. The actual text only credit looks like good oldies websites.

Besides, sometimes, OSM credit is in competition with some other logo. I was thinking of Mapbox but I couldn’t find an example with an OpenStreetMap map.

… See full entry