We all gave OpenStreetMap a try once, no? Same for me. No idea how old my (old) account is. I haven’t used it for years, and I wasn’t able to re-enable it again… but… in Autumn 2024, a friend told me about StreetComplete. I liked the idea of StreetComplete. Everyone likes it. But as mentioned, I had to create a new account for all of this 🤦 But it was worth it!

In this Autumn, my OpenStreetMap journey started. In Büsum, Northern Germany. In my vacation… After my vacation and multiple passing weeks, I mapped more and more. Dived into many details, tried to gather more and more knowledge in many areas, and there was and still is so unbelievably much. I took every opportunity combining required doings in the “real world” with mapping them in the virtual world. My friend and I discussed mapping, tools, great plans, even better ideas and so on and so forth. Well, we all had such dreams, no?

At some point we thought that OpenStreetMap should become a more prominent topic in our town. There was already a wiki page for our town. If I remember correctly, the last changes were from 2009. It contained great ideas and plans, but you can imagine that a lot has changed in the last ~15 years. In OSM and also in our town. Understandably, basically all content was out of date.

Since we collected already a lot of ideas what could be done, we started to re-write the wiki page step by step. The idea was to create a new entry point for people that are interested in OpenStreetMap in our town. Give them ideas on what can be done in our town. Also, since no one really likes to maintain MediaWiki pages regularly 🙈 the page should be pretty static. The content should give beginners, intermediates and nerds a helping hand on how to start on anything.

So everyone should find their obsession… mapping hydrants, trees, playgrounds ❤️ And be honest: You all have one!

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Hello, just a collection before putting it into a purposal

so there are many issues about walk=no at Gleisanlagen. Each enities pushing it to not my problem.

1. Routers need it to avoid Tracking through have traffic with separate sidewalks
2. Openstreetmap verifable on the spot
3. Historie of foot=no is changing in wikipedia.
4. StreetComplete is asking if its forbidden, not if its forbidden by sign.
5. Just use access.
6. Maybe foot:implicit=no / hazard:railway=yes source:foot:implicit=DE:StVO:25(5)
7. osm.wiki/Key:access suggest “saftey reasons” sidewalk=no or hazard=*
8. Vorschlag railway=light_rail impliziert ?foot=no?
9. There is a exception for maxspeed. Maybe create another train-crossings.
10. Grashopper working as expected. OSRM and navigating through busy crossroads. Valhalla has issue.

Reasons:

1. “Just use a better Router”,
2. Street-Speed-Limit is also not verifable on the Ground.
3. osm.wiki/DE:Key:foot
4. https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/poll-should-streetcomplete-disable-the-are-pedestrians-forbidden-to-walk-on-this-road-without-sidewalk-here-quest-in-the-uk/118387
5. Openstreetmap verifable on the spot
6. ?
7. DE:Key:hazard No, Entsprechend der OSM-Konventionen sollten nur Gefahren bzw. Gefahrenstellen kartiert werden, die vor Ort überprüft werden können.

Perfect solution: https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/2472 Are pedestrians legally prohibited from walking here according to a road sign?”

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/foot-no-oft-falsch-erfasst-durch-streetcomplete-quest/95470/6

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/falsches-gefahrliches-fussgangerrouting-durch-sidewalk-tagging-anderbar/130145

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/foot-no-prohibited-impossible/5135/25

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stvo_2013/__25.html (3)+(5) Gleisanlagen

I live in Washington State and noticed that several main roads like state highways did not have a speed limit set. When I use OsmAnd or Organic Maps to navigate, those apps are guessing what the speed limits are for several roads, creating very bad guesses of how long a trip will take. Fuel-efficient routes also are not optimized unless max speeds for roads are known.

I discovered several awesome websites that make finding existing speed limits a breeze. I don’t like relying on Mapillary, even though they do an amazing job in making it easier to map speed limits. I just don’t want to support their owner Meta (Facebook).

Specifically for my state, I found this website: Washington https://geo.wa.gov/datasets/WSDOT::wsdot-roadway-data-speed-limits/explore?location=47.916813%2C-118.330518%2C15

Move your mouse over any state highway, click on it, and it shows you the speed limit for that road segment.

With this website, it makes finding the speed zones significantly easier. I don’t have to use Bing Streetside or Mapillary anymore because I rely on government data instead.

I also found other state websites and will list them now so they are all grouped together.

Virginia https://www.virginiaroads.org/maps/VDOT::vdot-speed-limits-map/explore?location=37.356725%2C-78.949534%2C12&path=

North Carolina https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=2229ffaa3ea5470992d021023618e1e6

Texas https://gis-txdot.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/txdot-speed-limits/explore?location=33.705213%2C-100.174890%2C9

Florida https://gis-fdot.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/fdot::maximum-speed-limit-tda/explore?location=27.792987%2C-83.778658%2C7

New York https://gis.dot.ny.gov/html5viewer/?viewer=risviewer

If we get more people to check major roads and update their speed limits, routing engines like OsmAnd, Organic Maps, GraphHopper, OSRM, and Valhalla will be able to create routes that are much faster, safer, and more fuel efficient.

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That day, I received this email.

19 May 2026 (1:19 PM): We would also like to invite you to a special mapathon as part of the OpenStreetMap Community Building activities in Syria. This activity aims to train participants on using the OpenStreetMap platform and contributing to mapping buildings and roads to support humanitarian work in Syria. Date: 22 May 2026. Time: 11:00 AM (Syria Time). Location: Online (meeting link will be sent after registration).

11:00 AM Syria time is about 3:00 PM in UTC+7.

So, this afternoon, I attended the online meeting.

After that, I joined the mapathon hosted on the HOT Tasking Manager.

Even though, in the presentation, the speaker conducted the mapathon using the iD editor in the browser, this time I preferred to use my set of “powertools”: JOSM, Draw Buildings (B), and LastUpdated.

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I grew up in Nepal. Hills everywhere. Roads that don’t exist on any map. Communities that satellites can barely see through the cloud cover. When I first heard about OpenStreetMap, I thought: this is exactly what those places need.

That was a few years ago. Since then I’ve spent over 300 hours mapping, not because someone paid me to, but because I kept thinking about the person who might one day need that road to exist on a map before they could get help.

How I Started: Before I knew what OSM was, I was already messing around with maps, visiting new places, uploading photos to Google Maps, adding names, leaving notes about locations. I liked documenting places. That habit slowly turned into something bigger.

A hackathon in college introduced me to humanitarian mapping. That’s when it clicked: mapping wasn’t just a tech thing. It was about making communities visible.

My background is electrical engineering. My job is in the cable car sector. Neither screams “mapper.” But when you work in mountain infrastructure, you see how much depends on accurate geographic data, withdrawal routes, access to remote villages, disaster response. The gap between what exists on the ground and what exists on a map is sometimes jarring.

I’ve actually validated more tasks on HOT than I’ve mapped myself, which felt strange at first. But validation matters as much as mapping, maybe more. A wrong building polygon in a flood response map doesn’t help anyone.

On Women and Mapping: Most mapping events I’ve attended, online or in-person, are heavily male. So is the leadership in local OSM chapters. But whenever a woman shows up and starts contributing, the quality is often excellent. Careful, methodical, detail-oriented. And then they disappear. Not because they lost interest, usually because no one made space for them to stay.

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Just after the midnight of May 21 to May 22, 2026 the 5000th daily planet diff was generated.

• So I finally modified the boundary of Palo, Leyte, where Barangay Barayong is part of it. I was first putting a note to let anyone edit or find the boundary source from the local government, until I decided to do it myself. Not official, by the way. :-)

Tonight I finished mapping every building, every address in Farley Iowa. There are still buildings and farms outside the city limits but that’s a future project.

While preparing this article, I wanted to export the coordinate data of the battlefield map that I created in Altilunium LocationPad to GitHub Gist.

Then, I realized that the exported file format was actually just plain JSON, not proper GeoJSON. That’s why GitHub Gist couldn’t render it as an interactive map.

So, in this version (26.5.20), Altilunium LocationPad now properly exports and imports coordinate data in the proper GeoJSON format.

Image 1 : The exported GeoJSON can now be properly rendered by GitHub Gist.

Hi bestie, I love you so much for being a strong girl. You are strong You are beautiful You are dligent You are intelligent You are smart You are loved Continue being good and never stop being you.

Hi, I am Venetis, a computer science student from Thessaloniki. This summer I’ll be working on closures.osm.ch as part of Google Summer of Code 2026, mentored by Simon Poole and David Haberthür.

closures.osm.ch is a platform where road authorities submit temporary road closures so that routers can avoid them. The data is there, but right now it doesn’t actually affect routing. That’s what I’m fixing.

My work this summer comes down to three things:

• Adding a Valhalla-powered routing endpoint that genuinely avoids closed roads
• Building a sidecar service that feeds active closures into Valhalla’s traffic tile system
• Improving the DATEX II/CIFS importer that brings closure data in from external sources

I’ll be posting updates here at each milestone. The code is on GitHub if you want to follow along.

Coding starts May 25. Looking forward to it.

For the first time, Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), a widely used platform for sharing humanitarian data, is releasing disaster-specific OSM datasets. This has allowed OSM data to be downloaded over 440 times in response to recent disasters in Madagascar and Mozambique including within the disaster affected countries themselves.

This initiative kicked off in early 2026 and has already resulted in two regularly updated and focused HDX-OSM datasets:

• Mozambique Floods, January 2026
• Madagascar, Tropical Cyclone Gezani, February 2026

Although the same data is directly accessible on OSM, being on HDX ensures:

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Summary

Issue #1 when first using offline OpenStreetMap navigation apps for Android, such as OsmAnd, Comaps, and Organic Maps: the size of the map to be downloaded. In many places, it’s the entire country or nothing. And that often amounts to over 100 MB, with some cases exceeding 500 or 600 MB. Why is that?

Personal experience: the rise of smartphones in the Global South

During the summer of 2013, I coordinated an OSM mapping HOT project in northern and northeastern Haiti with others. At that time, the go-to tool for field data collection was the small, rugged, and energy-efficient Garmin Etrex series devices, though they required a fairly lengthy editing process on a computer. I had had my first Android smartphone for a few months by then, and as I recall, OSMtracker already existed, perhaps Vespucci as well (though I didn’t discover it until later), and OsmAnd was in its early stages. However, the app ecosystem wasn’t yet mature enough to replace the eTrex. At the end of the mission, I saw some Haitian participants start to get their first smartphones.

A few months later that same year, during another mapping mission in Mongolia, I had a meeting with officials from the Asian Development Bank whom I was trying to convince of all the benefits of OpenStreetMap. At one point, I used the emergence of these OSM mobile apps as an argument, noting that they would soon allow anyone to easily access and contribute to OSM data, given that smartphones would soon be in everyone’s hands. I didn’t feel like I was making wild guesses: cell phones were already everywhere, and it seemed quite logical that Android smartphones—whose affordable models were just starting to hit the market—would also be successful and boost both contributions to and use of OSM.

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30x30 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_by_30) is a global initiative proposed in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to conserve 30% of the area represented by Earth’s land, water and oceans. This goal has been adopted by many countries and non-governmental organizations, including The Nature Conservancy and the United States in the Biden administration’s Executive Order 14008 (Section 216) later a key element in the launch of the America the Beautiful initiative in 2022.

OpenStreetMap has adopted International Union for Conservation of Nature standards for describing protected areas, including parks, nature reserves, and other lands. As a free, open-source, community-driven and collaborative geographic feature database, OpenStreetMap is a useful tool for assessing progress towards this goal. Continual updates, world-wide coverage, native-language support and a robust open data working group governance structure; OSM is perhaps the best “live” tracker towards accomplishing this goal.

Over the last few weeks I’ve improved the way that paths and tracks are shown on map.atownsend.org.uk in both the raster and vector versions. The aims were:

1. Improve clarity, so that their visibility in e.g. nondescript woodland was better
2. Improve consistency, so that the display of them on vector and raster looked similar to each other, and the “visual weight” of each class broadly matched when looked at together on a map.
3. Reduce confusion so that two different things were not shown in similar ways.
4. Show “good quality” paths and tracks (e.g. paved and compacted gravel surfaces) differently to other ones to help answer the “will it be muddy” question.

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Contributing commercial vehicle GPS traces from Kerala — a routing approach

I’ve been working on a method to convert commercial vehicle telematics data into useful GPX traces for OSM contribution in Kerala.

The problem

Telematics data is segment-based — each record has a start coordinate, end coordinate, timestamp and distance, but no continuous GPS track in between. Uploading these directly produces straight lines which aren’t useful for mapping.

The solution

I set up a local OSRM instance using the Kerala road extract from Geofabrik, then route-matched each segment to the actual road network. This produces GPX traces with thousands of road-following points instead of straight lines.

Results

From two months of data covering Thrissur, Irinjalakuda, Chalakudy, Kodungallur and surrounding areas:

• 141 road-snapped segments uploaded as GPX traces
• 19 high-priority segments flagged as possible unmapped roads
• These will be cross-checked against aerial imagery in JOSM

Next steps

Reviewing the unmapped road candidates in JOSM against Bing aerial imagery. More vehicle data from the same region will be processed and contributed regularly.

If anyone in the Kerala OSM community has experience with similar data or wants to collaborate on reviewing unmapped road candidates, feel free to reach out.

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Tools used: Python, OSRM (self-hosted), gpxpy

First time writing a diary so friend I converted to mapping can find me :D

– Portuguese below

A SPECIAL KEYNOTE ON THE REVISION OF MOZAMBIQUE’S ENVIRONMENTAL LEGISLATION AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO HIGHLIGHT THE IMPORTANCE OF OPENSTREETMAP AND OPEN DATA

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On May 13, 2026, a roundtable discussion was held on the implementation strategy for Mozambique’s national environmental policy, which is currently undergoing a major revision. The event was hosted by the Faculty of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Pedagogical University of Maputo (FCTA UP-Maputo), in partnership with the Brazilian company IVIDES DATA®.

 

At the invitation of the organizers, Dr. Raquel Dezidério Souto (IVIDES DATA® and UFRJ, Brazil) delivered a special keynote titled “Development & Conservation” (translated from Portuguese), followed by a discussion on the recent Mozambique’s environmental strategy. A copy of the presentation can be found in Portuguese at https://zenodo.org/records/20149423 (*). 

 

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Yesterday I cleaned up some map data by removing unnecessary email and unrelated details from several objects. I am learning and trying to follow proper OpenStreetMap mapping guidelines.

[This is a work in progress, IANAL and this isn’t legal advice]

Lots of data is Switzerland is produced by the cantonal GIS offices (while it might seem to originate from swisstopo it often doesn’t), for example the hiking path/trail data is all cantonal and we can only utilise such data, even when using the data distributed by swisstopo, if the cantonal terms are compatible with our license.

In the following I’m using open in a hand wavy, “close enough” fashion here, and not applying the strict definition as per the open defintion. Class A refers to the federal ordinance definition for generally accessible geo data¹.

To set the scene: Switzerland does not have sui generis database rights regulation or anything similar, nor does it adhere to a sweat of the brow copyright doctrine. Between non-government entities any (minimal) protection available is based on contract and fair competition law. The big exception is geo data where the federal government has written in to law rights that are essentially a “data copyright light” and many of the cantons have followed suit.² There is no relevant case law that I know of and how any of this would work out in an actual dispute is, well, open.

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