Hello

I’m Astou Nathalie SIDIBE, a Human Ressources Manager, Social Activist, committed to Communities building, volunteer and humanitarian activities for a long time, in Mali.

I got involved in OpenstreetMap Project in December 2014 after two weeks of OpenStreetMap and GIS training with the Projet Espace OpenStreetMap Francophone, ProjetEOF in Bamako, then i cofounded OpenStreetMap Mali and advocate for OpenStreetMap and OpenData projects with a volunteer group in Mali.

So, since January 2015, i’ve been planning and organizing mapping parties, MappingCamps in Mali, cofacilitating OSM trainings in Mali and in West Africa with the support of the ProjetEOF.

I’m personnally involved in developing partnership with Public and Private Administrations, Universities, High Schools, local and International Organizations and NGO.

I’m currently leading, with the technical support of Les Libres Geographes, a mapping project on Organizations working in the Digital fields. This project, called [CarteInnov] (https://carteinnov.francophonelibre.org/t/ca1a3e-CarteInnov), is initiated and financed by the Organisation International de la Francophonie in 14 African countries including Mali. I’m also Leading the French-Speaking Africa Community for OpenData, CAFDO, in Mali.

Joining HOT Board is an honour and an opportunity to support and contribute more to HOT, to collaborate and learn more from other Board Members, to strengthen my leadership skills and also share my fews experiences leading a local community.

Thank you !

Nathalie

I am running for the elected position of Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s Chair of Voting Members.

Voting Members are the core of HOT’s work and values; I see the position of chair as one that facilitates the Membership in many of the actions that lead and grow the organisation. A number of the responsibilities are procedural, such as the calling and convening of meetings, but I also believe the Chair should foster and encourage individual volunteers to become Members, Mappers, Working Group contributors, Board candidates and more.

I have previously served on the Board of Directors, and have most recently been a member of the Governance Working Group. I have been a Mapper, have lead mapathons and have spoken publicly about our work. As such I believe I possess the range of experience required for this position.

HOT Members are a incredible group of humanitarians, mappers, hackers and creatives: I would like to efficiently and productively help these wonderful people lead the organisation.

As it has been mentioned before, establishing a Telegram channel as a major matter of communication for Russian-speaking OSM community is a questionable step itself since it creates an additional fragmentation and benefits only a certain group of people within this community.

However, this situation got some development recently. Russian communication regulator authority, RKN (actually, the government censorship agency) officially started blocking Telegram messenger communication protocol. Ironically, at the same time, iD got Russian OSM Telegram channel listed on its sidebar, above the link to OSM Russia forum section (which was always the main method of communication), giving a hint of its greater importance.

So, from now on, only those Russian users of those rare internet service providers who haven’t started following the order of RKN or those who are able to set up and use network tunneling services (soon they will be illegal in Russia too) will have an access to Telegram.

Most likely, some commenters might argue that it is so easy to set up a VPN and so on, but that’s not the point. The point is that any random OSM user from Russia should not have to violate (obviously, stupid and unconstitutional, but still existing) law or learn how to be an IT specialist to have an access to community communication channel. It doesn’t mean that some people can’t keep using that channel privately if they want to, but it should not be listed anywhere as a major or preferred channel of communication.

Over on the diversity-talk mailing list I’m floating the idea of a quarterly project to map traditionally under-represented things. There’s been lots of legit talk lately about what is and isn’t mapped in OSM, so let’s try to map it. I’ve set up a poll to gather ideas and select something. If you’re interested in helping with this, feel free to vote, take part, and/or join the mailing list.

I have been working on some code to detect if a changeset is an import, SPAM, or if it has a tagging error.

https://github.com/jremillard/osm-changeset-classification

Detecting SPAM and tagging errors is pretty straight forward. However, detecting imports is much more challenging. Before I started, I thought I knew what an import was. I was looking for large changesets, that only added 1 or two kinds of data. However, this criteria performs poorly in practice. In OSM many import changesets are not large, also it is not uncommon that the imported data has some hand editing mixed it.

My new definition of an import

An import is any addition to OSM that directly derives from other digital map sources.

Among the things on my to-do list are checking to ensure that changes to names of places in Lebap welayat adopted in November 2017 have been taken care of. The whole list is in this article in the Russian language. As time permits, I’ll check and edit as necessary. Among other things, the city of Atamyrat and surrounding district have had their old names (Kerki and Kerki etraby) restored. I changed the city name some time back but still have some work ahead.

Well this is an interesting JOSM issue. Whenever I try to use the building tool to draw a building, it goes circular! (Update 17 March: This is a feature, which you can toggle, see comments below)

This happens only on one of my machines. On another, it works fine. I suppose I should nuke my JOSM settings and start afresh.

Today, I got the question how I quickly added a ton of notes. I use OSMAND for this, with a few tweaks.

Setup

1. Enable the ‘OSM Editing plugin’
2. Under configure screen, enable ‘Quick action’. You find it right on top
3. Go back to the map; you’ll notice a new button on the lower right side, just above the plus-button.
4. Press this ‘quick action button’. A new menu pops up.
5. Press ‘add action’ and choose ‘Add OSM Note
6. In the following menu, make sure to enable ‘Show an interim dialog’ and press ‘apply’

Adding a note

1. Press the quick action button
2. An orange marker appears. Swipe the map to position the marker above the note location.
3. Press ‘Add OSM Note’
4. Enter the note text in the popup and press OK
5. Your note now appears as green circle with an ‘i’ on the map
6. Repeat for all the notes

For now, your note is not send over to OSM.org but remains on your own device!

Uploading all your notes

EDIT: M!dgard figured out a way to make this step obsolete and to import them directly into JOSM. See his diary entry here

After surveying, you’ll have a ton of notes. To upload them all at once:

1. Go to ‘My Places’
2. Go to the third tab: ‘OSM Edits’
3. Press the upload button in the lower left corner (pointing up)
4. Select the notes you want to upload. If you want to upload them all, press the checkbox left of ‘your edits’
5. Press the upload button in the upper right corner
6. Enter your credentials and hit OK.

You can also enter your credentials with the ‘OSM Editing’ plugin settings, so that you don’t have to enter them over and over again.

Adding POI

If you are gonna add a lot of POIs with the same presets (e.g. benches, AED, …), you can also make a quick action for that. Play around!

its a wonderful opportunity doing my national youth service in Rivers stat,Nigeria and working with the UniqueMappersTeam . within the last stage of my service year, i met the Coordinator and Mentor of #UniqueMappersTeam, Mr Victor Sunday,who introduced me to the team and gave the opportunity to participate in the team’s current activity of field data collection for malaria mapping in Rivers state,Nigeria.During the field data collection I collected coordinates as as well as mapped Primary health care on Maps.Me mobile app.It was so exciting going to the field and knowing geographically where i would not have known.Today, on my arrival to Port Harcourt from Gokhana ,after our Sunday worship,our passionate mentor took out his time to drive me to his office,at university of Port Harcourt,where,he introduced me to OpenStreetMap platform to sign-up for a username.He introduced me to Youthmappers web page,HOTOSM and task.hotsom and the available mapping task.. I seized the opportunity to map my church headquarters at yar’adua drive in owerri using the OpenStreetMap platform,and shared same on my facebook page. I look forward to participating as a volunteer mapper and becoming an active member of OpenStreetMap community in Nigeria. Thanks to Mr.Victor Sunday,thanks to UniqueMappersTeam and thanks to HOT for this exciting experience.

Today I collected house numbers in the Phase 4 development of Taze Zaman, a planned community in the northwest quadrant of Ashgabat. To my surprise, street signs in the new phase in a couple of cases show alternate spellings for the names of the streets. In the old phase, Ebedilik and Abadanlyk are the names of the streets; in the new phase, they are spelled Ebediýlyk and Abadançylyk. Since OSM recommends naming streets as their signs read, the streets are split between the alternate spellings.

At any rate, all houses are now numbered, using the addr:interpolation tag on lines drawn between address points at the end of each city block. The houses are cookie-cutter, so the interpolations should be pretty accurate.

As far as I am aware, the following countries have no unmapped places, as of 9 April 2018:

• Andorra
• Bahrain
• Denmark
• Estonia
• Greece
• Iceland
• Liechtenstein
• Macau
• Malta
• Monaco
• Nauru
• San Marino
• Singapore
• Vatican City

Beta version of multilingual Wikimedia maps

1.Kannada:- https://maps-beta.wmflabs.org/?lang=kn#8/46.830/8.152

2.Hindi :- https://maps-beta.wmflabs.org/?lang=hi#8/46.830/8.152

3.Tamil:- https://maps-beta.wmflabs.org/?lang=ta#8/46.830/8.152

4.Bengali :- https://maps-beta.wmflabs.org/?lang=bn#8/46.830/8.152

5.Malayalam :- https://maps-beta.wmflabs.org/?lang=ml#8/46.830/8.152 [As usual has rendering issue]

I started a few weeks ago by recording my walk around Woolaston, near Lydney, by path records and adding landuse and hedges from aerial photography. Things got a bit larger scale and I found myself, after a rainy week, ‘approaching’ Bream. I was surprised how little had been added to this area in the last two years - it’s not just the forest that is the attraction of this rural locality, and it deserves more. I found that Bream and adjacent areas still had fixmes apologising for the crudeness of the original area mapping. The Forest of Dean has urban areas, but also extensive semi-rural areas with scattered housing with large gardens. So it is all ‘residential’ or many ‘residential=cottage’ areas with grass lands between? When deciding what to map, I like to think “who are the map users?”. Of course, it’s a database, but I do like to think that a glance at a rendered map would give a prospective visitor a ‘first impression’ of the landscape. A few comments:– (1) Rights of Way: Short of visiting every footpath, I would welcome anyone else’s sources of useable Rights of Way data (I looked at Strava but a lot of walking routes went across private land!); (2) One slight drawback I have noticed is that ‘Meadows’ render on the Cycle Map, but not ‘Farmland’ - possibly something needs to be resolved here… As usual, please add any appropriate additions/amendments that might arise… This was just my contribution.

While exploring the Köşi neighborhood in Ashgabat (itself a former village before being annexed in the 20th century), Ann and I stumbled across a school with a bust of a woman in the school yard. This is unusual in Turkmenistan–a memorial to a woman–so we stopped to photograph it, and the teachers came out to see who the strangers were. We asked whom the bust commemorated. Ene Kuliyeva was an advocate for educating girls in the early 20th century, and was assassinated in Moscow in 1925. The school is named in her honor. I photographed the pages in a three-ring binder the teachers showed us, and am having the text translated from Turkmen into English. We forget too easily the martyrs who made the world a better place and suffered for their labors; I don’t want her to be forgotten.

Hello everyone, my name is Matthew Gibb and I appreciate the opportunity to be considered for the Board of Directors for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. For the past two and a half years I have been a member of the GIS team at the American Red Cross.

I vividly remember my first time mapping in OpenStreetMap. Typhoon Haiyan had just made landfall in the Philippines and a colleague in grad school introduced several of us to HOT and the Tasking Manager. She got us set up with JOSM, taught us how to map, and you might say the rest was history. Alas, it was not. It was probably another year before I mapped again, and then another six months before I started mapping my hometown and surrounding areas consistently on my own.

Having worked previously in disaster response domestically in the US, I was accustomed to having all the GIS data I needed, from federal to state to local level. It wasn’t until joining the American Red Cross that I was able to see first-hand the incredible impact that this community has in disaster response and engagement of local communities throughout the world. Through our work with the Missing Maps project, I’ve had the benefit of working with volunteers, literally putting their community on the map, and often times creating a perspective for their community that they did not have before.

My own adventure in joining HOT is a long way from a Pulitzer-worthy story for sure, but it has shaped how I believe I can continue to contribute to HOT as a member of the board:

… See full entry

It seems that the residents of Porters Lake, Nova Scotia don’t entirely take the august topic of road naming very seriously. This shoreline community has streets called This Street, That Street and The Other Street …

Hi Everyone

Let me introduce myself to you. My name is Harry Mahardhika. I am living in Jakarta, Indonesia. I am OSM user and working with Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) Indonesia as a Project Coordinator. Currently, I coordinate a collaboration project between HOT and Disaster National Management Agency in Indonesia. In general, our project to map certain cities in Indonesia to complete its critical infrastructures such as education, health, public facilities. We also update its administration boundary. We have been doing this project since 2016 until now. There are 3 cities that have been mapped in this project: Surabaya, DKI Jakarta and Semarang.

Until now, we still monitoring about our mapping project area. Unfortunately, last week we found that there were some changes in DKI Jakarta’s data that makes many of those data become error and broken. In general, main cause of those problem because some OSM Accounts shift / move existing data DKI Jakarta. We analyze and we found that because they trying to match those data with Digital Globe Satellite.

From explanation above, there are some suggestion that I would like to tell you:

1. When map DKI Jakarta, our team use satellite imagery from Geo Center USA because it was clearer and update. So please, DO NOT shift/move existing data in DKI Jakarta based on Digital Globe Satellite. They have ruined our effort and data in DKI Jakarta.
2. Why do they keep doing this? Is it individual work? Or do they work on certain project also in DKI Jakarta? If so, which organisation they work for? I need this explanation because more than one person doing this.
3. For you that read this diary and feel responsible about this problem, please fix the data that have you ruined. Please shift/move according to existing OSM data in DKI Jakarta.

List of OSM Accounts that made Crossing Ways and Buildings at OSM DATA in Jakarta as below:

… See full entry

This OpenStreetMap account celebrated its tenth birthday yesterday. (Happy birthday, OSM Account!)

Over the last decade, contributing to OSM has:

1. helped me cope with homesickness
2. given me too many good reasons to procrastinate on schoolwork
3. led me to old friends
4. led me to new friends
5. taken my inner roadgeek to a new level
6. taught me more about geography and GIS than I’d ever learn from a book
7. made me a worse driver (but a better notetaker)
8. helped me land a job
9. given my open source contributions a purpose beyond attribution
10. kept me from forgetting where I come from

Thank you, OSM community, for welcoming my contributions in the first place and for making my stay here as rewarding and meaningful as it has been. Here’s to countless more changesets, mailing list posts, wiki edits, and pull requests!

Build Build Build campaign reaches DEAR PAUL 24’s attention

As a Civil Engineering student, Registered PWD (due to lifelong developmental disability), an advocate of accessibility and public safety, and most of all, frequent editor to OpenStreetMap, most infrastructures are hereby published for information dissemination {see Build Build Build portal} where the North Luzon Expressway (NLEX) Segments, Philippine National Railways (PNR) Rehabilitation, Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) construction across NCR, Bulacan, and Cavite, and the North EDSA Unified Grand Central Station are going to be built from 2018. Moreover, actions are taken by DEAR PAUL 24 at the end of this blog entry, and accessibility features will be added in the near future for the sake of MAPS.ME app and OSM users. Here are the updated lists to guide you with the following status:

Upcoming Construction

• LRTA Line 1 South Extension (starting mid-2018)
• Mega Manila Subway System
• NLEX-SLEX Connector (starting mid-2018)
• Washington Place Philippines Phase 5 (Dasmarinas City)

Upcoming Infrastructures for Completion

• LRTA Line 2 East Extension
• Mactan-Cebu International Airport Terminal 2 (Cebu City)
• Southwest Integrated Transport Exchange System (Paranaque City/CAVITEX)

Upcoming PUV Routes within Cavite

NOTE: SWITX replaces any current routes due to upcoming changes to routing effective April 2018

• Bus Route (Nasugbu - SWITX via Tagaytay City and vice-versa)
• Bus Route (Trece Martires City - SWITX via Dasmarinas City and vice-versa)

Ongoing Rehabilitation

• Congressional Road Network (Dasmarinas City)
• Golden City Footbridge (Dasmarinas City)
• Philippine National Railways

Ongoing Construction

… See full entry

A couple of weeks ago I drove from Ashgabat to Turkmenabat then mushed on to the Dayahatyn caravansaray outside Seydi. You can see some Mapillary imagery of the caravansaray, which was in use between the 11th and 16th century on the Silk Road, here

Along the way, I collected over 25,000 ground level images using Mapillary, and over time am uploading them. The new roads built in and around Turkmenabat required a few hours of editing to update but the map of that city and environs is now in much better shape than before.