Hi. I haven’t been back here since I first registered on this website, because I inadvertently lost my password and had to reset it. But I think everything’s all good now. Just testing to see how well OSM works with the 2 screen readers on my Mac. Looks good so far. I’m taking one of my occasional train trips this evening, with one of my tutors. We’re going to 1871 in downtown Chicago, because I’m giving the keynote at the unveiling of a new goal-tracking portal for an organization called Center for Independent Futures. That’s all for now.

Well day 2 back to Manitoba from BC, crashing at the motel

I’m running in the upcoming election to fill an open seat on the OpenStreetMap U.S. board. I’ve been contributing to the OpenStreetMap project as a volunteer since April 2008, mostly by armchair mapping, shoe-leather mapping, and fiddling with the wiki, where I recently became an administrator. I’ve also done a bit of importing and as much evangelization as the folks around me will bear. (My day job, writing iOS software at Mapbox, also intersects with OSM to some extent.)

OSM has the potential to be profoundly more than a tech project. When we see someone lavishly micromapping their neighborhood, we can rejoice that we’ve given them and their community a voice, that OSM has broken new ground, that we’re chipping away at an ancient, one-size-fits-all, top-down approach to mapping the world. We’re incredibly lucky that many people have discovered our project and figured out how to contribute. Just imagine how many more people will discover us once we figure out how to speak to their interests.

As a board member for 2019, I’d like to work with other board members and the newly appointed executive director to:

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Is naming roads with no names vandalism?

Update I didn’t get elected, but we have an excellent new board member in Minh. Good luck to the new board!

Hi. Thanks for reading!

tl;dr: I would use my next term to jump-start two permanent OSM US working groups: Growth and Communication. Specifically, I will work with the ED and the rest of the board to recruit 2-4 people for each group and get them started with what they need.

Growth

A new Growth working group will focus on developing and executing new ways to find new mappers, especially from groups not well represented. The OSM US census was a good idea that needs follow up. I feel especially strongly about involving more young people through TeachOSM. And how about an OSM GeoBus? We have a lot of resources ($, ED) and we should put them to use for big ideas that reach new groups of people.

Communication

A new Communication working group will create a deliberate communications strategy. That sounds fluffy but I think it does not need to be. We need to find out who our audiences are and how to bring them a consistent, positive message from OSM US. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I suspect that we need hired help with this soon.

About Martijn

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Last week I spent four days on the road, speaking at the American Corner in Turkmenabat, meeting with local businessmen, and visiting Hojambaz out of curiosity–it is an out-of-the-way city, and I adhere to the philosophy that you cannot know a country by sitting in the capital. You have to get out and see as much of the country as possible if you want to understand it.

Of course, during the trip I collected geodata while going from appointment to appointment. Several villages got identified from ground truth, we found a few new gas stations, collected some street names in populated areas, and perhaps most important, I ran down some minor anomalies on the map of Turkmenabat, which is Turkmenistan’s second-largest city. A couple of major streets’ names were misspelled, and that has now been corrected based on ground truth. A dead end was discovered and mapped in a section of town that previously had been better connected. Errors in nomenclature of major POIs were corrected (e.g., the Lebap Province Library is not the “city library”). Along the way I collected over 28,000 Mapillary images, which are now being uploaded.

We took the P-39 highway to Hojambaz. Between the China National Petroleum Company’s camp at kilometer 21 and the connector to the Amu Darya bridge it is horrible. We traversed 200 kilometers in six hours, for an average speed of 33 kph. We worried about the return, as another six hours would have us driving in the dark, but locals advised us to take “the Chinese highway” (“Hitaý ýoly” in Turkmen), which CNPC built a few years ago but which we had never heard of. With the help of directions from locals, we found it, and discovered a smooth ribbon of asphalt that took us to the 21-kilometer signpost within a couple of hours. That route is now on OSM, too.

The sun had set by the time we returned to Turkmenabat, and the Silk Road Monument was lit up. Click here to see what it looked like!

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On the 16th of March, 2019, I was appointed as the Director, LetGirlsMap, Unilag chapter. This was an honour for me and has encouraged me to do more for the team, the UnilagMappersTeam and for the OSM body as a whole and has also encouraged me to keep mapping. I look forward to the new challenges that will come with my position, I look forward to meeting new people, mapping new places and generally broadening my horizon.

This used to be the 1869 William Bancroft Building, pictured above showing the former main entrance on the corner of Robin Hood Street and Roden Street.

The building is close enough to Nottingham City Centre that the legendary Robin Hood would have been able to easily hit the walls of the town with his arrow whilst standing on the steps of the building. Of course, when those steps were built those city walls no longer existed, but then neither did Robin Hood, so let’s just pass on.

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Hi, My name is Chad Blevins and I’m currently running for the open seat on the OSM-US board. I joined OSM-US in 2019, have been an active contributor to OSM since 2012, and a data user before then. As a member of the OSM Foundation I strive to build working relationships with a global community of open source geospatial enthusiasts.

In 2015 I co-founding YouthMappers, which focuses on empowering a generation of university students from around the world to become leaders in building resilient communities and defining their world through maps. I run a virtual internship program for U.S. based university students to learn the OpenStreetMap ecosystem while actively contributing to internationally focused development projects.

I’ve been based in the Washington D.C. area throughout my career which has allowed the opportunity to work across and collaborate with multiple government agencies, various industry sectors, universities, and private companies. I recognize the value of taking time to truly understand geospatial market trends and how they can impact our regular, everyday lives. I am a firm believer in open data and feel fortunate to live in a time when open source software is having such a positive influence on the world.

If elected as a board member I will focus on encouraging U.S. based university students to become active in the OpenStreetMap community, discover ways to develop relationships with international YouthMappers chapters, and become users of the data to support research and global awareness.

Thank you for considering me as candidate for the board.

I’ve had a look at mapping solar farms in England. By “solar farms” I mean the large field-scale things.

A few years ago someone put this very useful List of under construction and operational UK Ground Mounted Solar Farms on the wiki, sourced from the “REPD”.

I’ve been through and checked for every item in that table which is rated as >= 30 MW. About two thirds of them were already there. The rest were easy to map because very visible in DigitalGlobe imagery - most of them were not visible in Bing imagery because the latter is a few years old, and many solar farms are new.

(One of my changesets.)

In some cases I’ve used a single power=generator way, but in most cases they’re a power=plant relation. The tagging is generally like this:

generator:output:electricity 	31.6 MW
name 	Broxted Solar Farm
power 	plant
repd:id 	1592
source:generator:output:electricity 	repd
type 	site

This is in ADDITION to the tagging of solar panel areas using the PV tagging described here

I’m broadly following the approach in the wiki page with the big REPD list. The repd:id is useful to be able to join the dots later.

Hello OSM-US!

It was great to hear the news that Maggie Cawley will be serving as the Executive Director of OSM-US, I’m excited to see what ideas and energy she brings to the role. I’ve decided to run for the Board seat that Maggie vacated for a few reasons:

1. Under the leadership of our new ED, I want to help define the direction of OSM-US

2. OpenStreetMap has had a temendous impact on my career, and I want to give back in a positive manner to my local OSM community.

Who am I?

In my all day and all night job, I’m a father to two wonderful kids who are sick and tired of my dad jokes. I live with my family in Northern Virginia, but we’re all New Yorkers (upstate) at heart.

In my job that helps pay the bills, I work for Radiant Solutions, focusing on data quality and validation, something which in OSM, I care deeply about. My colleagues are only slightly tired of my dad jokes.

What do I map?

Here’s my HDYC page

I joined the OSM world in 2013 (if you want to see my first edits, I embarrassingly show them off in my SOTM-US talk in Detroit), mapping for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s Typhoon Haiyan response. In two years working with the American Red Cross, I supported local volunteers, all over the world, mapping their communities, leading mapping initiatives in Canaan, Haiti and Binga, Zimbabwe.

As a member of HOT, I try to make time every week for validating and giving feedback to new mappers. Sometimes life gets in the way of mapping, but I’ve grown as a mapper due to my involvement with HOT and it’s community of volunteers.

Of course, here in the US, I typically enjoy mapping places I’ve lived. I’m mostly active in upstate New York where I grew up, but map in Western NY, Central Massachusetts, and in Northern Virginia. I’ve recently increased my participation collecting street level imagery for Mapillary, which (at some point) I’ll get around to adding more detail in my local area.

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I have just created a discussion on the Map Feature Page: route=hiking

osm.wiki/Talk:Tag:route%3Dhiking

It is about route-markers that guide the hiker along his route. Have a look and tell us what you think: Is it a good idea or should I cast it in the rubbish bin?

As a surveying student, I make the move today to create an Open Street map sub-group for my institution, The federal polytechnic Ilaro, Ogun state, Nigeria, for the student of the department of Surveying and Geoinformatics, faculty of environmental science. Doing so will help the student to acquire more knowledge about mapping and helping their communities in managing human and natural disasters through mapping. I contact the OSM Nigeria coordinator (Mr Divine Victory) of my desire to expand the OSM community to my Institution which he’s excited about. I believe in due time the students will have a training on mapping that would enable them to contribute more to the universe at large.

It’s Spring Break!

I started off my Spring Break by taking a nice weekend trip with my girlfriend. Shoreline is a nice city, it was quiet even though I’m pretty sure we were in the middle of town. I got in some good long walks, and did a little mapping with StreetComplete.

I don’t typically take panoramas, but I found a good use for them: capturing an entire stripmall in one go. Eventually I’ll be using those panoramas, but my Spring Break is flying by. Amazing how a break doesn’t really feel like a break when you still have to work.

I am Itorho Abigail, an undergraduate in the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. I am a member of UniqueMappers, a subsidiary of YouthMappers team.
I was privileged to become a member of UniqueMapper team, after meeting with my school’s chapter director, Mr Sunday. He reached out to me and gave a detailed explanation on what YouthMappers team is all about. After the briefing, i volunteered to be a part of this great organization. I am dedicated to service for humanity. I choose to be involved in the daily affairs of the world. I had always thought distance was a barrier, but i was proven wrong. UniqueMappers team gave me an opportunity to reach out to the rest of the world from the comfort of my home. I truly am grateful for this opportunity.

Today I mapped for Mozambique.

With the equipment largely bought, the big hurdle is to work out a route. Asking around it took a few attempts to get some feedback and I was beginning to fear I would have to work out a route manually. Then Rorym suggested the graphHopper routing engine, which is made to solve this type of problem. I was cc’d with a Peter Karich the founder of the company, who kindly offered me an API with 300 locations to help work out the route. Rory had done a project to walk through Dublin by not passing by a pub which he blogged about, unfortunately, that blog is no longer online, but it seems to have been a manual process, which a blog on grasshopper shows how the process is simpler with their software. https://www.graphhopper.com/blog/2015/11/15/publess-routes-graphhopper-edition/

So that evening I spent most of my time reading through the two blogs about routing around or to visit pubs. Also out of curiosity had a look at the northernmost town on the Irish side of the border, Muff, and saw five or so crossings just around that area and a few choices as to how to go past them all. A nightmare to plan and remember.

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Though I am also involved on mapping in Canada, I still do not forget to keep updated with many infrastructure projects in the Philippines under the “Build, Build, Build” program under Rodrigo Duterte, as well as other major infrastructure projects under the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) not covered. Here is a list of some Philippine infrastructure projects I am working on since then:

NLEX Harbor Link

This expressway has opened in March 1, 2019, but it required some tweaks, such as the curved sections in Karuhatan (Valenzuela), the sections on Philippine National Railways (PNR) right of way, and the C-3 interchange (connects to Radial Road 10, and scheduled to open by December 2019). There is significant work modifying or deleting buildings affected by the expressway’s construction, and modifying the future connection with Radial Road 10 (a directional T interchange for the spur that connects to Radial Road 10).

Cavite-Laguna Expressway (Laguna section)

There is adjustments at the rotunda (roundabout) on Mamplasan Exit with SLEX, the new southbound lanes of Laguna Boulevard is marked open (except it needs some on-the-ground verification by other mappers), and South Boulevard, which connects to South Forbes Park and Ayala Westgrove Heights in Silang is extended east toward Laguna Boulevard.

Metro Manila Subway

Construction of this subway line, the first of its kind in the Philippines, began in March 2019, with only the Quirino Highway and North Avenue to be constructed. The whole route has been mapped, but since most portions are to be constructed soon, only the Quirino-North Avenue segment has been tagged as under construction.

Tarlac-Pangasinan-La Union Expressway

Thanks to new GPX tracks and partial coverage of Bing imagery, portions of the Binalonan-Pozorrubio leg of the expressway has been realigned, and the southbound ramps of the Pozorrubio interchange has been corrected

Candon Bypass Road

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