Just for the record (because I’m telling everyone), I’m transgender! 🙂 I’m transitioning to live openly and honestly as myself, as a woman now. 🙂 (To my LGBTQ+🏳️‍🌈 friends, I’m simplifying for the cis 😉) My name is Amanda McCann, and for pronouns they/them is fine, but she/her is nice. Auf deutsch, meine Pronomen sind „sie“.

My old email addresses will still work, but amanda@technomancy.org is my personal email address, and amanda.mccann@osmfoundation.org for OSMF Board matters.

On github, I’m amandasaurus on github, Amᵃᵖanda on the OpenStreetMap Wiki, and @Amanda#2524 on Discord, am{ap}anda on IRC

Like always, I am open to good faith questions from OSMers on LGBTQ issues. If there’s a question you’ve always been afraid to ask, you can ask below as a comment, or email me. 🙂

Don’t forget one of the rules of OSM: Have Fun! 🏳️‍⚧️

Are you part of a local chapter, or a local community, putting together an organized project, or developing software? We’d love to hear from you at the OSMF Board meetings. Please get in touch with us or comment on this post.

Over a year ago, the OSMF Board began inviting Local Chapters to present at our monthly Board meetings. It has been consistently great to hear about OSM activities around the world directly from the people involved. Very useful for the Board and those keenly interested in Foundation governance to get as full a picture as possible. Thank you to OpenStreetMap Italia, OpenStreetMap á Íslandi, OpenStreetMap France, FOSSGIS, FLOSSK, OSM Ireland, and OSM UK!

We realized there’s more voices we could hear from, and over the past two months, have opened the door to any OSM community and other projects like software development.

In May, Jochen Topf shared his experiences developing key pieces of the OSM software ecosystem. And this month, Feye Andal shared work across the incredible OSM-PH community. Next month, we have Sarah Hoffman coming to talk about nominatim!

There is so much happening across our amazing community. For the Board and others involved in core governance in OSMF, we want to have this front and center to our efforts. We appreciate the time everyone has spent to share their work with us, and encourage everyone else to signal your interest!

I hope you and your family are safe, healthy, and happy in this challenging time. I have been meaning to write this post since I became the Regional Director for the Asia Pacific Hub early this year. However, I decided to wait until I had something specific and useful to share with you all. Recently, we have made a few important decisions that I am thrilled to share with you through this post.

First, we have decided to name the Regional Hub as ‘Open Mapping Hub- Asia Pacific’.The ‘Open Mapping Hub’ name will also apply to the hubs in three other regions. I believe that this decision is profound and far-reaching. Although HOT is supporting the establishment and operation of the hub, we did not want to narrowly name it something as ‘HOT Asia Pacific Hub’. We want to ensure that the hub creates an accommodating and equitable space for everyone interested in contributing to the OSM movement in the region. We want the hub to be as inclusive as possible.

Those who attended Tyler’s talk at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit in December 2020 should not be surprised by this decision. In his talk, Tyler committed to shifting HOT’s focus from HOT to the wider OSM local communities. The name ‘Open Mapping Hub’ intends to encapsulate this very spirit. We are extremely excited to start our journey with this new name, and I would like to thank everyone who participated in the naming discussion.

… See full entry

Last September 2020, the OSM-Philippines community released the Call to Correct Narratives about Geospatial Work [in the Philippines]. We’re provided with an opportunity to share our own narratives and showcase the local community’s initiatives through a documentary-video produced by Amazon Web Services – Philippines.

… See full entry

How-To Add the WMS dataset “Verkeersborden Vlaanderen” to JOSM as a layer

After adding the layer, I was able to get the location and a visual representation of the “verkeersborden” (traffic signs) as registered in the “Verkeersborden Vlaanderen” dataset, as a layer on my OSM map.

Dataset “Verkeersborden Vlaanderen”

Read information on Verkeersborden Vlaanderen about usage, rights etc.

Adding a WMS dataset as a layer in JOSM

1. Navigate to https://verkeersborden.vlaanderen/opendata.php
2. Capture the links to the WMS datasets:

• De Grafische weergave van de verkeersborden uit de toepassing Verkeersborden.Vlaanderen

• De afgeleide data op basis van de verkeersborden uit de toepassing Verkeersborden.Vlaanderen

In JOSM

1. Open in the menu “Edit” > “Preference”;
2. Select in the left pane “WMS TMS”,
3. Click on the button “Add a new WMS entry by entering the URL”; the “Add Image URL” dialog box opens.
4. Enter under (2) “Enter GetCapabilities URL” the URL, e.g. “https://opendata.apps.mow.vlaanderen.be/opendata-geowebcache/service/wms?REQUEST=getcapabilities”
5. Select the layers
6. Enter under (7) a name for the layer, e.g. “Verkeersborden Vlaanderen”
7. Click on OK

My post Zone 30 speed limits: using OSM next to “Verkeersborden Vlaanderen” had already some helpful replies.

When you are tracing every time you go out of your house, it will appear on the Public GPS Traces that there is always a single point coming to your house, revealing your location. The best way to remedy this is to trace every road inside your community to prevent hotspots from becoming to obvious.

Jalan Sutera Pines

osm.org/changeset/106911462 没有月子中心的选项，只有birthing_center，但月子中心通常不接生，所以我就创建了一个amenity=postpartum_care

In March we celebrated the 10th Anniversary of our first pub meeting of local mappers in Nottingham. I’ve written a bit about on-line and in-person meetings held this year, but much more a set of reflections about how the group and its meetings have panned out over the past 10 years.

I hope there are some nuggets of value to others either already running such meetings or contemplating doing so.

Lastly, a big thank you for everyone who has come along over the years, and to Kyle who prompted me to write much of this in the first place.

این اولین تجربه من است و انرا با سلام به همگی اغاز میکنم. موفق باشید

In this post we are excited to share some of our recent research into organized editing on OSM. This relatively new line of research has been motivated by two observations. The OSM community has seen a dramatic rise in organized editing over the last several years. This new presence has continued the historic debate on the role organized editing should play in OSM. We became interested to study how the editing habits of these new actors differed from the community as a whole, but were surprised by the lack of accessible data. We decided to use the public tools to create computational methods of understanding different editing behaviours to classify editors as being part of the organized group or volunteer.

Following is an attempt to share some of our initial results. We’ll begin by outlining a new method we created on classifying users based on their profiles. Then we’ll share some features we extracted that may affect whether a user is organized or volunteer. Finally, we’ll show initial prediction results.

Extracting a list of users

… See full entry

The OSMF board has finally published the draft for the OSMF attribution guideline they have been working on - together with the firm intention to approve that in the next public board meeting without changes. This is unfortunately reminiscent of previous cases of the OSMF board developing policy and documents internally among themselves without public scrutiny and presenting them to the public as a done deal, ultimately with often very sub-optimal results.

So these comments are less in the hope that the board will revise their work style and discuss policy openly and publicly with the community from the start because they realize that this yields objectively better results and more to help the community understand the (in large parts somewhat confusing and difficult to understand) text and its provenance and implications.

The background of the attribution guidelines

I will not present a full history here - largely because it would make this text too long to read in a reasonable amount of time but also because much of that history has not been open to direct public observation and can only be reconstructed from minutes of LWG and board meetings which inevitably only show a selective record of history.

… See full entry

What a pleasure to find out that Esri permits mappers to access their collection of past imageries known as World Imagery Wayback.

Map it like the early noughties!

Why older imageries can be useful, some might argue.

It was already stated in the diary post that “The older imagery may include the features you are editing with better clarity or relative accuracy.”

Indeed. So, this was proven during one of my edits made today.

Other mappers might consider me as a waterway mapper junkie. Yeah, I’m so very into it, when the right mood comes.

Straight into today’s anecdote: a KartaView picture suggests there is a nearby waterway.

The freshest Maxar imagery indicated so too. With a caveat.

… See full entry

_

The Riverside Estate was missing all buildings and addresses. Roads haven’t been refined for over five years.

I’ve spent 3 days of my holiday to improve the estate’s mapping.

Done

• Update St James’ School buildings, roads, and tags
• Review Estate Roads
• Build Telephone Exchange area
• Build Cranmere Court care home building, car park, paths, green space, and fences
• Add house buildings, tagging apartments and bungalows when necessary
• Add garage areas and alleys
• Add Substations
• Review green spaces
• Add turn-around spaces at dead ends when necessary
• Add full addresses for all buildings
• Review surrounding land use tags
• Review and add footpaths

Todo

• Add house boundary fences
• Review surrounding common green spaces
• Review residential area boundary
• Review School land boundary

Discovering OpenStreetMap (OSM)

Оказывается, село Таврическое находится и в Донецкой и Запорожской области :-)

P. S. я редактировал их двоих.

Думаю, на многое не повлияет, тем более в Запорожской всё более куда интереснее)

ich habe nicht all zuviel Ahnung von vielem hinter Openstreetmap. Eines frage ich mich aber schon. Das “Ding” heißt Openstreetmap ist aber im Beschreiben von Straßen geradezu naiv. Auch die Darstellung (in den Renderern und Editoren (soweit ich sie kenne)) von Straßeneigenschaften sind, finde ich, unterrepräsentiert/unterentwickelt. Ob z.B. ein Bürgersteig an einer Straße “dranhängt” (und wo) sehe ich nicht in der Karte. Auch die Straßenbreite und die Anzahl Fahrspuren, kann man nicht richtig erkennen oder bearbeiten. Damit muss man wohl in dieser Straßenkarte leben. Dabei heraus kommt dann eben “Gebastel”. Da es ein Projekt von Freiwilligen ist, will ich da auch gar nicht weiter “mekern”, ist halt so.

Und auch, wenn ich es gerade mal lustig finde mit der 3D-Darstellung herum zu spielen: Setzte ich ein Flächenpolygon, z.B. für ein Dach, sehe ich nicht, wo der Ursprungsnode ist. Problem ist aber, vom Ort des Ursprungsnodes sind andere Eigenschaften abhängig, das nervt und mache eigenschaften kann ich deshalb nur mit mehreren Tagen herumprobieren richtig setzen….

Ich versuche mich da so durchzuschlagen, ich mappe nur in der Gegend, die ich auch kenne (wo ich wohne) und “spiele” da auch rum um herauszufinden, was gut funktioniert Hauptziel ist eine gute Karte zu haben die möglichst viel korrekt beschreibt. Wenn jemand einen Tipp für mich hat, kann er sich gerne nett und freundlich und möglichst mit Links angereichert an mich wenden, ich könnte ja etwas dazu lernen. Was ich so anderswo gesehen habe, schreckt mich schon etwas ab. Muss es denn immer gleich “Betonkopf” sein? (Meine Meinung ist die Richtige! Mach so, wie ich das interpretiere!). Das wünsche ich mir dringend nicht für Kommentare an mich.

Several years ago, Esri made its World Imagery map accessible through OSM editors such as iD and JOSM. The goal of this was to give OSM mappers some additional options for high-res imagery when creating and editing features in OSM.

The Esri World Imagery map is compiled from multiple sources, including Maxar satellite imagery as well as aerial imagery from various GIS organizations (e.g. cities, counties, states/provinces, etc.). In general, the World Imagery map is curated to feature the most recent imagery we have available for a given area, though we do retain some older imagery for a while if it is better in other respects (e.g. currency, clarity).

The World Imagery map is updated every few weeks with the latest imagery that we’ve assembled and processed. During a release, we replace the current set of image tiles with a new set of image tile for several areas where we have updates. For example, in our most recent update, we updated the imagery in Western Europe with the latest Maxar imagery.

For most users and use cases, these updates are a good thing because they provide access to more current imagery. In some cases, however, it may be less desirable. The latest imagery may be more current, but it may also be more cloudy for a specific location, or the imagery might have shifted a few meters relative to existing features in the OSM data. In these cases, the previous or even older imagery may be preferred for editing. The older imagery may include the features you are editing with better clarity or relative accuracy. This is why many of us compare imagery background layers when editing OSM data for a given area.

World Imagery Wayback

… See full entry