Every three years introvert communities from three Baltic countries try to gather together in one city and discuss things they’ve been doing. It is called SotM Baltics, and this year the conference comes again to Riga, Latvia. It’s in less than a month: 4th of June!

We’ve got just one day, and not a weekend even. But there will be many GIS professionals in neighbouring rooms (with their own conference), and generally the event will definitely feel like an oasis of open mapping.

I would like to invite you — whether you live nearby, or can fly in for a couple days — to attend and maybe present at the conference. There will be video recordings, and more importantly, a free lunch for everyone. And both the city and the weather promise to be splendid.

See the website for info and forms: https://2026.sotm-baltics.org/

For the next day I’m thinking of organizing either a workshop or a bicycle ride, whichever looks more fun.

Wanna play a game about the State of the Map Europe conference?

https://zverikk.itch.io/dundee

As you might know, we’re having OpenStreetMap Awards this year! Finally, after many skipped years, we will have the honour and the joy to recognize people and teams who have made an impact on OSM, whether it’s by mapping, writing, or coding!

The process is open, and the same as the last time: first we gather all the nominees we can think of, then some groups of notable OSM members will choose a few from those who feel to be the most notable, and after that — an open community voting to choose one for each category. And the categories are:

• Core Systems Award — for building or maintaining an core project.
• Innovation Award — for making something new.
• Influential Writing Award — for blog posts, tutorials and documentation.
• Greatness in Mapping Award — for tireless mapping!
• Expanding the Community Award — for finding us more members.
• Team Achievement Award — awarded to companies and groups.
• Ulf Möller Memorial Award — like a lifetime archievement award for individuals.

Note that only achievements made or announced in 2024 or before April 1st, 2025 are eligible.

And right now, I need you help. The deadline for submitting nominees is looming, and we’ve got too few. Each category needs at least twenty to make sense, and for some, we got like two.

This needs some archive work. Like, open WeeklyOSM or big community discussions (before April 1st), and add people, projects, and teams you think made the OSM in general slightly better.

And submit them to https://awards.openstreetmap.org/

(Yes, we’ve got the official domain, thanks to Grant!)

I make Every Door to be the best on-the-ground surveying app. Its focus has always been shops and amenities, but it’s summer now! Ride a bike outside a city, take a scenic route. And bring Every Door with you, because it is ready for outdoor adventures.

Today version 5.1 has been published to both major app stores, and soon on the rest. Here’s what the app learned to do in May:

We have always had map notes, but now you can draw on the map! Saw an unmapped track road or a stream? Open the 4th mode in Every Door, unlock the scribble mode, choose the type and draw with your finger. This goes to a separate database, which you can then use in JOSM or Rapid.

Read this wiki page to learn how it works and how to add the layer to your editor.

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So the SotM EU just ended (guys from UK asked to call it “Europe”, not “EU”). We had a lot of talks, hundred people from the States and Belgium, met many friends. And also learned a bit more about Overture Maps. Nothing new since my Shtosm post, but updates my post about donating money. This is a rough DeepL translation of this and this telegram posts.

Marc’s Address

First, a simple one. Overture is not OpenStreetMap. Marc started by saying that the target audience for Overture Maps is developers. Just as Ballmer once chanted: developers, developers! And he’s right: Overture makes working with data much easier for developers. The data is collected, cleaned, in a convenient format, take it and build it into the product.

So the audience is product developers. Who know little about geo, but a lot about building products. As I wrote in the reddit about VLC, there are developers and there are developers. The audience here are opensource developers: god knows how to organize them. They are not the TA of Overture. They’re doing OSM. So when Mark encourages developers to use (and of course improve) Overture here, he’s kind of leading developers away from OSM. And that’s the first thing that was a bit tone deaf in his presentation.

The second is what I detailed in my question after the talk. That is, I’ve written before that Overture is an awesome wrapper to OSM. It sells data, it sells an idea, it does all the things we don’t want to do. But at the same time, the attitude towards Overture and the community was: you’re doing a great job, all these maps are very good, the tools you’ve written are great too, keep it up.

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Spent today writing a new Python library. Super useful if you are making command-line OSM processing scripts:

https://github.com/Zverik/cli-oauth2

With it you add OAuth2 authentication in just one line of code (well, 3-4 after PEP8).

auth = OpenStreetMapAuth(
    client_id, client_secret, ['read_prefs', 'write_api']
).auth_server(token_test=lambda s: s.get('user/details'))

user_name = auth.get('user/details.json').json()['user']['display_name']

This line starts a local web server, opens OSM OAuth page, catches the redirect, stores the token on disk, and returns a requests session that also prepends the API endpoint to its parameter.

Not very secure — but it doesn’t need to be. One drawback is when publishing sources to github, you would need to publish your client credentials as well. Or just read then from a config file, idk.

Already updated my Simple Revert and OSM to Sandbox scripts to use it. Hope it helps!

It’s that time again: we are ready to announce the third Baltics-located conference on OpenStreetMap and everything around it! Just like three years ago, we are joining the BalticGIT org team to have an opportunity to gather everyone interested in open data and open tools to present their work, meet other mappers and developers, and spend two days in a beautiful city on a super wide river.

Mark the date: 18-19 May (that’s Thursday and Friday!) in Riga, Latvia.

See the website for details.

The RIX airport is a home base to AirBaltic which has flights from like a hundred locations around the world. It’s really easy and affordable to come. So, we would be delighted to meet you there!

We are opening the call for papers. Please submit your topics, and we (me, that is) will contact you. We understand it’s just three months, but again, this is an OSM event, where there are new things every month :)

Registration will open a bit later, which we will also announce.

This week I’ve released the 2.0 version of Every Door, which irons out most of the inconveniences found within a month after its official release. Yes, the editor has been officially released, just a few days before two talks on it at SotM and FOSS4G (recordings pending). You should download the editor for your Android or iOS smartphone right now!

I absolutely love the experience it gives me. It has revived my love for plain mapping, going out and collecting things to put on the map. Pascal’s HDYC shows my mapping days went from 29 last year to over 120 this year. That’s because I again look around for unmapped things while outside, and making an edit no longer requires navigating a map on a small phone screen, or making scribbles to open JOSM later at home.

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Ten years ago on this day we changed the license for our data to ODbL, Open Database License 1.0. That was the final action of the lengthy relicensing process, which followed an exciting show of redacting and remapping the planet.

In July 2012 we started every day with watching the redaction progress map, discussing how the redaction bot devoured our precious map data, and making memes on the way.

After the bot finished its work, we started remapping everything we had lost. Poland and Australia were particularly broken, but most other countries had their losses. Alas we could not make everybody agree to the new contributor’s terms, so some mapping had to be done twice. But the work went better than expected, and it was then when we felt that the community is more important than the map, and that OSM can survive the loss of the latter.

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I thought for quite a few days on the Jochen’s study for the OSM data model, and I’ve no idea on whether it’s good or bad or how to improve it. The process feels pretty straightforward to me.

But that’s the issue. It’s not impossible. To fix OSM data issues, changing the data model is not important. Frankly, I don’t have anything to add to my 2019 talk at Heidelberg. It was a reply to Jochen’s and Andy’s musings on API 0.7 back then, and it is still now.

I know, Florence is too far away, and tickets are worth a fortune. I hesitated for weeks before shelling out 800 € for a flight and a hotel. That’s too much even for me, so I totally understand if you could not make it this year.

Thank gods for the Internet though! We are continuing with an option of virtual participation in SotM. Traditionally that have meant watching talks online and occasionally making people at the venue read your questions out loud. Not too fun when you have to concentrate on events happening thousands of kilometers away.

BUUUT this year we trying something different as well. First, passive participation: few people at the conference (or just me, we’ll see how it goes) would post photos and announcements and general impressions on everything going at and around the conference. It’s a way to get a glimpse at the experience of actually being there. I have done it in Russian for every SotM and FOSS4G and FOSDEM since 2016, and now I thought it might fit well into the virtual attendee package.

Also, active participation: record a video introduction of yourself and put it into the library of introductions. That way you can listen to people who attend the conference, either physically or virtually, and start a conversation with any of them. It is a magic tool that helps learn something about a person before approaching them: might help when you have an introvert’s anxiety (I should know!). And generally it’s fun: it highlights that a conference is not so much about talks and dinners, but about people first and foremost.

So, do buy a Venueless ticket at https://pretix.eu/osmf/SotM2022/ and join us: yes, you won’t be able to shake any hands or split a beer, but with a very little effort you can be a part of the conference.

After my last State of the Map talk, some asked me where’s that “Edit Tags” button on the osm.org website, to quickly fix any tags without launching Level0? Of course there wasn’t one: I just quickly made up a text area with Firefox developer tools. But the idea was there.

Now I’m proud to show you that the button works, with a series of changesets to prove it. Alas, not in the website itself: to enable it, you must install a browser extension. Get yours for Firefox or for Chrome. After installing, open the iD editor once, and then look at any object page on osm.org.

This extension is a hack. It uses some undocumented things and will break when something changes in the code. Like, you need to first open iD editor for the authentication to work. If you don’t see the “Edit Tags” link, refresh the page. It is flimsy, but you can edit the map with it.

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Today I’m proud to present my new OpenStreetMap editor. It’s called Every Door and works on both iPhones and Androids. I shared the idea last Summer at a State of the Map, but started writing just late October. In the last month and a half thirty people made ten thousand edits with the editor and helped make it much better. Now I’m launching the open testing.

The official website has links to TestFlight and Google Play, a short video, and a FAQ.

I’ve got just one feeling: at long last. One way or another I was suggesting something like that for OSM since 2013. Made a failed attempt with OpenSurveyor. Watched with hope for big company projects with paid developers — but all these have disappeared. In this time we’ve got one amazing StreetComplete, which I like a lot, although it’s not for me.

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There are multiple mapping tasks in OpenStreetMap that people still have to do old-style, like we did in 2010. But with current technology and with current funding of OSM research, these can be automated, improving mapping quality over the world.

If you work on OSM-related projects for a company, like in Facebook or Apple, please ask your manager if they can spare your time on projects useful for the community. For example:

1. Imagery alignment! People from the US and Western Europe won’t understand, but in most parts of the world, imagery is offset up to hundreds of meters. Mappers need to shift it to start mapping, otherwise different people would map with different offsets.

   We have plugins for automatically tracing roads, buildings and rivers. Why not create a button for JOSM and iD that looks at GPS traces (rasterized or not) and finds the best offset for an imagery layer?

2. okay I had just that one idea and struggle to come up with more

3. please share your ideas in comments

Reminding you that there is a big conference coming up: the State of the Map Baltics 2020 in Riga, Latvia. How big? Well, half a thousand attendees have already registered. It’s time for you to buy a flight and meet us and other GIS enthusiasts and professionals on 6th of March:

https://2020.sotm-baltics.org/

Why so big? Well, it’s just a part of a bigger conference: Baltic GIT is not related to version control systems, but to geospatial technologies. Think of it as a partly local FOSS4G, only with less focus on open source. And it’s free!

We’ve got Allan Mustard of OSMF, Stefan Gustafsson of ESA, Tomas Straupis, Kirill Bondarenko, Danil Kirsanov, Evgen Bodunov, Rihards Olups and dozens of other speakers and OSM members. Do visit, and let’s enjoy Riga together!

Note: this post goes too far and may be triggering. I believe OWG does great stuff, but is too powerfull with too few resources.

Thanks to a discussion in OSM Belarus telegram group, I suddenly realized why the new Board would not change anything. We could replace all seven members, and the project will stay the same. We could invite all GlobalLogic employees to run the project, and they wouldn’t harm a node. We are looking the wrong way.

All real work in OpenStreetMap is done by working groups. They decide on license terms, press relations, data policy, and technical stuff. Since we’ve got few volunteers, anybody can join any working group and… start working, I guess. The concept of “working” is what stops people from joining, and many people tried to explain there isn’t that much work.

In his manifesto Steve Coast suggests, besides closing off the Board and the tiles, to drastically increase budget for the Operations Working Group. Which makes sense: they are the only working group to have consistently spent money, which had measurable positive impact on the project. Why wouldn’t we want more servers?

OWG also manages our website. And planet extracts. And our data model. And developer relations. And has a final say over who can and who cannot integrate with our core systems. Which… Is a lot, don’t you think? They must have a vast experience on working in open source, on encouraging developers to join the effort.

Except they are doing exactly the opposite. Despite having 37 tile caching servers, our tiles are slower than ever, with many experienced contributors having moved to alternative tiles. In the past nine years I’ve seen dozens of developers driven off the Rails Port website code. Even active members of the Board were rejected their valuable contributions, like an endpoint to retrieve deleted objects. In their repositories, OWG members are consistently breaking every rule of open communities, by not giving outside people even a bit of control.

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As you might know, as of this week, Juno is no more. It is ceased to be. We had a good run, helped thousand of NYC drivers earn money and provided them with a human, attentive support team. But the increasing regulations in the city benefited Uber and disadvantaged their competitors, especially small companies like Juno. So we decided not to continue this fight.

What happens to the GPS tile layer we were making? It is still there — but not updating anymore. I have loaded two days worth of tracks for the central part, and month for the rest. It should help validate some of the complex cases around the edges, but obviously won’t tell you what has changed in recent days. Sorry for not updating it, and I hope it still helps with mapping New York.

In the meantime we have published another open-source thing: a reverse geocoder. In fact, it seems like the first ready to use, open and strictly reverse geocoder. Unlike others, it is in no way optimized for forward geocoding, but does one thing better than the others: finding an address for a coordinate. You can learn more about why it is not an easy task from my SotM lightning talk. And head to the github repository to see the queries and test cases for yourself:

https://github.com/gojuno/jrg

The moment Juno was over, the whole R&D team, me included, was acquired by Lyft. Which means, instead of asking others to open more data for OSM and to help the community with improving the map, I get to do that myself. Just for the US though, but still better than NYC only. I’m pretty excited for this new opportunity, and looking forward to working with their mapping team and their data — and making OpenStreetMap useful and better for everyone.

На прошлой неделе меня по работе отправили в Бобруйск. Это такой большой маленький город, где делают вкусный ирис, а с недавних пор мы в Juno Lab помогаем там делать умных школьников. Рассказывал, как обычно, про OpenStreetMap. Пришлось много тренироваться, чтобы дети смогли высидеть полтора часа и не заскучать. Разумеется, стоило им открыть iD, как их школа пропала с карты — но затем появилась, заново нарисованная.

Чтобы результат не пропал, повторил весь текст на камеру. Сорок минут отборной картографии. Теперь есть что присылать людям, которые не знают про OpenStreetMap, а вам лень объяснять:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=469pkgFDYhk

It all started with a bad edit. We in Juno rely on routing over OpenStreetMap roads, and notice every change that breaks the map matching. One day, we encountered a pretty big breakage caused by reversing some one-way roads. Turns out, all sources available to mappers, and even proprietary alternatives, like Google Street View, were obsolete enough to validate the edit. I told the story in my FOSDEM talk, but the main point is that it gave me an idea.

How fresh a source can be? We’ve got plenty of these, but they all are very old. GPS traces come very slowly, and people still trace lines from ten years ago. Satellite imagery is updated once every few years. Street View photos (that is, Mapillary) is always older than you’d like. If something, like a street direction, has been changed in past two months, you’ve got no way to know it and reflect it on the map, save for surveying it yourself. It’s okay for a small village, but not for New York.

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“There are empty territories, but then a question arises: if they are completely empty, then why should they be mapped? For some reason, the local people decided that they don’t need to map that.”

“We, as white men, are very privileged, and we simply do not see obstacles.”

“Maybe in some form we will use the technologies made back in 2008-2009 for Osmarender”

“Why women can not program themselves an editor understandable to them, use tagging schemes that are necessary for women…“

“What this is about, is that Mapbox ruined the vector tiles for OSM.”

“To sum it up, we see that OSM is turning into Google Map Maker.”

Last week there was a big OpenStreetMap conference in Milan, where I obviously went. There were a lot of great talks, I met a hundred awesome people and shared many ideas. During the conference I wrote a live feed with thoughts and photos, though in Russian. That’s why I don’t plan to write a separate blog post: I’ve written enough.

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