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 Understandably, basically all content was out of date.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!

With some OSM tools I tried to find out if there were still active mappers in our town. And there were indeed some! My friend suggested to plan a MapWalk event with StreetComplete in our town. Via Mastodon and the OSM notification system, I contacted all the active mappers I found, but I also tried to get the old wiki maintainers hooked. I tried to get as many as possible to this first meet and greet mapping event.

And we were lucky, 5-6 people responded and 3-4 people really joined this first event! This felt really great. The two of us were now doubled, and even a bit more!

Posting about that first MapWalk had an unexpected side effect: I asked the OSM bubble on Mastodon how to count all the changes we did that day and indeed a nice guy named Ulf wrote a Python script that queries what I required. Later on, this idea became the great tool :muscle: whatdidyoudo.

Later on, we additionally created a Matrix channel to have some kind of virtual town square, where local mappers can sync and new starters find an entry into the community. Not a coincidence — a lot of the OSM world has moved there too, and it remains one of the better options for open, decentralized communication without handing your community over to a corporate platform.

Then, to make our OSM world complete, ideas also came up to host our own Panoramax instance. We talked with some contacts in the University of Fulda and ended up with a great contact to the foundation Magrathea Laboratories 🤗 It is the local hackspace and CCC Erfa. Since they are interested in all #DiDay topics, also this Panoramax project was quite interesting and they agreed to cooperate / host the instance under their umbrella. While this project has not been finished yet, we got other super sidekicks here. The hackspace welcomed us, to give talks about OpenStreetMap, also offered to bring this topic up for DiDay events and — even more cool — offered to use the space for OpenStreetMap events!

Our community is still not that huge of course. But we noticed that all this fun we had, brought us 5-10 new people that map here and there some things. Within the “inner circle” we have a good handful of people that map regularly and also a lot.

We have been doing these MapWalks quarterly since then. Besides the mapping results, it is a great opportunity to explore your town in a level of detail you would never have imagined. Of course, the social interactions and networking with OSM users is always super interesting. Super people!

The last MapWalk brought the best success until now :tada: We were 9 people and were really struggling on how to organize the routes we were walking (to not clash too much and get the best results out of the day)!

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It is quite interesting how much can be done with fewer but motivated people.