To help make OSM more inclusive in line with the diversity statement https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Diversity_Statement I’ve gone through the wiki and changed all relevant instances of specific pronouns to their gender neutral versions. This both encourages inclusivity by including non binary people, and makes the pages easier to understand.

Pages and text that have not been changed are statements by members of the community, talks, personal user pages and other related pages where changing the phrases would reflect directly on someone’s opinion.

This resulted in changes to around ~190 wiki pages, or if you include modified templates, another ~4100 pages. Below is a list of phrases I changed to their gender neutral version.

• he/she
• she/he
• his/her
• her/his
• he or she
• she or he
• his or her
• her or his
• s/he
• him/herself
• her/himself
• him/her
• her/him

I’m surprised at the few recent pages still using he/she type references to people, namely the State Of The Map proposal for Paris 2026, especially after the drama around LGBT people and State Of The Map 2024.


Happy mapping, and I’m glad to help make the community more welcoming and accessable for all. <3
Phoebe

Myanmar Earthquake 2025 - Bago Township Roads and Buildings Mapping Toady 200 edit Mapping Contribution done

Happy to be part of the Esri India User Conference—a great opportunity to learn new trends, attend practical sessions, and connect with industry experts and scientists. Grateful to my organization Jio-bp and my lead for giving me this chance to represent at the Esri India User Conference.

Hey OSM Kerala,

I’ve recently come across these innovative “Bottle Booths” scattered across Kerala as part of the state’s push for better plastic waste management. From what I’ve gathered, they’re public recycling stations designed specifically for collecting plastic bottles to reduce littering and promote recycling. The Kochi Corporation alone has installed over 300 of them in various spots, and similar initiatives are popping up elsewhere, often tied to the Haritha Karma Sena waste collection program.

Inspired by this, I’ve started mapping them into OpenStreetMap! So far, I’ve added a few in my local area, tagging them as:

• amenity=recycling
• recycling_type=container
• recycling:plastic_bottles=yes
• Optional extras like name=Bottle Booth and operator=Local Corporation (e.g., Varkala Muncipality) if known.

I’m not entirely sure about the full benefits of mapping every single one—maybe it’ll help apps like OsmAnd or Organic Maps guide people to the nearest booth, encouraging more recycling and cutting down on plastic pollution. It could also provide useful data for environmental projects or local governments.

If anyone’s in Kerala and wants to join in, let’s collaborate! keep an eye out and add them as you go. Here’s a photo of one.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plastic_bottle_booth,_Kerala.jpg

Happy mapping!

Take a look to watch they on the outside it ain’t safe to watch look alive

I’ve been mulling over an idea for a while: what if we grab a complete snapshot of OpenStreetMap data for a given region, then run some statistics over it?

Things like which tags are most frequently used, who the top contributors are by edit count, and who has been active in that area the longest.

For the last one, “longest active” means the timespan between a contributor’s very first edit within that region and their most recent edit (also within that region). This distinction helps separate two very different contributor types: the one-hit wonders who show up during a mapping campaign, make a huge number of edits in a short burst, and then disappear forever; and the long-term caretakers, often locals, who quietly keep the map up to date whenever they notice changes in their surroundings.

To explore this idea, I had to build some tools.

Step one was downloading all OSM objects within a given administrative boundary (relation) : https://altilunium.github.io/osm-region-downloader/

… See full entry

2025.09.08

I am two days late to write this post. Life gets in the way. However, I felt I should have this in writing. On 6 September 2025, after 11:30 PM, I suddenly realized that the ending day marks something significant. It marks the 10th year completion of my journey with OpenStreetMap. 10 years ago, on this day in 2015, I entered a workshop arranged by Save the Children International in Bangladesh. The workshop was arranged by a project named Kolorob (Bengali word for the sound of a lot of people cheering together) who were training youths on how to edit OpenStreetMap. Little did I know back then that it will entirely change the direction of my life.

10 years since 6 September 2015 consists of 3654 days. Checking my HDYC told me that I mapped 3425 days in that 10 years. That is about 9.38 years of mapping each day. It felt quite overwhelming. Mapping became such an integrated part of my life that it hardly feels something I do, rather something automated that is to be done regularly.

It was a rewarding journey, mixed with bittersweet memories of field mapping in hot summer days in the sun, venturing to unknown areas for GPS tracks, remotely mapping areas after areas that I will probably never visit, spending hours after hours on validating, figuring out how to best map an area, learning new tools, plugins, taking workshops, teaching and training new mappers, solving data collection problems, and so on.

Over time, due to various aspects of life and career, I drifted apart from organized mapping community. However, my mapping continued. I kept mapping unmapped areas of the world. My joy is to take a part of the world with no features mapped and then completing it, literally putting it on the map.

I hope to continue my mapping journey, one day at a time.

Hello

y first day in mapping was sweet and exciting. I felt good to know that even small tasks I did could help improve global maps. It was interesting to discover how roads, buildings, and other features are added, and I enjoyed learning while contributing to something meaningful. That experience motivated me to keep mapping and to grow my skills further.

Hello OSM friends! I’m Bhausaheb…… from Nashik, working in GIS Industry as an GIS Engineer. Recently, I have been mapped new buildings around my locality using ID Editor.

(My first diary entry, am I doing this right?)

I’ve been mapping my beautiful town for now 1.5 or more years. I discovered OSM through a Polish youtuber talking about motorways, and at first I made some small changes, not knowing what I got myself into. Through the years, I’ve fixed the landuse, updated all of the POIs, kept up with constructions, repairs, etc., and did all sorts of detailing.

I’ve reached a point where… I need to move outwards. There is not much left to do except wait for something to close, open or change.

It’s been a heck of a ride. I would like to give the Polish OSM community a warm thank you for helping me out in sticky situations.

Link for the map, go explore!

Hello OSM friends! I’m Pratap from Mumbai, working in GIS. Recently, I mapped new buildings in my locality using iD editor and did QA checks with OSM Inspector. I’m excited to share my learning with the community

Lifecycle Tagging

Lifecycle tagging is the representation of the temporal state of an object (e.g., whether it is under construction, demolished, or abandoned). Since there is no single convention universally accepted by the community, different and inconsistent schemes have developed, making automatic interpretation and uniform data management difficult. In many map editors, there is no section dedicated to editing this lifecycle, which makes it even more difficult for new users to understand how to use the system.

The goal of this project is to devise and implement a method for applying lifecycle tagging in a way that is simple, intuitive, and does not interfere with existing tagging practices.

PR can be viewed here.

Study

Before fully committing to the development of a new interface, a study was conducted to assess which tagging schema is the most popular, consistent and suitable for integration into the iD editor. Many other editors have been. Full study available here.

I also tried many of the existing editors and checked how they supported lifecycle editing.

Proposed Standard

… See full entry

SIWES Diary – Day 1 Date: 2nd September, 2025 Organization: Unique Mappers Network, Nigeria National Office: Suite 7, Mapathon Center, UNIPORT Mall, Abuja Campus, University of Port Harcourt

Activities:

-Reported to the National Office of Unique Mappers Network and settled into the Mapathon Center.

-Was introduced to the organization’s vision, mission, and the role of open mapping in sustainable development.

-Met fellow IT students including Favour, Alexander and Salvation, who are also undergoing their internship.

-Created an OpenStreetMap account and was tasked to locate my community and count the number of buildings. Many buildings were not visible, so using aerial imagery and my local knowledge, I edited the map by adding missing buildings.

-Since the office router had no internet subscription, I used my personal data for mapping and contributions.

-Received four major tasks for the internship period:

1. Watch the video “The Magic of Maps and Mapping” (YouTube link-https://youtu.be/5MyCtvSBATI?si=g6TM60pmY_oolnT) and reflect on how mapping can be applied to geology.

2. Work on mapping buildings in my community, since the area is not yet globally visible on OpenStreetMap.

3. Research and design an open mapping project that addresses at least five Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

4. Participate in research-related tasks assigned by the organization.

-Later in the day, I met the National Coordinator, Dr. Victor N. Sunday, who gave me a formal orientation. He emphasized the importance of my contributions and provided me with a WhatsApp link to join the National Community and Internship groups. Observations/Learning Points:

-Understood the operational structure of Unique Mappers Network and how it collaborates nationally on geospatial projects.

-Learned the importance of open data contribution to global platforms like OpenStreetMap.

… See full entry

In 2025 alone I found vandalism incidents specifically targeting map of Indonesian parliament compound twice, in March and now in late August. Thankfully these are all restored.

What made me sad that some Indonesians don’t understand the OpenStreetMap at all, what they only know in their head is political activism. They do by erasing - or editing - the place of institution they despise. Not really sure if these incidents are unique to maps in Indonesia or there’s international example of politically motivated vandalism of OSM maps?

Styles for vector tiles are typically written in the MapLibre GL style language. These definitions exist in JSON, which, for various reasons, is not a good language for humans to write in. Software called Charites preprocessed my Street Spirit style to improve readability. This helped a great deal and removed the two largest pain points: no comments and only one file.

Charites’ main features are:1

1. letting you write in YAML instead of JSON,
2. importing other YAML files into the main one,
3. and the use of simple variables to allow common style constants to be set once.

I made use of the first two features, but I still found myself limited by them. I still faced issues where the project’s structure revolved around the styling language rather than what makes sense to a cartographer.

A good example of this was road layers. With Charites I had to have separate files for each layer, so I had separate files for each of the thirteen layers. With glug I was able to have one file for the twelve layers that drew the casings and fill, and one file for the road text layer. This kept related definitions in the same place, which makes everything more readable.

Expressions are essential for writing performant MapLibre GL styles. A simple expression example is filtering to only show labels of larger areas. A filter property such the one below does this.

{"filter":
[">=",
["get","way_area"],
['*', 750, 6126430366.1, ['^', 0.25, ["zoom"]]]
]}

This JSON doesn’t allow comments, so you have to hope it’s obvious from the text what is happening.[2]

Charites lets this be reformulated to YAML

filter:
  - '>='
  - [get, way_area]
  - ['*', 750, 6126430366.1, ['^', 0.25, [zoom]]] # Only show areas larger than 750 pixels at current zoom

It’s a bit better, but the comment shows a limitation of the language. Filtering by area is a very common task. It shouldn’t require a comment to explain the basic math. With glug this instead becomes

… See full entry

OSM Accounts

same login:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:XXX
https://community.openstreetmap.org/u/XXX

different login:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/XXX

Integrations:

Services

• Github
• Umap
• Facilmap
• Overpass
• Geojson.io

Desktop Applications

• josm
• gnome-maps

Android Applications

… TODO

Hi everyone, this is the update on the final phase of my project in adding transliteration support to Nominatim’s search results! A quick refresher: this project focused on adding transliteration as an option to users who did not understand the local language of a name, in which an understandable tag was not available.

Background

For background, you can check the overview of the project and the midterm report down below:

• Project Overview
• Midterm Report

The bulk of the work can be found in these pull requests:

• Locales and result class refactorization
• Locales documentation update (for refactored code)
• Transliteration integration

Detailed Report of the Project

The detailed version of the report can be read here (version pending Github Commit).

What I did

• Integrated transliteration into Nominatim so search results in unfamiliar scripts (e.g. 北京市) can be displayed in a user-readable form (e.g. Beijing).
• Built a pluggable transliteration framework supporting Latin script via unidecode, with prototypes for Cantonese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.
• Refactored the Locales class and results pipeline for clearer responsibilities, modularity, and maintainability.
• Introduced a languages.yaml configuration file for language normalization and country-language mapping.
• Implemented new logic for parsing browser language headers, including handling of ambiguous codes like zh.
• Wrote extensive unit tests and updated GitHub workflows for optional dependencies.
• Added documentation to explain the new localization and transliteration system.

Possible Next Steps

A summary of a few possible next steps are below:

• Improve regionalization (e.g. Hong Kong and Macau, which Nominatim does not yet recognize as independent from China).
• Refine fallback logic when multiple languages are present.
• Extend the non-Latin transliteration framework with more language-specific implementations.
• Expand testing for robustness and reliability.

… See full entry

Hi everyone, this is the update on the final phase of my project in adding transliteration support to Nominatim’s search results! A quick refresher: this project focused on adding transliteration as an option to users who did not understand the local language of a name, in which an understandable tag was not available.

Background

For background, you can check the overview of the project and the midterm report down below:

• Project Overview
• Midterm Report

The bulk of the work can be found in these pull requests:

• Locales and result class refactorization
• Locales documentation update (for refactored code)
• Transliteration integration

Detailed Report of the Project

The detailed version of the report can be read here (version pending Github Commit).

What I did

• Integrated transliteration into Nominatim so search results in unfamiliar scripts (e.g. 北京市) can be displayed in a user-readable form (e.g. Beijing).
• Built a pluggable transliteration framework supporting Latin script via unidecode, with prototypes for Cantonese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.
• Refactored the Locales class and results pipeline for clearer responsibilities, modularity, and maintainability.
• Introduced a languages.yaml configuration file for language normalization and country-language mapping.
• Implemented new logic for parsing browser language headers, including handling of ambiguous codes like zh.
• Wrote extensive unit tests and updated GitHub workflows for optional dependencies.
• Added documentation to explain the new localization and transliteration system.

Possible Next Steps

A summary of a few possible next steps are below:

• Improve regionalization (e.g. Hong Kong and Macau, which Nominatim does not yet recognize as independent from China).
• Refine fallback logic when multiple languages are present.
• Extend the non-Latin transliteration framework with more language-specific implementations.
• Expand testing for robustness and reliability.

… See full entry

Introduction

This report reflects on my journey during Google Summer of Code 2025, where I worked on the 3D Model Repository (3DMR): a platform that makes high-quality, CC-licensed 3D assets discoverable, reusable, and directly linkable to OpenStreetMap (OSM) features. At its core, 3DMR is about more than just hosting models: it’s about ensuring provenance, metadata quality, and renderer-friendly optimized delivery.

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Initial Project Goals

Details of my original proposal can be found here: OSM: Modernize the 3D Model Repository.

In essence, the goal of the project under GSoC 2025 was to revive the 3DMR project by upgrading Django and related dependencies and standardizing on the widely accepted glTF/GLB format so renderers can load models predictably.

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Work Done

My detailed progress notes are documented on the community thread. A high level summary of the major milestones can be highlighted as:

… See full entry