~~~This blog is also posted on my Medium account here ~~~

We often talk about how OpenStreetMap contributes to various initiatives like disaster responses, urban planning, land use analysis, and research. However, I believe we’re not doing justice to OSM by not sharing how it has profoundly impacted our personal lives. As OSM celebrates its 19th birthday, I’d like to offer my story as a birthday gift — a glimpse into how OSM has transformed me. I hope you find my journey an enjoyable read!

I became a part of OSM in 2015, just a few days after completing my final university examination. To be honest, I joined because I found myself with time on my hands, waiting to secure a job opportunity. Little did I know that this decision would mark the beginning of a transformative journey.

I got introduced to OSM by Geoffrey Kateregga, when the Ramani Huria, (Swahili for Open Map) a HOT-led project was kicking off in Tanzania. The project involved over 150 students & fresh graduates from the University of Dar es Salaam and Ardhi University to map flood-prone areas of Dar es Salaam, and this is where OSM started transforming me!

I made my first map edit at the campus ground, and it sounds trivial but I was super excited after Geoffrey mentioned that, anyone in the entire world can be able to see what I mapped, validate and actually use that! Honestly, it’s that thrill that keeps me engaged with OSM even today — yes, it’s that powerful! haha.

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I’m lucky sometimes to find something just like this. Uhhh. It was tough. https://osmcha.org/changesets/139739372

before

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On the 9th of August 2023, I participated in the State of the Map Africa scholarship committee in reviewing the application submitted by members of OSM Africa for sponsorship to this year conference that to be held in Cameroun.

I thoroughly enjoyed my involvement with the FMTM testing team, where I gained invaluable experience in data collection within Shyira Sector, Nyabihu District, located in the picturesque western province of Rwanda. Working alongside a remarkable team from Rwanda, I was inspired by the diverse and enthusiastic individuals I had the pleasure of collaborating with. The Rwandan terrain, delectable cuisine, and engaging interactions with members of the HOT community left an indelible mark on my memory.

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Create, Cultivate & Thrive: Are We Doing Enough?

Resilience is the ability of a community to continue to live, function, develop and thrive after a crisis. Key elements of enhancing resilience include maximizing social cohesion, collaboration, empowerment, participation and consideration of local characteristics and issues. This means dialogue within, and inputs from, the community itself. Skilled volunteers within the community are then to take the responsibility to rebuild relationships — within the community, with the external stakeholder i.e. organizations, and governments, to revive the buzz again and again, where it was left behind. These relationships form a solid foundation on which other community volunteers can create positive change, by improving their skills and abilities for better contribution. Fresh thinking is also needed more than ever because volunteers have unique attributes that make them essential and put them at the heart of the restoration process.

Like most community-based resilience volunteering, volunteering with the OpenStreetMap community is also uniquely flexible. People from all backgrounds sign up to support a wide range of initiatives, activities & organizational efforts across social, economic, health, logistics, environmental development & humanitarian crisis response by enriching open & sharable geo-data repository through the OpenStreetMap platform. We know from experience that it works as a great support in every context and adds value to every type of program, from Disaster risk reduction & response, public health, protection, wash, education, information management & logistic support, by fueling evidence-based interventions. The approach is universal and adaptable nowadays; community capacity development, operation & program management, mentoring & leadership are the key components to strengthening & sustaining activism.

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After giving the “How to become an OSM pro” talk at CCC last year, I will give two talks at CCCamp23 next week:

Introduction to OpenStreetMap

This covers what OSM is (not), why to map, where to map, what to map, and how to map. Perfect to get your friends started with OSM!

Querying OpenStreetMap with Overpass-Turbo (cancelled)

Introduction and examples of using the [Overpass Query Language](osm.wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_QL) and [Overpass-Turbo](https://overpass-turbo.eu/) to fetch data from the OpenStreetMap database. Can be used for mapping, quality assurance, or research

Edit: There is an Overpass talk at CCCamp already, so I’ll do mine some other time.

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⚠️ The talks will not be recorded

The exact time is not yet announced, keep an eye on the (self-organized) schedule, or follow me @jomo@mstdn.io on Mastodon. See you at the camp!

OpenStreetMap 19th Birthday Party

In 2023, the project’s anniversary, OpenStreetMap’s 19th anniversary birthday party will be celebrated around August 9, 2023 in cities all over the world! osm.wiki/OpenStreetMap_19th_Anniversary_Birthday_party

PROJECT LINK:

https://tasks.hotosm.org/projects/15381/

The Openstreetmap 19th birthday party event will take place today at 8:00 pm with the Quississana neighborhood map, in the city of São José dos Pinhais, Paraná osm.org/relation/1123929#map=15/ -25.5504/-49.1532 where we will map the buildings that are missing in the neighborhood and we will also promote an online meeting of Brazilian mappers in the room of UMBRAOSM - Union of Brazilian Openstreetmap mappers at the link: https://meet.jit.si/ umbraosm

The Event will be promoted by UMBRAOSM - Union of Brazilian Openstreetmap Mappers

Festa de aniversário de 19 anos do OpenStreetMap.

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One of the biggest things that’s annoyed me with OpenStreetMap is the pertinent lack of POIs, compared to the big G that many around me have generally accepted as the standard navigation app and database for everyday use. It actually made me excited for Overture Maps, as I thought we could easily take the good stuff from Facebook’s places data to improve our map.

When the Overture Maps Foundation’s data released its first alpha files, naturally, the OSM community started sleuthing in there. The job became even easier when community member @bdon released a tool to overlay the POI dataset into an OSM basemap, as seen here.

The way Meta sourced the POIs in the first place has unintended consequences, however, like…

Top 12 Beach Resorts inside Neighborhoods near Me

That heading would suffice for a top-ten listicle, haha.

I’ve manually listed a small sample of such hotels, resorts and other kinds of supposed accommodations that, for humans, “obviously don’t belong there”: first as screenshots one-by-one, and then add them all into a table.

1 — Water Park in Tract Housing

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I asked my first question on the Support Forum. Member Minh Nguyễn was kind to answer it quickly and accurately. I wanted to add a speed limit to a Way but the Way was under a “Boundary” data label.. The solution: Select Edit.. Then on the RIGHT side of map area are icons. By selecting the one called “Map Data” and then clicking on heading called “MAP FEATURES” and then un-checking the box for “Boundaries” then the Map doesn’t display “Boundary Data” With that layer now hidden the WAY was easy to select and add Speed Limit Tags. The OSM ID Editor has many cool features once someone shows me.. :)

Tonight I learned how to designate different Speed Limits on the same road going in different directions. The Forward direction of a “Way” has little guide triangle icons when a Way is selected that act like arrows. These triangle icons point in the Forward Direction. The reverse of Forward is Backward. After selecting a Way, there is a menu on left called TAG’s. I simply press add (+) to create a TAG called maxspeed:forward and maxspeed:backward and assign a speed limit appropriate for that section of Way. It doesn’t populate “mph” so I needed to remember to include that after the speed. I figured that out later and went back and double checked all my Forward and Backward speeds. I like best when a street has the same speed limit in both directions. However many primary streets have sections with different speed limit overlap. ID editor really has some cool features. :)

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Before I started mapping I didn’t think much about walkability. There are parts of the city that are hard to get to without a car.

Some streets don’t even have a sidewalk. Theres a chance that curbs have no ramp for wheelchair users. I will say though that the city is making things better.

A couple new walking paths were built along the two main roads. Near my house there was also work done to the roads and sidewalks. We now have ramps on the curbs!

Cool

It’s a long weekend this weekend in Ireland so I found some time today to catch up on some OpenStreetMap tasks.

Primary objective: Send welcome messages to new contributors in Ireland.

Objective status: Completed. \o/

Other observations:

• new contributors add lots of good information. some mistakes but we also did that at the start.
• lots of buildings still to add in Ireland.
• impressed by the amount of organisations trying to contribute updates. Saw new contributions from libraries, public transport organisations, business improvement organisations.
• A new contributor with a username that may signify they work in the waste industry has been adding information for new estates. Love it!
• Terracing tool rocks! Added a whole estate in Blarney, Co. Cork in about an hour using it today.
• Map Roulette (see maproulette.org ) is cool.

Map of recent edits for dónal

Lots of criminal going on here

Everyone knows that StreetComplete is a simple editor. But did you know that it has more features than it seems at first glance?

On osm.org does not support video, so the article will be on telegra.ph https://telegra.ph/Advanced-StreetComplete-08-04

На русском языке: https://telegra.ph/Prodvinutyj-StreetComplete-08-05

Yesterday which was the 5th of August, 2023 we ha our weekly mapathon. This holds every Saturday of every week. I trained our newbie from last week on how to use Maproulette and how to map road. Then I also opened a new account and trained a newbie yesterday on how to map. We had two newbies yesterday but I could only open an account for the other because our time was up. We all also had refreshments and had fun mapping. We were a total of 6.

I attended the monthly coordination meeting that took place on the 5th August from 9:45am-11am. The Agenda for the meeting 1. Map Nigeria Mapathon Project -progress and concerns 2. Other community Activities- 3. Reports from Mapathon centers/State Chapters/Campus Team 4. SotM Nigeria 2023-updates and Actions required

I also invited 2 persons to attend the meeting. It was quite nice.

There’s lots of software around to work with OpenStreetMap data - querying it, creating maps from it, using it for navigation. One area that there has historically been less support is analysing OSM changeset data. As an example, here is one of mine.

However, many years ago Toby Murray wrote ChangesetMD. That can be used to maintain a database of changeset information (tags, discussions, etc.). Martijn van Exel updated that to a recent version of Python and I made a couple more changes to support very recent Python versions and made the replication more scriptable.

Downloading changeset data

Over on the planet.osm.org site, there’s a download for all the changeets generated at the same time as the weekly “planet” file is created, and also one for all the changeets and discussions as well. The changesets-only one is just over 6GB (bzipped), and the one with discussions as well is only about 250MB more, because most changesets don’t have discussions.

If you’re not interested in changeset data dating back to 2012 you don’t need to download this file; you can just start replicating from whatever point in the past you are intereted in starting from.

Installing the software

If you’re on Debian or Ubuntu, you’ll likely want to follow these instructions from a non-root user account of your choice (substitute that account for “youruseraccount” in the instructions).

Running it for the first time

From the virtual account created by the installation, which you can reenter by running

cd /home/${youruseraccount}/src/ChangesetMD
source .venv/bin/activate

Run something like this

python changesetmd.py -d changesets -c -g

The “-g” is optional and initialises the database to store geometric data. “changesets” in the line above is just the database name.

Loading a changeset dump file

To load the database with changesets and discussions:

python changesetmd.py -d changesets -g  -f ~/data/discussions-latest.osm.bz2

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Added lots of building in SA between anderson loop-huebner and I10-NW Military HWY. Will continue adding in sections until SA buildings are filled in completely.