That's very neat but also very resource intensive. After running it for 20 minutes on my laptop it was taking up 500 MB of resident memory along with a steady 25% of CPU, spiking up to 60% or so (presumably when it did updates.

That's on a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of physical memory.

The program is now (after a long while) in SVN and on the wiki.

The warning about it being easy to move large ways in JOSM doesn't apply anymore. JOSM will display a confirmation dialog if you move a way with more than 20 nodes now.

You can turn it off permanently of course if that sort of thing bothers you.

Hello Kevin. Good to hear that you're interested.

Other people can and will help you. The best way to get help is probably to sign up for our mailing lists. E.g. the general talk mailing lists or the newbies mailing list.

People can only help you if you have any specific inquiries, is there anything in particular you need help with?

With regards to getting mapping done there's some help other people can give you but (and especially for Africa) if you want something done you're basically going to have to do it yourself. And recruit other people to help you.

The first thing you should do is get in contact with other mappers in Sierra Leone. Look at the data for Freetown and see who's been making the most edits to it. Currently the top contributor for Freetown is Dave Stanley followed by Waldrunner.

Best of luck.

Perhaps you should request a SVN account and add your projects(s) to the OSM svn?

You can email Tom Hughes to request access.

Tordanik: Sorry about that. I just used slideshare because it was the first website that came to mind when sharing my slides. If someone can point out a website that sucks less please do. I couldn't upload them to WM Commons because it contains some imagery I haven't properly attributed (some things from random Google image searches).

You can also download them here (PDF and ODF) but I won't host things at that location forever.

My talk was recorded and will (probably) be here once it's uploaded tomorrow.

dankarran: I think they are, although the room I'm in isn't being streamed live at the streaming website I think.

Did you read this bit on the wiki about Geonames not being a usable datasource for OpenStreetMap?

Zaŝa: You can zoom in, but sometimes you'll get a blank screen so you'll have to wait a bit before that area gets rendered.

My crappy thrown-together tilebrowser doesn't have the "More OSM Coming soon" 404 tile so it's not as friendly.

A reply of mine to the mailing list should answer the three above comments.

To summarize: Neat-o, want to work on it ? :)

You can also take screenshots of the device itself over USB. QLandkarte supports this and Garmin also has some proprietary utility for this if you're running Windows.

smsm1: Yeah, we tried the Potlatch emulation mode briefly too.

It works just fine here in Opera 9.64, and the feature hasn't been there for weeks, just a few days. Previously you could only look at the area that contained the relation, but now you can have it drawn on the map.

The same goes for nodes & ways.

Note that you can also use the main site for that now (the bigger map is linked from the relation browser). Although the external site may look better.

randomjunk: In this particular case this seems to have been a prank by a sockpuppet of an experienced OSM user, as witnessed by - among other things - a circular 12 nautical mile administrative zone, which incidentally is still on the map.

But generally speaking it's good to ask people to fix things they get wrong themselves, even if that means waiting a bit more. The resulting learning experience is often very useful for new contributors and often avoids hurt feelings people may have when they see their work deleted. Even if it doesn't align with the goals of the project.

It's little stuff like that which helps to maintain a friendlier atmosphere than the (English) Wikipedia.

This is actually the first bit of Windows programming I've ever done, and I'm doing it in AutoIt which is a language I've never used before. But it's really neat, I wish there was something like it for *nix.

I'll try to clean up what I have and get it into SVN in a few days.

It's like that because a waterway=riverbank area is missing in places.

It also needs cleanup for other reasons, for instance the ways for the suburbs Lehel and Haidhausen don't share nodes at their edges.

Actually not only for the user edits but also for recent changes and history within a bbox now. See the ticket in trac.

What encoding is the data originally in and how are you converting it? You converting "cour à bois" to "cour [U+FFFD] bois" suggests a easy-to-fix encoding issue in your code.

And yes, structured data is better, so perhaps canvec:value=Lumber yard - ( Cour à bois ) should be split up into canvec:value:en=Lumber yard and canvec:value:fr=Cour à bois. Although that tagging schema suggests those values came from the canvec dataset.