The last new version of Vespucci with major changes was at the end of 2014 and it has taken a lot more time than I wanted to get near to completing the next version. But now a lot of things are coming together and I’m expecting that we are only a single digit number of weeks away from a stable release.

Just some of the major features:

• multi-select mode
• restyled tag editing with split pane layout on tablets.
• selective tag copy, cut and paste.
• lots of relation editing improvements
• start a camera app directly
• go directly to preset screen when creating new elements.

Besides the multi-select support most changes have been geared towards making the user interface more consistent and easier to use.

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I spent some time today producing some numbers to show how large the effect of old accounts returning and starting to edit actually is and determined the annual numbers of new mappers that created their account at least two years back. For 2014 this would be accounts created in 2011 and earlier.

Year  New mappers
      with old accounts
2012       1'817
2013       2'241
2014       2'848

To give some perspective: 2014 missing maps and HOT together attracted roughly 1’500 new mappers. The total number of new contributors in 2014 was 105’612..

Thanks to TomH for providing some of the data required for the stats.

People who have read Gary Gales blog post on Geohipster will have noticed that one of his claims is that OSM is “business unfriendly”. It is a reoccurring theme in discussion with people from the geo-industry however in many many discussions and contacts with companies outside of geo** it has never been an issue, and so the question should probably be reformulated as:

Is OSM geo-business unfriendly?

Well, my answer is, you expected this: no.

It is obvious simply by observing the many thriving businesses that would not exist without OSM and the way OSMs “business-model” is structured.

By positioning itself as a data collection project OSM has left lots of space to build businesses using OSM data and providing services on top of it. This is in stark contrast to say Wikipedia, which has always positioned itself as the one-stop shop for WP content and services.

Would a MapBox exist if OSM had chosen a more Wikipedia like model? Naturally not. Would MapBox cease to exist if OSM changed its mind today? Probably not, given that they have moved away from being a one-trick pony, but it would be the death knell for a number of other players.

But no fear, a further reason that OSM is extremely business friendly is that we have held a steady course over the decade the project has existed. Major changes have taken place over a long period of time with lots of time to adapt.

Now there is a certain slow feature creep with respect to services provided on the central OSM site which will continue to raise the bar of the minimal functionality for a viable online map portal, but anybody endangered by this should likely rethink their business model in any case.

Community run and developed software and services will likely have more impact. OSM provides a level playing field and your business model should take competing with non-commercial services in to account (note how OSMand in continuously improving).

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It is time that we lay the geocoding related licence discussion to rest by forming consensus on a guideline.

It is well known that I support the concept that the results of bulk geocoding form a derived database and support the corresponding conclusions on the Geocoding Guideline page .

However Example 7 glosses over a point that has been raised for example by Steve Coast in the past: are failed geocoding results really free of OSM intellectual property? For clarity: we are not discussing on the fly gecoding as there is no database created and nothing to share.

We need to resolve this to move forward on the matter.

I don’t believe there is a clear and conclusive answer to the above and there is a certain danger of getting in to “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” type of discussions, so I believe that it boils down to: with what is the OSM community happy? Naturally with the backdrop of the ODbL in mind.

I suggest something very simple: that the set of failed addresses (or more general: input data) should be shared with the OSM community. I am not saying that the failed addresses are subject to the ODbL SA clauses, just that we should treat them as if they are.

Now you might ask why would we be interested in failed addresses? On the one hand these can be mined, just as the successfully geocoded ones, for additional information, for example for house number -> post codes relationships and on the other hand the list of failed addresses is obviously helpful for quality assurance.

And I believe that this, particularly the later point, creates a win-win situation for the organisation doing the geocoding and for OSM. The win for the geocoding organisation is that more of its addresses will be found in OSM and the reliance on third party datasets will be reduced.

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Two days back there was a longish discussion on the OSM IRC channel about supporting OSM on XSCE, aka on offline, potentially slow devices. Currently it seems if they (XSCE) distribute a pre-rendered set of tiles, and during the discussion (which was mainly about alternatives to distributing tiles) it was mentioned that it would be nice if they, besides a slippy map, could provide a search function.

Now given that disk space idoes not seem to be an issue in the project and keeping in sync with OSM central is not a requirement, it occured to me that Photon might be a viable way of providing a global search function.

Installing it on my PI2 (running Ubuntu 14.04) was surprisingly easy and the only painful part was downloading 30GB of search index over my not particularly fast Internet connection.

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Anybody who has any interest in the growth of OpenStreetMap has probably read at least one paper or blog that has moaned about “only” a couple of 100’000 users actually having contributed out of the 2 million + that have signed up for an account.

The over 500’000 contributors are a good 25% of the total registered accounts and I’m not sure if that really counts as “only” given that we don’t really have any comparative numbers, I would suspect it is actually very good.

In any case there have been calls to simply delete the “inactive” accounts as they inflate the numbers and in general do no good. I’m very much against that for two reasons: on the one hand we don’t know why inactive members have joined, maybe they simply wanted to show support, maybe they wanted an OSM account for autentication in uMap or any of many other possible reasons. On the other hand they are a reservoir of new mappers, and every day we likely have dozens of old accounts starting to map.

As an holdover from the licence change I’m still running a script that produces a daily list of old accounts that have newly accepted the contributor terms and typically there are a dozen or so each day. These accounts have not been active since at least April 2011, when we had roughly 350’000 accounts total. The majority tends to be accounts that hadn’t previously edited but there are always a couple that somehow didn’t get the message during the licence change and had actually edited more than 4 years ago.

In any case the tl;dr version: deleting the 1.5 million inactive accounts would deny us the pleasure and fun of welcoming new contributors like osm.org/user/Geocurioius to the active mappers.

Two years ago I produced some statistics on addresses in OSM. While I did regularly re-run the scripts, I never really revisted the topic to see how things are developing,

                2013-03-27     2015-04-09    Increase since March 2013
Total           20'168'470     51'903'310            257%
Germany          3'659'043      8'470'716            232%
USA              2'090'893      5'229'243            250%

The complete set of numbers can be found [here] (http://qa.poole.ch/addresses/), According to official statistics there are 18.5 million residential buildings in Germany so I would expect that we are roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of the way to complete coverage there.

The large global increase in early 2014 is mainly due to the import of 8.7 million addresses in the Netherlands which due to peculiarities in building and numbering in NL led to a far larger increase in the counts than you would normally expect of a country with a similar population size.

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SOSM operates a fair number of services mainly for the Swiss community that up to now have been hosted on a single small server leased from Hetzner. While this is a very cost worthy solution, it doesn’t have any redundancy built in and further requires cross border Internet traffic to access, which raises privacy concerns at least with parts of our community. SInce we started operating the server a bit over a year ago it was clear that a local solution would be preferable.

Due to the good relations between SOSM and Wikimedia Switzerland late last year we were pointed to the fact that Wikimedia Germany was throwing away their old hardware which used to host the “toolserver” and that while most of it was clearly not worth continuing to use, there was three couple of years old Dell R520 servers that might still be useful. While we needed to find an affordable hosting location to go with the machines (more on that soon), it was clear, if at all possible, we would like to secure the machines for SOSM.

Wikimedia operates a larger site in the Netherlands in a commercial hosting facility just outside of Amsterdam in Haarlem (yes Haarlem and nearby Breuklen gave the names to the Harlem and Brooklyn in NYC). They don’t have direct on site staff and it was clear that we would have to arrange pickup when somebody was there dismantling the hardware. This turned out to be bit of a challenge and in the end, after determining that we wouldn’t have to commercially import the hardware (no financial difference, just a procedural one), we decided that the easiest and most efficient, perhaps not most ecological, solution would be simply to drive up to Amsterdam short term when Wikimedia was ready and pick up the servers in person.

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I’ve updated the statistics that I regularly produce from our changeset dump, see stats page on wiki.openstreetmap.org, to the end of 2014 numbers.

The well known trends continue with growth in every category with a total of 472’925 contributors since 2005.

Looking back on the 10th anniversary celebrations in 2014 it is important to note that was celebrating the birth of the idea, not the start of success.

Success slowly started in 2007 with the project taking off in 2008, for a Web 2.0 undertaking prior to that it was a flop. Perhaps even better than a graph Martijn van Exel’s “then and now” map comparision with 2007 illustrated just how much of nothing OSM was back then (unluckily the comparision is no longer available).

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Dear OSMF members

You have likely already seen the announcement for the upcoming general meeting on the 7th of December. I would ask you to make the small effort and either participate directly in the meeting on Sunday or, better, vote via proxy now.

As I pointed out in the original proposal for this general meeting, actually achieving the 75% votes to carry the special resolutions is a very high hurdle and unlikely to be achieved without support by the board. But even if we do not pass the 75% mark, a high as possible support for the term limits will send a clear signal to the board that we want the issues to be addressed.

It has been suggested that the main problem with the proposed term limits is that they actually affect some of the board members ability to continue to stand for re-election. Without us sending that clear signal to the board, it is very likely that the board will implement placebo limits that only serve to pacify their electorate and have no real effect.

Please make the small effort to participate in this vote and make your voice heard!

Simon

One of Steves favourite sound bites is “we have the money, lets employ somebody” in a couple of variants, used again in his current manifesto to convince people in to electing him back to the OSMF board.

During my time I simply ignored them, not wanting to derail things more than they typically were, but the obvious response would have been “how on earth would you know?” (well that is actually the polite version).

The OSMF has limited financial reporting (it has improved over the last two years) and essentially no planning, also known as a budget. It is currently simply not possible to know what the financial status of the OSMF is or should be at point in time in the future. And while the OSMF has roughly £80’000 of cash available we shouldn’t be eating too much in to that given that substantial amounts of it would be needed in case of larger hardware problems (imagine one of our hosting locations catching fire) or other shortfalls and unexpected costs. Not even mentioning any kind of planning for short term cash needs.

It is one of the things that I consider a personal fail that we didn’t manage to get something resembling a conventional budget in place over the last two years. It is not difficult, but it would have required cooperation from multiple board members to be actually meaningful and that was not forthcoming and so I concentrated on other pressing issues.

One of the larger planning issues is the largest line item, SOTM. Right now a couple of days before this years event, the OSMF board has no idea what has been signed in its name (if anything has been signed that is), what the potential risks are, nothing. And this was the same the previous year, the year before, the year before that and so on ….

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In 2011 the then current board had a face to face meeting in Seattle and produced a set of “audacious goals” for OSM that were

• The World’s Most Used Map
• More Than Just Streets
• Cultivating Leadership of Mappers
• Easier Contribution for Non-Geeks

Now some of these would have been directly actionable, but the first two are really “visions” under a different name. And as visions goes they are quite good, far out goal posts that nobody expects to be achieved soon.

And we are still far away from reaching the first goal . There are lots of pieces missing before we can remotely hope to achieve it, but we are on the way.

Steve has long harped about adding more addresses to OSM, matter of fact I have too. From a pure usability point of view if you want to produce a competitive device or app with door to door navigation support you are going to need address data. To be more precise this boils down to adding hose/building numbers with their associated streets (intentional pun) to our dataset in some form.

Note on the side: there are lots of regions that don’t have a conventional western way of describing locations, we don’t have good support for that yet in OSM, solving the “address problem” tends to centred around 1st world countries.

The OSM community has lots of experience with adding addresses by both on the ground surveying and imports of suitable open data, matter of fact we’ve had a full country “complete” for half a decade now. What is however undeniable is that it is slow progress, even importing a couple of million addresses (we don’t have good numbers, but it is likely that there is something between half and one billion address conventional house addresses out there) takes a lot of time if you want to provide some minimum quality and the preferable on the ground surveying tends to be even slower.

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Rewind two years, September 2012. I’m rather fuzzy on why I stood for the OSMF board in the first place, but I remember at least being annoyed by the treatment of the working groups by the board, experiencing first hand a dress down of one our most respected community members just because he didn’t jump when the then chairperson said jump. And yes something didn’t feel quite right about the organisation.

To make a long story short, I wasn’t expecting to end up being elected the chairperson and further was expecting the fault lines inside the board to be in other places than they turned out to be. Naive me assumed that we would be having heated discussions about the scope of services the OSMF provides and how we delineate what the OSMF does from commercial and other services providers, how to grow the OSMF membership base and how we could best support the wider OSM community. Alas things were not quite ready for that.

My approach was let the past be the past, fix the issues and then move on. The net result was an uphill battle every foot of the way over the last two years and for the moving on part, well that might have happened now.

Why did I step down?

No, I didn’t step down because of some flak on the mailing lists. I’m a big boy (well I am kind of small actually) and can easily take the heat. A consequence of exposing yourself and engaging with the community is that you tend to function as a focal point for everything real or just perceived wrong about the organisation you are representing, it simply comes with the territory. But I still think it is necessary out of respect to the OSMF members to be open about what I think and where I believe the sticky issues are, instead of spewing safe political correct canned sound bites or hiding away somewhere.

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A bit over 10 months ago the SOSM board decided that we would try and systematically send a welcome note to every new contributor in Switzerland http://sosm.ch/how-many-mappers-are-there-in-switzerland/. Today I just sent off the 1000th such message, not a big deal, takes a couple of seconds per mail and I typically send them every 2nd day or so. The mail (in 4 languages, really should be in five), tries to be as low key as possible and simply welcomes the new mapper and points out our local and international resources.

Observations

• there hasn’t been a noticeable increase in SOSM membership signups, on the one hand 10 months is too short term to expect that to happen, and on the other hand we don’t actively solicit that in the mail anyway.
• just as above direct feedback is quite rare.
• the “one edit user” seems to be on the way out, most of the users already have more than one changeset by the time we send the mail (nailing that down in hard numbers is a project for another day).
• given that Switzerland is rather small (8 million population), well mapped (as all DACH countries) you wouldn’t be surprised to see some indications of saturation after 9 years, but there are no such effects noticeable at all.

If you think this is a good idea and are considering doing something similar yourself, please note:

• in most countries you will want to split the work up and coordinate, swamping new users with mail is likely not a good idea.
• Pascal Neis provides a RSS with new users on a country by country base here: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosmlist
• users signing up to OSM don’t have to agree to receiving unsolicited mail, matter of fact there is currently no way that they can opt-in at all. This implies that you should consider the legal implications in whatever jurisdiction you are and be careful how you word your mails. I haven’t heard of any problems, but you never know.

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I’ve updated the statistics that I regularly produce from our changeset dump, see stats page on wiki.openstreetmap.org, to the end of Q3 2014 numbers.

The well known trends continue with continuous growth in every category with a total of 447’883 contributors. Of special note is

showing that at the end of the third quarter we have already had slightly more active contributors than in the full year 2013.

August 2014 showed the 2nd highest increase in contributors in the history of the project with over 10’700 new mappers joining OpenStreetMap. It is not unwarranted speculation that this was due to the tenth anniversary celebrations.

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Vespucci 0.9.5 is now very near the feature freeze for the 0.9.5 release, numerous tasks that have either been been requested by users for a long time or have been on my personal to do list have been completed and there are only one or two left to do.

Some of the more interesting new functionality

• On device help and some usability improvements
• JOSM compatible OSM file reading and saving
• Auto download
• Fast address tags adding with house number prediction
• Import and upload of GPS tracks
• Function to add node at current GPS position
• Support for external GPS sources (for example RTKLIB)
• Basic conflict resolution
• and numerous “under the hood” changes

If you want to give the beta version a spin, it can be downloaded from

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9pKLmh8s1h8bFI5bGd4VnhYWkk&usp=sharing

Some of you may have seen my blog posts on contributor numbers in the past (May 2013 , December 2013) on our contributor growth based on analysing the regular changeset dumps.

While I was fairly sure that the numbers were correct, I did know that I hadn’t taken one potential systematic problem in to account: users that had signed up and produced only empty changesets. Now it could be argued that such users at least tried to contribute and should be counted, but opinions may differ on that. It was clear that any effect on current trends would be minimal, all modern editors will typically only allow you to save if you have actually changed something, implying that an empty changeset is something that can only happen in an error situation (for example an editing conflict, or a crash of the application).

Here are the corrected graphs:

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Anybody that has spent any amount of time fixing TIGER data in the US has seen all the artifacts that we have all come to love, over- and underruns in corners, lost fixes after being inside, wiggles where the surveyors stopped to read road signs, crosscountry non-existing residenials and so on. Today I saw one thing I hadn’t before:

(blue is the corrected version)

[As always this is just my own, personal, opinion, and is no way an official statement by anybody]

Yesterday I had a short exchange of tweets with somebody that was surprised that http://opendata-hackday.de/ was using google maps instead of OSM. Given that it is rather a convoluted subject, explaining why this in fact is not surprising was a bit difficult in 140 letters and is what prompted me to create this post.

It is probably just natural that outsiders, even members of both the OSM community and the Open Data movement, simply assume that these are essentially the same and have a large overlap in motives and goals. Numerous OSM contributors are active in the Open Data movement and undoubtedly we are a very large consumer of open data in various forms.

However this apparent overlap shouldn’t hide the fact that both our goals and motives are in large parts completely different. The Open Data movement is about liberating, accessing and exploiting data that is already there, and, please don’t take this negative, about improving the bottom line of the companies involved. One of the major arguments used in prying data out of the hands of government is that it will have a beneficial net effect for our economies and the involved companies and I don’t have an argument with that. On top of that, the “we have already paid for it” justification is surely, at least in some ways, correct.

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It seems, even though it has been available for quite a while, that the fixthemap page on openstreetmap.org is still not particularly well known. If you have an OSM based project and you don’t want to create your own page for this purpose (as for example Mapbox has done now too) please provide a link to the page with a suitable text. You can provide coordinates with the URL (best probably the center of the map the user is viewing) and if the user chooses to add a note it will be positioned correctly.

An example of how to do this is for example the SOSM run osm.ch site: http://www.osm.ch/#13/47.2095/8.5237