State of the Map EU 2023

Yes, its an incredible and inspiring duo. But OSM is in sense extra important: it shows wikipedia was not a fluke. In a better world far more resources would be dedicate for this type of digital commons.

The second way in which OSM is special is that it is a very tangible, physical facts-focused database that avoids some of the frictions and conflicts of interpretation in Wikipedia.

Given the downhill direction of public discourse these days I wonder if Wikipedia were to be launched today, would it have any chance?

But contributing to OSM is definitely not inherently complicated: the StreetComplete app has been around for years and lets any ordinary phone owner add details with just a few taps, in an environment much like a computer game. It is true that powerful editors like JOSM or Vespucci have a steeper learning curve, but since changes to OSM immediately go live and e.g. deleting a highway by mistake would be bad, you want some level of friction.

Regarding ease of contribution... I knew exactly nothing about mapping a few months ago. I saw the recent OSM birthday news and decided I should start contributing. Someone here on HN recommended Street Complete so I just downloaded that. It was really easy to contribute data using that app, it asks you stuff and you just add the missing information or confirm that it's correct. Added lots of local information for my city and neghborhood.

Eventually I noticed some roads were wrong and downloaded Vespucci to fix them. Turned out to be surprisingly easy once I learned about ways. Just pick up a few dots and move them, maybe add some new dots. Then I figured I should probably add my house to the map. Then why not add my neighbors as well? Wait, I'm using the satellite imagery as a reference to trace the buildings. Are the streets even aligned with the images to begin with? I figure I should get some GPS traces to verify. Wow, I always thought GPS and its 3 meter precision were impressive but it's actually not good enough for this purpose. Looks like I can set up a differential GPS system with a base station at a precisely known position, what a cool project. Expensive though. Oh look, new Android phones provide access to raw GPS pseudoranges which is just what I need to differentiate GPS fixes. They even have L5 GPS, sweet. I should try making an app for that when my new phone arrives. Maybe I can repurpose my old one into a GPS base station so I can compute GPS traces with centimeter precision. Meanwhile, I'll just average the results with JOSM. Man, JOSM is such a nice editor. Free software, works on Linux. I should learn all of its features.