Organizing OpenStreetMap mapping parties
contrapunctus.codeberg.page
contrapunctus.codeberg.page
It's pointless. People are doing their own thing. One guy came with a phone without an Internet connection so we couldn't even edit the same area without saving over each other. He had to upload later and deal with the conflicts.
At least, it's pointless for me. I guess I need a firmer hand or something. Or maybe it's because I'm not in a heavy population center (it's questionable that I could even start an OSM community here) and I'm at the mercy of whoever I can even get to show up. In Delhi I'm sure it's different.
At this point I'm just going to aim for regular events, minimal planning on my part, less stress and more energy for more events. We'll figure it out as we go, as we end up doing anyway. Tomorrow is my first event with that approach, we'll see how it goes. I only have two other people showing up, so it should be simple.
I guess I have always been in the "agonizing over every detail" stage, and remain so today (looks like we both have mapping parties tomorrow, because tomorrow's our 7th party :) ).
In the beginning, we were much more "lax". We waited for latecomers. During the survey, we moved in one big group. We focused on the social aspect of the meetup - often, the meet-and-greet phase would go on for too long, and there wouldn't be much time spent in actual mapping. After each party, I would be disappointed to note that most people did not make significant map changes during the survey.
In the 5th party, we decided to observe a stricter schedule, and tried a new approach - that of splitting up into teams, assigning an area to each team, surveying the assigned areas, then regrouping and reviewing the contributions. There was a radical difference. Everyone was contributing. A significant amount of data was gathered, and the social aspect of the meetup didn't seem to suffer as we feared it might.
Delhi is very populous, but somehow there are very few OSM contributors here. [1] It's been a real struggle to get people interested in OSM, and even more of a struggle to keep them contributing in the long term. Most participants don't continue mapping after the mapping party/workshop. I prefer to think there's something off in my approach rather than in the people, because that gives me the energy to keep trying new things.
It's great that you're organizing mapping parties in your region. I laud your initiative. Good luck for your parties!
[1] India's OSM community seems to mostly be concentrated in the southern states. For the Delhi OSM community, Bangalore remains our inspiration both for OSM coverage and for mapping party productivity.
BTW I'm also not just targeting newcomers, I'm also trying to gather a community among the existing local editors. It's just something I enjoy doing and it would be fun to do with more people.
As for the low numbers of newcomers - I could reach out more. There's a local tech scene slowly coalescing in my area. Once I have regular mapping meetups I'll be able to invite people at the wider tech meetups here with more confidence. (For existing editors, I should spend more time combing local edits, that's worked so far)
In Belgium, we've done some active community building. A chat channel helps, but regular meetups too - often these are just sitting in a bar or in a cozy place and discussing everything that is related to OpenStreetMap.
It also helps that quite a few have jobs in or at least using OpenStreetMap.
Also recommended, Organic Maps[2], which is an OSM client that's good enough to use as my main map app (in my city, at least)
Final recommendation, this interview[3] with the founder of OpenStreetMap Steve Coast. 3 hours of fascinating insight into the history and future of the project, including how he doesn't think OSM will be relevant for much longer once someone manages to develop a mapping project into their self-driving cars
[1] https://streetcomplete.app/?lang=en [2] https://organicmaps.app/ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB9NxbnE1i0
As someone who intends to never drive again, this is very funny to me. Cars are very obviously not the future of human transport, self driving or otherwise. They take up an absurd amount of space.
I wish this were true. However, I'm seeing the trend pointing in the opposite direction almost everywhere. For example, almost every European country has seen a rise in the motorization rate. [1] China is also firmly on the rise, and America remains 80-90% [2]
Given this, I don't expect that OSM has the ability/authority to make a dent in motor vehicle usage rates. I do, however, believe they can take advantage of the way the world exists today to improve open source mapping.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/D...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/car-ownership-s...
[Not cited, but neet]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27503807
The old, European cities have a bigger chance to go carfree. Some are actively working to it (e.g. Paris or Ghent), some are trying (Brussels), others are not even trying (Antwerp).
In the long run, I hope car use will decline (so that only emergency services, nuts services, ...) need one - for the climate, for our health but mostly of all: a carfree city is a pleasant city.
Have a look at https://social.notjustbikes.com/@notjustbikes , who does great videos about it.
I'm optimistic that anti car efforts will win out in the end as our message spreads and people's quality of life decreases hand in hand with even further trafficization of their lives.
if you can entertain the idea that in 10 years there will be far more cars with lidar+cameras+gps around (plus the compute to process it all), steve's point is that this data will be very useful for generating real time road maps such that we won't need to rely on a network of pedestrian volunteers to manually update a database whenever a road gets closed for repair or a new condo is built.
So they will stop taking space as soon they FSD.
It will be somewhere in the vicinity so it will only congest local roads, which would be much emptier now that they're not used for parking.
How do you justify the car option given that public transit objectively takes up less space and is better for the environment?
In reality, you can do both. You can also do neither. I live in a dense urban core already where it is often convenient to take a bus. But not always - there are those mysterious poles of unavailability. Upgrading it with automatic off-site parking could still free up a lot of street estate.
People want to drive without their seatbelts while drunk. Actually, this is one of the few times it's correct to truck out, "if we asked the people what they want, they'd say faster horses." Most Americans have no idea what they're missing in terms of the convenience and comfort of a good public transit system. Instead of being mad at everyone in your city for 40 minutes twice a day, you can relax for 30-45 minutes twice a day while reading a book or taking a nap. And, you can get drunk if you feel like it, and get home cheap anyway.
> But not always - there are those mysterious poles of unavailability.
A better funded public transit system wouldn't have this.
> off-site parking could still free up a lot of street estate
Offsite where? Parking lots? Consider Houston: "off site" aka out of the city is about a hundred miles from the city center. There's no "off site" for many American cities.
I can see a huge amount of wasted space below freeway interchanges which encircle central Houston. Just build two storey deep FSD offsites below all of these.
US is a weird outlier but many other places already have good public transit. FSD offsite parking they still can explore.
No matter where you want to put a parking lot, there's something better, more beneficial to society, less environmentally damaging, more conducive to a nice place to live, and more capitalistically valuable than the parking lot that can go there instead. And if you want to start talking about drilling holes in the ground to put parking lots, great, let's make them horizontal instead and spend that money on a subway.
Cars are simply a bad solution to moving people, automated or otherwise. Ever hear the story about how they had to take realistic parking lots out of sim city, because they made the game boring? There's a reason for that.
If you have these cars, stop pretending you don't need to handle the traffic. You do.
We handle traffic with busses, MRT, docked bicycle rental system, and also the fact that our cities are very dense, with lots of small businesses like restaurants easily accessible from your house within a five minute walk.
I'm arguing to get rid of the cars. Taiwan should do the same, for the record. I mean, the classic image illustrates the point perfectly https://danielbowen.com/2012/09/19/road-space-photo/ there's just no way to justify private cars in a modern era with cities having multi-millions of people.
Pinned ticket "iOS - Planning": https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/5421
See also the project board: https://github.com/orgs/streetcomplete/projects/1/views/1 showing quite a few things already done, some in progress, and a handful todo or blocked each
It doesn't have points and badges like Street Complete, but you can easily add/update/fix amenities, update addresses, add info about buildings, and fill in the same data using the "micromapping mode". I started with Street Complete, but now use this for most things.
Street numbering is generally quite awful on all maps. Google has made a right old hash of much of my town. It manages to put a hairdresser in the middle of the road on the exit from a pretty large roundabout and a taxi company on a small C17th Methodist cemetery.
The entrance to my own company as shown by Google would involve a multi car pile up thanks to the massive "intelligence" that can't manage multiple requests for a change from someone who is listed at Company House, who uses a 20+ year old Google account with the same name and a company email address with the same, quite uncommon surname, in it. I have tried multiple ways to address getting Google to correct their fucking map. I've even tried simulating their own instructions in my correction attempts.
Go on try it yourself - which little UK company am I MD of? Go and find it and put street view on to see why driving through a railing, pavement and a 20' retaining wall is a bad idea. No, it isn't hard for humans to figure out but it is hard for the clever kiddies at Google to get their algorithms let me fix their fucking map to find the actual entrance and the route to it.
In the UK a postcode can cover something up to 100 properties, as required. My business is in a fairly odd stub of land and has its own postcode. The other property adjacent, within the same plot also has its own postcode.
A fairly large dose of irony is that I do occasionally do reviews for Google and am apparently a guide or some such nonsense and my reviews have 1000's of views. My reviews are treated as gold (and might help or hinder a business) but my attempts to fix a real issue with my own company address is ignored.
Just fixing up street numbering will make a huge difference to navigation but Street Complete covers much, much more. I've also done my best with the paths in my local [edit: sp] park, to describe accessibility and "cyclability" etc.
Even for someone who just want a quick feature look up it seems pretty useful.
Search has two "magnifying glass" buttons, and could probably use a suggestion popup.
A nice showcase of Svelte too, the thing is refreshingly light and fast.
And I spent quite some time getting it somewhat fast - not to mention that my caching server is currently down.
https://github.com/pietervdvn/MapComplete-data/tree/main/lat...
The country awareness source code is here: https://github.com/pietervdvn/latlon2country
The idea: I've taken all the country boundaries from OSM (via nominatim); I slice them in four parts. If the resulting geojson is too big, I slice this again until I have small geojsons, suitable to download. If you know the zoomlevel and location, one can use the standard slippy-tile-index to fetch the correct tile. (Alternatively, if the entire tile is within a country, it'll just return the country code)
However, the client also needs to know what zoomlevel there is. For that, I built a search tree.
It's been a while though, so I've forgotten some of the details ;)
In Toronto I only see a very small number of people contributing to OSM's cycling infrastructure, which results in the map not as up-to-date, which in turn means that the aforementioned apps will not propose routes through the nicest, most recently built bicycle tracks we have in the city. The situation is not terrible by any means, but it could be better.
1. When you see a trail or any other feature that doesn't appear on the map, take a picture.
2. When you get home, visit https://www.openstreetmap.org and start drawing.
The website has satellite images overlayed wirh map data, so it's easy to see what you are doing.
You can look at your pictures to remind yourself of what was missing.
If you have recorded your ride,you can also upload your GPX trace to OpenStreetMap to make it easier to trace features that don't show up clearly on satellite images.
Don't be afraid of making mistakes. Look around and start small. Good luck!
Compare with Google who use their monopoly position to keep amassing data which they keep for themselves. Imagine all the effort that's gone into working for Google for free that could have been put into OSM. If you work on tools for allowing people to do that you should be ashamed.
On a different note it's funny to think back to the start of OSM. It was created in the UK because all the data from our beloved national mapping department, all paid for by us, the public, of course, was not available for use in any way by emerging digital technology like GPS etc. After waiting for too long people decided we'll just build our own. Now we have one of the richest datasets in existence and it's free. There's still a ton of stuff locked up in Ordnance Survey, though, and can't be released because reasons.
It's also fun to think how much fun OSM was back then. We were literally walking round neighbourhoods collecting GPS data in completely blank parts of the map. Satellite imagery came later but can't help thinking it's a way things becoming "better" made them less fun.
It deserves all the praises it gets.
I only discovered OSM after getting shafted on a public footpath which was completely destroyed and had been for years with a river running through it and a mud bank.
Thanks for reading, and ask me anything!
PS - I suspect some may have missed my footnotes if they were reading on mobile - tap the numbers to see them.
The 3D Model Repository sounds like what you want. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/3D_Model_Repository
Wikimedia Commons might work for this, too. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Commons#3D_mod...
Tangentially, if you aren't already aware of them, you may be interested in OpenDroneMap (ODM) https://opendronemap.org/
and OpenAerialMap (OAM) https://openaerialmap.org/
Also:
> It's easy to pick a proprietary network like Telegram or an unsustainable one like Matrix,
What's unsustainable about Matrix? I've really enjoyed running our community on Matrix.
I believe several are hosted on matrix.org.
However, user accounts aren’t portable yet, sadly. So the problem is more that if matrix.org disappeared then it would impact the user accounts homed on it.
Matrix has been going strong for 10 years, and while it's true that the Matrix.org Foundation (and Element) need funding (c.f. https://matrix.org/blog/2024/01/2024-roadmap-and-fundraiser/ and https://matrix.org/blog/2024/04/open-source-publicly-funded-...) it's clear that elsewhere in the Matrix ecosystem there's loads of $ flying around: https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/wordpress-com-owner-automa... etc.
So I think it's a little ridiculous to call Matrix "unsustainable" (at least any more than any other FOSS project).
> I've really enjoyed running our community on Matrix.
I'm glad, thank you for using it.
Of course! We love how easy it is to get bots up and running, and the ecosystem of bridges made it really easy to incentivize people to onboard, because we can basically offer "for free" the ability for people to answer their instagram messages without opening instagram, etc.
Our only issue has been onboarding flow. We get that there's an "identity server" but when we use vector.im and generate invite links from for example Element, they usually get sent into a flow where they, confusingly, are making an account on some big home server instead of ours (I think like matrix.org or something). We were going to deploy our own identity server after someone on iirc matrix community chat somewhere mentioned that the email flow is implemented per identity server, but all the FOSS identity servers we could find were deprecated. Anyway now we just give people tokens that we generate in synapse and screenshot instructions lol. The one thing I miss from slack is being able to just right click a Room, click "invite," enter someone's email address, and it's all handled from there.
However, that's not what's being talked about here most likely (though it's unclear since when we just say "Matrix" or "XMPP" we're talking about a protocol, not a service, client, server, etc. so who knows). If you compare Matrix the foundation/company, they are VC funded (the foundation is a bit of a sham after community pressure, it's all the same people and accounts controlling it, so it's a step in the right direction but not really well established). The moment that funding dries up, or the Element people (who still mostly control protocol work) decide they want to monetize the users more, the whole thing will fall apart. That's unsustainable.
Meanwhile proper standards organizations like the IETF or XSF have been going for way longer than 10 years and have proven track records of sustainable funding and membership. People just like to pretend it's worse somehow because they're not building sexy looking software themselves with millions in VC funding. In reality infrastructure is never sexy, and if it's using unsustainable funding models it will fail. This seems like a good reason to pick something controlled by a real standards body over something that's not if you want a long-term community.
(P.S. Since someone once accused me of bias and deliberately not mentioning this even though I'm completely open about it: I have volunteered for the XSF and have done work on both Matrix and XMPP related products and open source projects; I chose to volunteer for the XSF after working on both protocols and evaluating their funding and leadership, so take that for what it's worth)
This not true.
Element (the company set up by the original Matrix team to fund their work) may be VC funded - but the Matrix.org Foundation is entirely separate, with its own leadership (the Managing Director is Josh Simmons, formerly president of OSI), its own accounts, and is funded by memberships and donations. It’s also electing its own governing board in the next few weeks: https://matrix.org/blog/2023/12/electing-our-first-governing...
Calling it a “sham” is demonstrably untrue, and far from pleasant.
Meanwhile, Matrix has never needed the full room history to be synchronised - when a server joins a room, it typically only grabs the last 20 messages (with other history pulled in demand when the client scrolls up). (It does needs to grab all the key-value state about the room, although these days that happens gradually in the background).
If you're wondering why Matrix implementations are often greedy on disk space, it's because they typically cache the key-value state aggressively (storing a snapshot of it for the room on a regular basis). However, that's just an implementation quirk; folks could absolutely come up with fancier datastructures to store it more efficiently; it's just not got to the top of anyone's todo list yet - things like performance and UX are considered much more important than disk usage right now.
> Talking over phone is the most reliable way to announce the party, send reminders and confirmations, and to coordinate during the party. That way, there's no question of "didn't check my messages/email".
Maybe it’s different in India but here in the states, when you tell most people that you’re not coordinating with imessage/sms (or fb messenger or whatsapp), you’ll get blank stares. I’m reminded of this: http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/nosql/fault-tolerance.png
[0] in particular because of the plight of the umbrella protestors in Hong Kong and the government's infiltration of coordination platforms
Hi, author here. It doesn't need a 3rd party server - it's all hosted in Codeberg Git repos. Here's a guide - https://codeberg.page/
> What's unsustainable about Matrix? I've really enjoyed running our community on Matrix.
Many of us in the Delhi OpenStreetMap community are associated with projects like the Free Software Community of India, and run public instances of federated services, including Matrix and XMPP.
It has been our experience that XMPP has a dramatically lower server resource footprint than Matrix. We've actually had to close down a public Matrix service because it was economically unsustainable in this sense.
So far as I can tell, xmpp has no concept of threading, is that the case? It's what prevented me from choosing it when I went with matrix for my co-op.
Steve hasn't been a relevant force in OSM for more than a decade and if you want to do OSM a favour, point people to the editor on openstreetmap.org, not any of the mobile or "simplified" editing apps.
In the mapping events I’ve attended a clear goal was to onboard people into contributing casually and frequently as they go about their everyday lives.
(For context I can’t see the linked Twitter thread and have no idea why you’re talking about Steve)
I was able to do edits in RapID (the Facebook fork), although you need to reload between each edit.
While direct entry (on the phone) is what I would do and would recommend for anybody that already knows the ropes, it is going to be overwhelming for a beginner.
PS: I was commenting on the whole thread, and if you look through it you will see Steve mentioned as the OSM savant.
If you want to make the time to take photos and take notes, and sit down later and enter them on your computer, go for it. Likely that's a faster way to do a larger entry. In particular, I haven't seen a mobile app that does a great job of polygon geometry editing — a mouse really helps.
But I don't think it's a problem to do simple POI entry or attribute updates from a simpler mobile app like "Go Mapp!!". I think like many things, the best mapping tool is "the one that you have with you".
Am I missing something?
I wouldn't have made most of my contributions (or even started mapping) if I had to use their website on a tiny screen or had to take pictures or notes to add it later when I had my computer. I use their website, but that only for more advanced stuff.
The right approach is approach is probably somewhere between the two extremes. Teach new users about the website, but also about apps that let you quickly fix/update/add new stuff right on your phone.
You don't have to do this yourself, just understand that simple apps are a good way to bring new users in, that they're good enough for a lot of tasks, and that this newer generation of tech users usually prefer apps to web editors.
Except that the numbers show the opposite.
Not saying it's easy but I want to believe that a fine tuned open vision model can do a lot.
Or just use Claude or GPT 4 vision.
But we've also head plenty of teens adding fake data to have pokemons in their front garden. To much gamification hurts.
This sounds like a really cool project. Thanks for your hard work.
(I'm not sure about the details, but I think the spawn points were OSM based long before the map rendering was OSM based to). In either case, read their Wikipedia page for more details (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic,_Inc.) and our OSM-wikipage (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Go)
It reminded me of the saying about libertarians: "Libertarians are like house cats. Completely dependent on a system they neither understand nor appreciate and fiercely confident of their own independence."
I love everything about openstreetmap, but it is completely dependent on the charity of Microsoft who donates the aerial/satellite images, which cost them millions. Without these images, there just would not be any openstreetmap at all. So while I appreciate the fiercely independent attitude of a lot of the OSM community, I also saw a lot of self-deception about how very dependent they are on these very large corporations, without whom they would have no source of data from which to make these maps.
A nearby city recently began using OSM in its GIS services and bootstrapped the new arrangement by collaborating with local OSM volunteers to import previously inaccessible data into OSM.
Implementing open data projects through government is completely in line with the goals of OSM.
Since then a lot of things have changed and the global imagery layers (currently Bing, ESRI and mapbox, all three using Maxar for a significant part) are, in developed parts of the world, mainly just used as a lesser quality fallback. As an example where I'm making right now, I'm using state level, a federal and a global (non-Bing) imagery.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
> All surveyors should carry pepper spray for emergencies, whether they involve human or non-human animals. India is not for beginners, as the meme goes.
I was using Citystrides FYI.