Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

The one enlightening experience I had in the 2009ish timeframe is how incredibly easy it is to contribute valuable information to OSM.

Intuitively I would have assumed that this would be really difficult to do, but the tools OSM provides for editing are actually quite easy to use even for people with no clue like myself.

You don't even require accurate GPS hardware or anything. Knowledge of your surroundings combined with the (blurry, but available none the less) satellite imagery might already be enough for you to really do good.

In my case, I've added building numbers of my neighborhood, marked one-way roads, added a few gravel foot paths where they were missing and I knew where there because I walk on them on my commute and so on. All this required zero hardware nor actual knowledge in map making (also: The changes are still in unaltered, so I assume they weren't all bad).

Using a cheap GPS tracker and a bike I furthermore added a few small lakes and a small creek close to where I live. The GPS tracker was very helpful as the satellite imagery was (understandably) just showing forest, but biking around the lake a few times was really helpful in giving me the correct measurements.

All this was both a lot of fun and absolutely trivial to do. I highly recommend that you give this a shot on your end. I'm a person with zero experience in map making and yet I could easily contribute my part and I had an absolute blast doing it.

Also, if you are good with directions, this isn't limited to the places you live now - I've also added a lot of detail to the map around the place where I went to elementary school (yes. The environment has changed a bit, but that was a great opportunity to visit the place again).

Contributing to OSM is a very pleasant and fun experience.

I love it. A couple of days ago, we heard we might be moving office to a different building a couple of kilometres away. I checked on OSM, and the roads were all correct, but it was pretty sparse apart from that.

It took literally just ten minutes to map the whole block - building outlines, numbers and addresses, car parks, POI for the pub on the corner. The iD editor is ridiculously good, and mapping really is quite fun!

To contribute to (say) the Linux Kernel, or Firefox, you need to be a good programmer. To contribute to Wikipedia is a little easier, but you probably need to be pretty knowledgeable about something non-trivial.

To contribute to OpenStreetMap, you only have to know somewhere. It's quite likely that almost everyone knows something that isn't in OSM.

Even 2 people from the same town, but live 1km apart could probably contribute different things to OSM.

Combine that with everyone wanting to see their own town/city/house/area on a map, and it's a recipe for explosive growth.

Generally agree with the ease of contribution sentiment to OSM, but your characterization of Firefox contributors dismisses the valuable work that 9 out of 10 Mozilla contributors do who aren't programmers. You absolutely do not need to be a good programmer, or any kind of programmer at all, to contribute to Firefox. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/

I misspoke, and apologise.

Most of my point still stands w.r.t. Firefox. QA, graphic design, education, translation and documentation are still skills that lots of people don't have.

I've been using OSM for some time for offline navigation on my tablet but never made an edit, because I thought it would be difficult to do. After reading your comment, I signed up and marked my street one-way (which it wasn't on OSM). It was so easy - thank you!

I logged in to say that I'd want to contribute with roads, but every time I've tried to I didn't know where to start. I've added shops and ATMs in my neighborhood, but I want to add buildings and roads too. I have a Nexus 5 and sometimes a bit of time. Is there a friendly guide?

The easiest way to contribute is to trace roads and buildings that you know, from satellite images, using the iD editor at http://openstreetmap.org/edit . You can create GPX tracks using a variety of different apps (I use OSMAnd), but most of the time they aren't all that necessary.

As for knowing how to tag things, most of the time it is self-explanatory, and then you pick things up over time by looking at the wiki. I wouldn't worry about getting everything perfect from the start, for instance, you can add building outlines, and then in the future go back and add addresses if you choose.

There are also some forest paths that I'd like to track. For them I guess I need GPX tracks (they can't be seen from satelite). I've installed GPSLogger. I guess I could just upload those files to Open Street Map for use in the iD Editor.

There is one other option for forest paths - Strava have made available their GPS heatmap for editing OpenStreetMap:

http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/

http://strava.github.io/iD/

So, depending on where you live, you may find local trails are on there (although you've still got to go in person to confirm they do actually exist, and to know exactly what they are - mountain bike trails, or narrow footpaths, or wide tracks for horses and 4x4s). In theory, it means you can shift effort away from sorting out gpx tracks, and more into getting the contextual information correct.

That's great! Thanks!

I do a lot of this kind of mapping too. You can drag and drop a gpx file onto iD and it will show on the map to make tracing easy.

You can use OsmAnd to record a gps track and send it to OpenStreetMap. It will be available in most editors, including iD. Althought, you can use any gps tracker and upload a track here http://www.openstreetmap.org/trace/create

There are also a lot of great smartphone apps. Select OS scroll down and there is a table which apps allow you to edit: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Software/Mobile

Pushpin is my favorite for iOS right now, because you can just mark the location and while moving on you can select what type of POI it is. It's also all in your edit history so at home you can for example then look up the restaurant and add more information in the browser. http://pushpinosm.org/

Can you suggest some applications (Debian) or introductions to use when contributing? I remember having had a look at Merkaator a few years ago and finding it rather unhelpful (or at least neither “very pleasant” nor “actually quite easy”).

There's now a new and easy-to-use in-browser editor, iD; clicking "edit" on the "default" OSM slippy map gets you there by default, and it even has a walk-through for first-time users: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/51.5011/-0.0194

(As for me, I prefer jOSM - more complex, Java-based, not in-browser; more powerful in various ways: https://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Download )

Wow, that's really cool. I just added one road that was missing in the neighborhood.

Yup. For small edits, this is perfect - it's in-browser, well integrated with the default map, plus it has a satellite layer by default :)

iD is fine for lots of edits. It's only when you what to lots of complex things (like relations, administrative boundaries etc) that you should break out JOSM

This indeed looks very cool, thank you and your sibling comment very much!

There are two in-browser editors available from OSM itself, and the site includes tutorials. I've used iD in Chromium on Ubuntu so I'm optimistic that you could use it with Debian. For new lines/nodes you can trace over satellite images and/or upload GPS tracks and trace over them. You can also add metadata to existing data - eg mark a road as one-way for motor vehicles.

I would recommend JOSM (http://josm.openstreetmap.de/) which is Java-based and I find much faster and easier to use than the web-based Potlatch or iD. However, try out iD (the one you get on the website when clicking the 'Edit' button) and see if it works for you.

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