I'm trying my hand at organizing mapping events. In fact I'm doing one tomorrow by coincidence. The first few, I agonized over making sure everything was prepared, I have an agenda for how I think things will go.
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.
Hey, author here. I guess this is something I should update the post to address.
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.
In all communities, your gonna have churn and only a small percentage that is gonna continue contributing.
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.
Yeah once I get to the point you're describing I will think about rules and details again. And I will keep your blog post handy. I just think I've just been optimizing prematurely. I have to get a sense of the failure modes before I start making too many rules. I end up spending energy on the wrong thing and get frustrated when it doesn't work anyway. I'm also doing something much simpler than you guys. Good lord, laser distance meters!? I'll be happy to number the houses in town and add all the restaurants and stuff for now :-)
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)
Similarly, as recommended in the article, StreetComplete[1], which shows incomplete areas on your map and marks them as quests to add to :)
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
> 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
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.
> Cars are very obviously not the future of human transport
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.
It's more complicated then that. For the U.S.: the urban sprawl and urban planning makes it impossible to not use a car for many people.
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.
I should clarify: if it is our future, our future is grim.
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.
i don't like cars at all and think it's a terrible shame how they've influenced the design of cities, but i think we might still disagree on what future trends will be :)
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.
It's anyway a weird analysis. Keeping up with changes to the street network is more or less easy. POI search data/metadata is the stuff that is missing, is something that provides a lot of value to users, and is not easy to automatically collate.
Self driving car can drive itself to a remote garage when not needed, and return back to your doorstep when needed - just press a button in your smartphone app five minutes prior.
That seems like it'd do little to decrease the amount of space cars take up: It doesn't decrease the amount of traffic (actually, empty cars driving around when they would've been parked before increases traffic), so it doesn't decrease the amount of roads. It doesn't decrease the amount of people driving to businesses, so it doesn't decrease the need for non-residential parking. It probably slightly decreases the footprint of residential parking by making it higher density, though it still must exist nearby and many people are probably still going to want garage space.
It would absolutely decrease the amount of non-residential parking. You will be obliged to direct your car to off-site parking when driving to businesses in urban core. That's the main point.
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.
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.
Give me a map and I'll find a way for an off-site carousel.
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.
In Taiwan we turned the under-bridge areas into markets, basketball courts, concrete parks (for BBQ or whatever), and skate parks. In Japan they do one better and turned them into full blown malls and shopping areas.
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.
1 per 3 people? We're at like 2.8 per 10 in Taiwan. If Taiwan had 1 car per 3 people the country would be in permanent gridlock, there's absolutely not enough road infrastructure to handle that. Taipei already experiences near gridlock every single rushhour.
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.
Street Complete is rather good. I filled in a few details in Hong Kong (come on you lot, the population density there is huge!) recently.
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.
Funny, I find OSM most useful for all the little walking paths people plot... Way better than Google maps. No car based system will ever be good there.
No iOS version as the other comment mentioned, but if you want to contribute, try Every Door ( https://every-door.app/ ) for now.
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.
I guess the OSM community is more defaulting to developing for other open platforms because that's what we mostly use ourselves and can test/run the code on, but iOS is in the making:
I looked at a few network requests and you are fetching the country code for some locations, is there some docu on this how/why you are doing so? I soon perhaps also have to implement a simple "is this location in country XY" check and it seems both trivial and complex at the same time to solve, without a full map-aware database/system.
Yeah, the country location is a requirement to show the opening hours. The library (https://github.com/opening-hours/opening_hours.js) is aware of holidays in many countries, but for that it needs to know what country a POI is in.
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 ;)
OpenStreetMap is great and I only wish more people using apps like Strava, RideWithGPS, Komoot or OSMAnd realized that they can contribute, benefitting everybody else using those apps.
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.
If i'm using ridewithgps, how do I contribute? is there an easy tool, or maybe it's something these tools could integrate? I know I ride trails thatdon't always show up on OSM views.
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!
I think it's a good sign that OpenStreetMap has gotten so complete, at least in most USA cities, that we're starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel for things that can be added/edited. Water fountains?!?! Wow. I know that for every place where I've physically lived (and have local knowledge of the streets), OSM's roads are basically perfect, and there's no need anymore to edit them. Sometimes, I'll drive past a new suburban neighborhood being developed and they are spreading the asphalt for new streets, and I think to myself "AHA! Now is my chance to finally add a road to OSM!" I race back to my computer and lo and behold the new streets have already been added some time ago.
This is a great effort. People just doing something good for the community. No expectation of reward or seeking rent on the output. Just doing the right thing.
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.
I'm mostly an "armchair mapper", but I actually find adding details from satellite imagery to be really fun. It's kind of like a nerdy version of paint-by-number.
I wouldn't call Ordinance Survey beloved. Their leisure maps have been a rotting liability for the last decade at least. Totally untrustworthy for hikers/walkers.
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.
I really enjoyed this! I've only tried to do this once and it was a bit of a failure (nobody showed up on the day despite a lot of interest), but since then I've done a lot of organizing in other fields (political stuff mostly) and have a lot more experience planning events. The mix of general organizing principals (call people, they're way more likely to show up) and OSM specific stuff in this article (don't map eg. a mall, it's more confusing for newbies) was really helpful and I think there are a lot of tips for organizing other kinds of things; everything from lan parties to mutual aid could benefit from this. Thank you OP!
Hi, great article. I'm pretty new to OSM. One of my hobbies is 3D scanning for photogrammetry. Is there a good way to contribute 3d models (retopologized ofc) to OSM in some way? Could include drone scans or buildings, sculptures, etc.
I'm really curious how this person got codeberg pages working, I still haven't managed to get a codeberg page deployed. I thought it required a 3rd party server, like their actions seem to.
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.
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.
It's not less sustainable than most other FOSS projects, it's just that most other FOSS projects also don't have sustainable funding. If you're just comparing the actual implementations this is true of most XMPP stuff as well.
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)
> 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,
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.
> I'm really curious how this person got codeberg pages working, I still haven't managed to get a codeberg page deployed. I thought it required a 3rd party server, like their actions seem to.
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.
Hosting costs makes sense (though last check ours only really pegs out at 4gb, granted that's with about 100 logins).
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.
XMPP has threading at a protocol level, just like Matrix (and it has since the early days). I'm only aware of one or two apps that implement it though, and I'm not really sure why that is (maybe it's just a lot of old-school developers who like older IM clients? Unclear.). I really like the way the Cheogram app does this (it's XMPP under the hood) and am hopeful that other clients will see the way they've done it and start adopting it.
Matrix.org (and Element) is running out of money and hosts a large number of free users. The rest of the community probably won't be able to handle the influx of users the day the Matrix.org homeserver needs to close.
That's the usecase of Matrix As IRC I guess you mean? I've never participated in any matrix.org rooms outside of the matrix / synapse / element support rooms (I believe they're on matrix.org). For our community it's kind of moot if matrix.org closes, the only downside is of course support will drop off precipitously. But other than that, we self host.
I mean in the sense that IRC as a community and support hub for certain things like various Linux distros, other Foss projects etc, shifted away from irc to other tools like discourse or matrix.
Rooms in Matrix are hosted on every server who participates in them - just because the alias is #somewhere:matrix.org doesn’t mean that if matrix.org goes down the room disappears.
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.
> 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
Author here, and it's quite similar in India. Everyone expects me to WhatsApp them the details, and the ubiquity of proprietary platforms is infuriating. Thankfully we've been able to use cell calls and SMS/email until we can onboard them to XMPP. (Many of us in the Delhi OSM community are free software and XMPP advocates.)
Note, I'm very sympathetic to not wanting to use proprietary platforms in general [0], but I'm not at a point in my life where I can spend any brain glucose at all on it.
[0] in particular because of the plight of the umbrella protestors in Hong Kong and the government's infiltration of coordination platforms
Matrix only recently started adopting an (as of now) experimental protocol that allows purging older parts of the append-only data set that constitutes a channel.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
To add to this, not everyone needs to pursue the same kind of work. As a more experienced mapper I make a point of allocating my time toward what I think of as “scaffolding” tasks that enable others’ mobile contributions—geometry, wide area edits, alignment, navigational references, model clarification, or anything that might trigger new quests in StreetComplete or declutter formidable ones. It’s gratifying to have exposed new opportunities for mobile contributions and see the questers begin filling them in.
What do you recommend to beginners for mapping in the field? Walk around with a laptop? Or just notes on paper for later data entry?
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)
The easiest thing people can do these days is to take georeferenced photographs with their phones, best with a photo app that will record the direction the phone was pointing, for example OpenCamera on Android. Then take their time and then add the information either with iD (the javascript based editor on openstreetmap.org) on a desktop (or JOSM if they are savy enough), or on either of the mobile editors, but most importantly sitting down in peace and quiet.
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.
> point people to the editor on openstreetmap.org, not any of the mobile or "simplified" editing
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.
I wonder if it would be possible to use a fine-tuned LLaVA 1.6 along with the GPS/phone orientation and reference tape measure etc. in images collected via app. I think if you can cover from multiple directions and aggregate the data effectively it could be pretty efficient.
Not saying it's easy but I want to believe that a fine tuned open vision model can do a lot.
Pokemon go already is based on OpenStreetMap. And yes, a few OSM-contributors started because a park was missing and they thus lacked a spawnpoint for pokemons.
But we've also head plenty of teens adding fake data to have pokemons in their front garden. To much gamification hurts.
Thanks! Niantec started as a startup within Google's startup incubator and thus used Google Maps in the very beginning. However, they got 'spun out' and when the price became to expensive, they switched to OSM anno 2017.
I went to a State of the Map conference in Antwerp last year. For me it was fascinating, and not my normal type of crowd. A couple of things stuck out to me though.
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.
First OSM existed and was already quite good many years before we got access to Bing imagery (2010). Undoubtedly there was a big boost in some types of mapping due to a reasonable quality global imagery source being available, mainly buildings, but it isn't as if we couldn't have continued without it.
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.
Depends where you go. Around here the local government provides aerial imagery as a public service and it’s higher quality than Microsoft’s.
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.
While true that Yahoo and then Bing has been important there are many other free sources of satellite imagery now days. OSM did not have access to imagery for quite a few years, so it possible without them, and also quite a lot more fun.
It would be handy to give street mappers some sort of defense tool from dogs. Like air horn, sticks or maybe peper spray. India has a huge problem with packs of wild street dogs, that regularly attack and kill people. It is dangerous to roam on streets you do not know very well.
> 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.
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...
This kind of applies to following existing OSM maps. I did a “walk every street in my city” thing a year ago, and some of the “streets” are very much private property and not public pathways.
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.