weeklyOSM 620

31/05/2022-06/06/2022

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OSMCha with a new feature funded by Wikimedia Italy [1] © OSMCha | map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

Mapping campaigns

  • It is with great sadness that we learnt of the sudden death of Innocent Dibloni Soungalo, an OSM contributor from Burkina Faso. A geographer by training and a geomatician by profession, a former volunteer of the Francophonie in Senegal, Innocent had worked hard to strengthen OpenStreetMap in West Africa since his debut in 2015. From Cotonou to Dakar, via Ouagadougou, Bamako, Lomé or Bouaké, many people have benefited from his teachings and will mourn him. In his memory, the African OSM community has decided to map Gaoua, his home town.
  • Christoffs reported that OSM Poland (OSMP) has recently established contacts with the blind community in Poland. This has identified their special needs and the potential for OSM support. The next step is to encourage contributors to pay special attention when mapping to tags that support the mobility of blind people.

Mapping

  • French news agency Agence France Presse reported (fr) > en about the colossal work of a volunteer team in Ukraine that is scanning buildings deemed of interest at a 5 mm resolution, both for historical and future rebuilding purposes. Similar methods had been used for the Notre-Dame de Paris’ cathedral in France, before the 2019 fire.
  • Franjo Lukezic wrote a guide to making before-and-after GIFs for visualising OpenStreetMap editing sessions.
  • The vote on the improved tagging of neighbourhood places (place=*) in Japan is open until Thursday 16 June.

Community

  • French mapper Djiril shared (fr) their main takeaways after 1 month into OpenStreetMap. Future updates will be on Github (fr) > en.
  • François Lacombe posted (fr) > en a call, on LinkedIn, asking for data about communications and power poles in France. Following a partnership between OpenStreetMap France and Enedis, the main French electric power distribution company, more than one million of the estimated total of 24 million poles have been mapped.
  • The UN Mapper of the month for June is Yacouba Diarra, from Mali, a member of YouthMappers UnivSegou.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

  • The OSMF Board intends to change the requirements to become a normal foundation member to include that people must have edited on a minimum of 15 days first, and first registered as a mapper at least 3 months ago. The announcement triggered a lengthy discussion on osmf-talk which is still ongoing. Mikel Maron has summarised what is proposed here.
  • Cristoffs wrote an open letter to the OSMF board, as a diary entry (following on from this issue), which attracted considerable comment, including from the EWG, who commented here, and indirectly from the repository author, here. The key request was that the style ought to reflect community requests for the display of new tags regardless of cartographic issues, and that the OSMF board (who currently don’t directly mandate what that style shows) should make that happen, due to the special status that the ‘standard’ style has (rendered by OSM itself, cached by Fastly, etc.). Topics covered also included the behaviour of style authors (and how issues there should be reported).
  • The OSMF Engineering Working Group has commissioned Jochen Topf to write a report outlining the problems with the current OSM data model, their impact on OSM systems, and possible improvements. Steve Coast, founder of OSM, responded by saying that there is nothing to fix. If the discussion on Y Combinator is any guide, this is not a truth universally acknowledged.

Events

  • The State of the Map Working Group is happy to announce that tickets and the programme are now accessible through the SotM 2022 website.

OSM research

  • You can now find out about the four accepted student projects for the Google Summer of Code 2022.

Humanitarian OSM

  • The HOT unSummit is offering travel funding for active HOT and humanitarian open mapping / open data contributors and community members to attend two of the conferences that they are supporting; FOSS4G and SOTM.

Maps

  • The AdV working group Smart Mapping has developed a bilingual map ((uk)/(de)), as an aid for refugees and as an experiment for future applications. More can be found about AdV projects at basemap.de (de) > en and AdV Smart Mapping.
  • Andy Townsend (SomeoneElse) wrote a diary entry describing the recent style changes visible on the map here including the use of colours to differentiate tourist and mainline railway stations, locked gates, and better roadside cycleway and footpath name handling. Mostly these are done using lua tag transforms to keep the styling code simple.

switch2OSM

  • Big Tech’s maps have led ride-sharing giant Grab astray. Grab is now building its own maps based on OSM and says it has become the largest contributor to OpenStreetMap in Southeast Asia.

Open Data

  • Cristiano Giovando wrote about the current state of affairs with OpenAerialMap version 2.

Software

  • OSMCha now allows users to search changesets that affect a certain OSM tag. For example: you can find changesets that created, modified or deleted restaurants. For more details, see the Development Seed blog post.
  • OsmAnd invites you to celebrate 12 years with OsmAnd! You can share a photo with your trip story on Instagram with the hashtag #12YearsOsmAnd; OsmAnd will choose the best and award a prize.
  • Sammyhawkrad built a simple tool to help OpenStreetMap contributors see statistics of their most common editing issues as flagged by Osmose.

Releases

  • Eugene Kizevich outlined what’s new in version 4.2 of OsmAnd for Android. Besides an adaptation of the map style, new quick actions and recording widgets, the ‘OSM Mapper assistant’ option was split into separate options: fixme tags,note tags, icons at low zooms, and waterway tunnels.

OSM in the media

  • French dataviz company WeDoData tweeted (fr) > en about the Arte series Europe, a disrupted continent (fr) episode on people-driven solutions to European transportation issues. They explain how they used OpenStreetMap to fetch the bicycle network at a continental scale and computed its evolution since 2014.

Other “geo” things

  • Jules Grandin has made (fr) > en a series of maps comparing humans and different livestock populations in French departments using data (fr) > en from the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (Insee).

Upcoming Events

WhereWhatOnlineWhenCountry
NantesState of the Map France 2022 osmcalpic2022-06-10 – 2022-06-12flag
Zürich141. OSM-Stammtisch/Mappingparty osmcalpic2022-06-11flag
臺北市OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #41 osmcalpic2022-06-13flag
WashingtonMappingDC Mappy Hour osmcalpic2022-06-15flag
20095Hamburger Mappertreffen osmcalpic2022-06-14flag
BerlinMissing Maps – GRC Online Mapathon osmcalpic2022-06-14flag
GuadalajaraCurso Gratuito JOSM osmcalpic2022-06-16flag
Arrondissement de ToursLa liberté numérique osmcalpic2022-06-18flag
京都市京都!街歩き!マッピングパーティ:第31回 妙法院 osmcalpic2022-06-18flag
新店區OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團 #2 三峽-大溪踏查 osmcalpic2022-06-19flag
OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting osmcalpic2022-06-20
ArlonEPN d’Arlon – Atelier ouvert OpenStreetMap – Initiation osmcalpic2022-06-21flag
San JoseSouth Bay Map Night osmcalpic2022-06-22flag
152. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn osmcalpic2022-06-21
City of NottinghamOSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online) osmcalpic2022-06-21flag
TeachOSM Map-Along osmcalpic2022-06-22
LüneburgLüneburger Mappertreffen (online) osmcalpic2022-06-21flag
WashingtonOpenStreetMap US Mappy Hour osmcalpic2022-06-23flag
DüsseldorfDüsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen osmcalpic2022-06-24flag
IJmuidenOSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online) osmcalpic2022-06-25flag
Tanzania Mapping Groups June Mapathon osmcalpic2022-06-25
ArlonEPN d’Arlon – Atelier ouvert OpenStreetMap – Contribution osmcalpic2022-06-28flag
[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting osmcalpic2022-06-30
Essen17. OSM-FOSSGIS-Communitytreffen osmcalpic2022-07-01 – 2022-07-03flag

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Sammyhawkrad, SomeoneElse, Strubbl, TheSwavu, derFred, erenozdemir.