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 Pressereported > 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 their main takeaways after 1 month into OpenStreetMap. Future updates will be on Github > .
François Lacombe posted > 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 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.
Cristoffswrote 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 (/), as an aid for refugees and as an experiment for future applications. More can be found about AdV projects at basemap.de > 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 > about the Arte series Europe, a disrupted continent 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 > a series of maps comparing humans and different livestock populations in French departments using data > from the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (Insee).