weeklyOSM 539

10/11/2020-16/11/2020

About us

• This week we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the first Weekly OSM Summary. Thanks to Pascal, Jonas, and Dennis, who started the project in November 2010. Alongside number 17 of the German Wochennotiz, Weekly OSM Summary started in the English language, first weekly, later fortnightly until issue 100 in July 2014. Then in October 2014 it was relaunched as a complete translation of Wochennotiz, along with its own branding and website – sponsored for several years by the Archbishop Sentamu Academie, Kingston upon Hull, UK – and synchronised with Wochennotiz numbering. Number 219 was published in English, Spanish, Romanian, Turkish, Japanese and German. Today the website is paid for by FOSSGIS. Today we provide weekly summaries in:  Čeština , Deutsch , English , Español , Français , 日本語 , 한국어 , Polski , Português do Brasil , Português , Русский , Türkçe , Italiano , 台灣中文
• weeklyOSM recently expanded its publishing to 14 languages. Without our content management system OSMBC, designed and developed by TheFive, this would not be possible. Christoph maintains the OSMBC system and our Mattermost service, on servers provided by FOSSGIS. In his blog post, TheFive mentioned: ‘nearly 24k articles. Currently 70 users are listed as editors and nearly 700 are guest users’.We thank FOSSGIS for the financial support, but especially Christoph for the continuous maintenance, constant responsiveness and unswerving development of OSMBC.
• We are looking for volunteers to help us improve our newsletter so we can get it out faster, have more depth and coverage, and generally improve it for our readers, like you.We are currently urgently seeking proofreaders who are native English speakers. So it is not a problem if you are new to OSM, we are looking for your language skills.Please join our team by contacting us now, it’s fun! 😉

Mapping

• Kana Lee reported about the Microsoft Open Maps team’s plan to work on OSM data in Peru, focusing on the road network. More details can be found on GitHub.
• Everywhere She Maps is an activity to support girls and women in mapping for their own security, livelihoods, access, prosperity, and also their participation in innovation and economic capacity. It is an initiative of YouthMappers sponsored by USAID.
• Awesome work by OSM Ireland in mapping Joe Biden’s ancestral town of Ballina, Ireland. If you would like to continue to make Ballina the best mapped place in Ireland, then use this gorgeous taskmanager. (Menus are available in en, fr, pt, pt-br, it and es.)
• Jake Low calls attention, via the tagging mailing list, to his proposal for tagging fire lookouts.
• Janko Mihelić proposed a framework for mapping admission to places which is now open for voting until Thursday 26 November.
• Rouelibre proposed the tag training=bicycle for cycle (repair) shops or other facilities related to cycling that offer instruction in bicycle riding.
• With the outbreak of COVID-19 in March 2020 the German speaking Telegram group started voting on and publishing a weekly mapping focus. Alongside the German version, they recently made an English version of their wiki page available in order to inspire more people to contribute to mapping challenges, which change weekly.’Public Toilets’ are the current ‘Weekly Focus’. Please enter your own ideas in the ‘Focus Idea Depot’ and vote on them in the Telegram group ‘OSM de’.

Community

• Dan Stowell, Jack Kelly, and others have published, in the electronic journal Nature Scientific Data, their curated open data for solar power in the UK. The data are based on OSM, and this publication represents a significant milestone for the OSM-UK community project to map rooftop solar power. On 13 November 2020 the project itself reached a notional 33% completion mark compared with the national FIT (Feed-in tariff) open data set.
• OSMF Board member Rory McCann provided an October update on his OSM-related activities.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Nuno Caldeira has noticed that most of the candidates for the upcoming OSM Foundation board elections have less than 15% of active mapping days.
• Dermot McNally interviewed Allan Mustard while he mapped buildings in Ireland as part of #buildingsIreland project and talked about his origins in mapping, the role of the Foundation in aiding the creation of the map through funding and employing staff, and the Board’s relationship with corporate sponsors. Rory McCann was also present during the interview.
• Did you know that the monthly board meetings are public and broadcast live on the web? The dates will be published in an OSS calendar.

Humanitarian OSM

• HOT has opened up registration for the sixth annual Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit. The Summit has the theme ’10 Years of Humanitarian OpenStreetMap: The Past, Present and Future of Humanitarian Mapping’ and is open to the whole humanitarian mapping community.

Maps

• [1] A ‘Ghost Bike’ is a memorial for a cyclist who died in a traffic accident, in the form of a white bicycle permanently placed near the accident location. On this map, you can see all of the ghost bikes known by OpenStreetMap, add new ones and upload photos. Menus on the website are available in , and .
• An OSM contributor from Montreal noticed an interesting historic cycling map of Montreal from 1897.

switch2OSM

• Switch2OSM now includes a manual on how to install, set up and configure all the necessary software to operate your own tile server on Debian Linux 11, even though this (stable) release is not due until at least next year.

Open Data

• Julien de Labaca reports > on Norwegian activities to provide and process standardised European traffic information data.

Software

• Denis Peshekhonov and Grigory Frantsuzov have used OSM data to create a VK app for those who like exploring the neighbourhood. The app suggests a random POI within walking distance and gives ‘achievements’ to those who keep visiting new points.

Programming

• The Freehand Drawing Utility ‘The Sandbox’ permits adding waypoint markers and tracks on a new layer over one of a lot of available map backgrounds and then downloading the drawn layer as plain text, GPX, or Google Earth KML.
• Jennings Anderson demonstrated, in his blog, how to work with the weekly updated OSM data available as open datasets on Amazon Web Services. For example, he queries OSM changesets using Amazon Athena (PrestoDB).
• An interactive (password protected) beta of the developer documentation for Osmose-QA is now available. It can be used to learn how Osmose’s backend works and helps in modifying or adding new validation rules.

Did you know …

• … there is a list of films, movies, or TV series that are either about OpenStreetMap, use OpenStreetMap, or give credit?
• … you can use Alexander Avtanski’s ‘GPS Visualization Tools‘ for visualising recorded GPS tracks?
• … the quiz in which you are presented with a shape and have to guess which country? Arun Ganesh, from Mapbox, has developed the quiz using OSS Svelte and it is based on OSM data (water and place labels, but not the boundaries) and Wikidata. The source code is available on GitHub. The boundaries are from Mapbox and are a combination of proprietary and (non-OSM) open data.

OSM in the media

• Berlin police used an OSM map in a tweet to show the evacuation area imposed after a World War II bomb was found.

Other “geo” things

• People around Philadelphia are continuing to add businesses around the city. Nothing unusual about that you might think. This one, however, has been in the news recently. More details here.
• Arizona University is currently seeking a PhD student for a funded research assistantship, via a NASA Funded LCLUC (Land-Cover/Land-Use Change) Grant, to start in August 2021, mapping clandestine infrastructure (airstrips and roads) in protected areas of Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Online	2020 Pista ng Mapa	2020-11-13-2020-11-27
Online	Missing Maps Mapathon Bratislava #10	2020-11-19
Online	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2020	2020-11-20
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)	2020-11-23
Derby	Derby pub meetup	2020-11-24
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-11-24
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch [1]	2020-11-25
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon	2020-12-01
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch (online)	2020-12-02
online	HOT Virtual Summit (online)	2020-12-04
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #23	2020-12-07
Michigan	Michigan Online Meetup	2020-12-07
Heidelberg	Mannheimer Mapathons e.V. – Int’l. Mapathon (online)	2020-12-08
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-12-08
Munich	Münchner Treffen	2020-12-10

Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM. Please check your event in our public calendar preview and correct it, where appropriate.

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, NunoMASAzevedo, PierZen, Polyglot, rogehm, SK53, Sammyhawkrad, TheSwavu, derFred, richter_fn.