The next public OSMF board meeting will take place on Thursday, 10 December 2020, at 5.00 PM (GMT) with some interesting items – Treasurer’s report, attribution guidelines, conflict of interest policy for Working Groups, and Brexit update.
The reworked proposal electricity=*is open for voting, and ends Tuesday 15 December.
Mapping
François presented a heat map and a new styling for indoor tags, and makes some recommendations for better indoor mapping.
And another tenth birthday – Happy birthday Potlatch 2.
The Portuguese delegation of Médecins Sans Frontières held its first online Mapathon in Portugal on 24 November. User NunoMASAzevedo gives a report > of the event in a post in his diary.
User Espen’s proposal, later adopted by ZeLonewolf, to tag hazard=* for a potential source of damage to health, life, property, or any other interest of value is open for comment.
Jeroen Hoek’s and Supaplex’s proposal for parking=street_side, for tagging areas suitable, or designated for, parking which are directly adjacent to the carriageway of a road and can be reached directly from the roadway without having to use an access way, has been approved. The parking=street_side feature page is here.
Brian Sperlongano’s (user ZeLonewolf) proposal for the tag boundary=special_economic_zone to map Special Economic Zones has been approved.
Community
k3ninho expresses his concerns about the oversized interest of the big players Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft in OpenStreetMap. In this context it is interesting to note that two of the companies contacted have expressed their concerns and one of them is also represented by a candidate for the OSMF board.
Alexander Zipf analysed how much local information is captured in OpenStreetMap data, which can be an indicator of data quality. In addition to the blogpost a Jupyter Notebook is available to generate an interactive map and plots for regions of your choice.
Marcel Reinmuth explored Indian healthcare facilities mapped in OpenStreetMap and analyses health-related imports.
Jean-Marc Liotier, currently a candidate in the OSMF board election, uses a clever pun to explain where OSM fits into economic theory. He uses this to identify some aspects of OSM which clearly require fundamental support and protection by the OSMF.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
The OSMF has published the minutes of the OSMF 19 November Board Meeting.
These are the answers of the 2020 OSMF board election candidates to the official questions created by our election facilitator, Michael Collinson. Voting is already in progress.
Tobias Knerr (user Tordanik) is running > for re-election to the OSMF board and reflects on his work so far.
Michal Migurski, working for Facebook, writes on his blog why he is running for the OSMF board and offers an online audio-video chat (‘office hour’) on 9 December for an hour from 4.00 PM (GMT) to answer questions.
Simon Poole discussed the proposed amendment to the OSMF Articles of Association (AOA) regarding Board sub-committees and explains why he will not be supporting it.
Christoph Hormann reflected (part 1) / (part 2) on the OSMF changes during the past year and what they mean for the future.
Humanitarian OSM
Laurent Savaëte, a co-developer of MapSwipe, is encouraging people to join and contribute to the Missing Maps Project.
Maps
AnyGIS allows you to download specialised raster maps directly to your smartphone and use them without access to the Internet. Menus in and .
Jacek Czapla has made some suggestions as to how to reduce the size of an OSM file before use in an application. His approach uses the –tag-filter option of Osmosis to retain only the road network and buildings.
Software
OpenStreetCam is now KartaView. The name change happened after the OSM Foundation (OSMF) adopted a Trademark Policy discouraging names like OpenStreet-Thing. To support this, the team decided to change the name to KartaView.
Programming
The tagging templates and tag validation rules of iD have been moved to a separate GitHub project called iD Tagging Schema.
Releases
JOSM stable release 17329 was published on 22 November.
With the kind help of Mike, Jiri Vlasak, aka qeef, merged Mike’s JOSM-Scripts into the Mapathoner JOSM plugin. He informed us about it on the HOT mailing list. Mike’s JOSM-Scripts are untouched and can still be run as usual. However, you may now also run the functionality of the scripts directly from the Mapathoner menu.
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