Suddenly StreetComplete is back again in the PlayStore, but earlier … Google removed StreetComplete from the Play Store last week. Google claimed that the app was not compliant with its policy for the background location permission, a permission it apparently does not even request! Tobias Zwick contacted Google support about the mistake immediately, but after more than a week, he was still waiting for a reply. Vespucci developer Simon Poole commented on Reddit that he had also experienced a similar Kafkaesque situation with Google Play in November. With some sage advice from Simon the StreetComplete developers have managed to create a version that Google Play deems acceptable. If the issue reoccurs the app can always be downloaded from F-Droid and directly from GitHub.
Mapping campaigns
User jinalfoflia is inviting new and experienced mappers to a bunch of new Philippines-based MapRoulette challenges — feedback and suggestions are welcome!
FLOSSK hosted [sq] > , at the Prishtina Hackerspace, an award ceremony for students with the most contributions to OpenStreetMap as part of the project ‘After School Support for Teens’ (ASSET), run by Kosovo Education Center (KEC). Sixteen mapathons were held as part of this project and the five winning students have made 7706 edits in total. FLOSSK has actively contributed to this project’s activities.
The Swiss OSM Chapter, SwissOSM, launched the activity ‘Project of the Month CH’ inspired by the French Project-du-Mois and the German ‘Focus of the Week’. The first Project of the Month (PotM) in June is about mapping schools. The trilingual website (DE, FR, EN) for PotM is still under construction.
Mapping
A local mapper and an international expert in urban transport shared their points of view about Trufi having mapped Nouakchott’s public transport network. Overall, the association added 59 routes, 454 stops, and 1987 points of interest from 24,000 street-level photographs to the capital of Mauritania.
Voting on the proposal reusable_packaging=* has finished and was approved with 13 votes for, 1 vote against and 1 abstention.
Until 14 June the voting is still running for man_made=stupa, a Buddhist dome-shaped structure with a spire on top originally built to contain relics.
Community
Geospatial company Geolonia > has published > a blog post introducing OpenStreetMap.
New user Fiftyfour wrote a detailed post about their first six weeks as OSM mapper: deciding what features to map, discovering tools and data sources, interacting with the community, tagging businesses consistently, and the non-obvious task of picking the most appropriate tag for a given feature.
LySioSS blogged > about the journey from an unmapped place to a detailed picture of La Vallée des Tortues, a small animal park in Sorède France, and shows a before and after animation.
Martijn van Exel asked his OpenStreetMap Monday question, which was ‘What have you always wondered about in OSM, but been too afraid to ask?’
raphaelmirc wrote > , in his diary, about the registration of the first Brazilian OSM mapper Claudomiro in February 2006.
Wikimedia Italia’s microgrants are open. You can apply for a microgrant to fund activities which require a small economic contribution (up to EUR 1000). The microgrants are also open to people who are not associated with Wikimedia Italia. You need to apply using this page > , where you will also find more information.
The Annual General Meeting of the OSM France association will take place > online on Saturday, June 12 at 2:30 pm using BigBlueButton. Don’t forget the week before (7 to 11 June) there will be the ‘mini-SotM online 2021‘ which will end on Friday. From 9 pm on Friday there will be a friendly evening hosted by Captain Moustache, who will offer us a quiz to test our knowledge.
Maps
Vincent Aulnay created > a map of Airbnb offerings in France. Although ubiquitous across the country, the map reveals the distribution of the company’s network is mainly driven by coastal areas, ski resorts and big cities.
Christoph Hormann is exploring, in a (so far) two-part series, how the OSM-Carto style could be extended to, amongst other things, render unpaved roads, show the width and lane numbers of roads, roadside pavements, cycle tracks, turning loops and more.
‘River runner’, by Sam Learner, lets you place a rain droplet anywhere over the United States and shows you an animation of its path to the sea.
Open Data
French startup Acceslibre is looking > to exchange data with OpenStreetMap. The collaborative platform, launched in early 2020, allows any public establishment’s manager to provide accessibility information for one or more places. They estimate the number of establishments at 1.2 million for 12 million French people with a disability.
Software
furrysalamander has released, on GitHub, the ‘mini-map-maker’, a tool for automatically generating 3D printable STL files from freely available lidar data.
Sayana Saithu explained how the Atlas Checks framework, a quality assurance tool for programmatically detecting OSM mapping errors, works.
MapComplete is searching for translators. Do you want MapComplete in your language? Head over to Hosted Weblate and submit your new translations there!
Programming
Bike Ottawa have built ‘stress model’ software to analyse a road network and report on its cycling potential based on Level of Traffic Stress ratings.
User qeef carried out load testing on their Divide and Map. Now. server, simulating mapping sessions with respectively 100 and 200 mappers. Check out the diary entry for more details, graphs and configuration tweaks.
Releases
Organic Maps is now available in F-Droid and Google Play and is in beta on Apple AppStore. The MAPS.ME fork offers fast offline maps of all the cities of the world including POIs.
… the OpenStreetMap plugin for Blender? Particularly impressive are the building models, which you may have expected to just be extrusions of their footprints, but actually have some decent details on them.
… the OSM Bike Ottawa Tagging Guide? It’s a great resource for all those questions you have about tagging bike infrastructure.
… the cartographic result of the project ‘Notre histoire compte‘ (‘Our story counts’) > in Geneva? Queer Code and Lestime have collected memories of LGBTQI places and events and recorded them using uMap and in a printable PDF.
OSM in the media
Spiegel Netzweltcompared > outdoor apps that make navigation and route planning easier. Whether the mountains are calling in summer or your bike is saddled, with Komoot, Outdooractive, BRouter and OsmAnd there will be an app for navigation and route planning.
Other “geo” things
The city of Frankfurt wants > to move forward in terms of a urban digitisation strategy with a new map system, Maps, with a wide range of information about traffic connections, climate or surrounding daycare centres that can now be accessed via the geoportal.
LEGO has released a world map made from 11,695 LEGO bricks, weighing in at just over 4 kg.
Florence Broderick and Dr Ramsey Faragher, founder and CEO of Focal Point Positioning, organised a webinar that discussed the future of indoor mapping and the role that next generation GPS technology could play in a range of indoor use cases, along with a demo of an indoor solution used in shopping centres across Europe.
“StreetComplete no longer only available on F-Droid or GitHub” is not correct I think the title was supposed to tell us that its no longer available on Google play and only on fdroid and github for the time being. At least thats what the translation says in the german version of the article
““StreetComplete no longer only available on F-Droid or GitHub” is not correct”
Why it is not correct? It is back also on Google-controlled app store.
“StreetComplete no longer only available on F-Droid or GitHub” is not correct
I think the title was supposed to tell us that its no longer available on Google play and only on fdroid and github for the time being.
At least thats what the translation says in the german version of the article
““StreetComplete no longer only available on F-Droid or GitHub” is not correct”
Why it is not correct? It is back also on Google-controlled app store.