22/10/2026-28/10/2026

Mapping

• Andy Mabbett has proposed a tagging scheme for the concrete arrows and illuminated beacon towers along the historic US Transcontinental Airway System. These physical navigation aids were built to guide early airmail pilots. Concrete arrows were enormous arrows painted or laid out on the ground, often on hilltops or open land, pointing pilots towards the next route segment. Beacon towers were tall structures equipped with powerful lights that helped pilots follow the route at night.

• LordGarySugar is proposing the tags flat_ride=track and water_ride=track so that, in the case of flat rides and water rides, the track can be distinguished from the ride area. Currently, attraction=log_flume is used for both, meaning that renderers cannot interpret the tag on paths. The tag attraction:part=* is intended to identify components such as stations and platforms, whilst a site=attraction relation is intended to link all parts of an attraction. The discussion is taking place on the OSM Community forum.

Community

• rtnF has analysed the diversity of addr:neighbourhood values in Indonesia.

• simaransharma has been adding and fixing temple map data in Surat, Gujarat, and is currently looking for other mappers in Gujarat who are also interested in mapping temples.

Local chapter news

• OSM US published another instalment of their Mapper Highlight series, which highlights mappers, projects, and OSM communities. This October, they interviewed William Edmisten (aka wcedmisten), a Virginia mapper who recently mapped every hospital network in the United States and kept invested followers updated on the OSM US Slack.

Events

• As part of its Gender Programme, the Unique Mappers Network hosted a virtual breast cancer awareness and geospatial education event on Friday 23 October. The theme was ‘Every Story Is Unique, Every Journey Matters’. It covered breast cancer awareness, prevention, early detection, and the importance of seeking medical advice. It also looked at the role of open mapping in community health awareness.

• The organisers of the fifth State of the Map Nigeria have postponed their conference from 10 to 13 November to 17 to 20 November 2026, as the University of Uyo has scheduled its graduation ceremony for 9 to 14 November. The venue remains the Town Campus of the University of Uyo in Akwa Ibom State, and the theme remains ‘Open Geospatial Innovation for Climate Action and Community Resilience’. The programme includes workshops, specialist talks on GeoAI, OpenStreetMap, citizen science, and climate action, as well as networking opportunities. Further information can be found on the conference website.

• The Asociación OpenStreetMap España is hosting ‘SotMes 2026’ at the TomTom offices in Madrid on 6 and 7 November. This free gathering of the Spanish OSM community combines talks with an ‘unconference’. Anyone interested can register .

Maps

• The Cunning Conquests Atlas is a free resource containing interactive maps of an ever-growing library of journeys. It was built with coastline data from OpenStreetMap and was released on 17 October. You can also watch the videos on YouTube with detailed legends.

• Proton built a web map where you can look up any ZIP code in the US and find how many surveillance devices (flock cameras) are near your home. The device locations on this Flock camera map come from independent research by cybersecurity researcher Joshua Michael.

• vetsurgeo launched The Church Atlas, a free map of more than 3,000 churches in 18 languages, using OpenStreetMap data, with Wikidata and Wikipedia providing addresses, summaries, and photos. He also shared the lessons learned about church tagging in a diary entry.

• rpollock has published Walkably, a map showing pedestrian-friendliness across 31 European countries, based on OpenStreetMap data. Each hexagonal cell that intersects a road is assigned a score for the walkability of everyday destinations and for road quality (traffic, noise, shade in summer, main roads, gradient). An OSM blog post documented the checks made against census data. The full methodology is explained on the project page.

OSM in action

• ^[1] Jiri Podhorecky worked on the graphic design and cartographic preparation of a printed tourist map of Prague, built directly on up-to-date OpenStreetMap data.

• copilot.travel developed a dynamic map that shows each European capital claiming territory on the basis of the nationality of the first car to reach surrounding places, using typical road speeds and including ferries.

Software

• Chris Debian has developed PillarPoint, an open-source Android app for people who find, visit, and record British trigonometrical points (trigs) and Ordnance Survey benchmarks. For each trig the app checks whether OSM already has a matching survey point and flags any OSM node that is some distance from the recorded station location.

• GeoDesk released GOL Tool 2.5, adding support for incremental updates to keep local copies of OpenStreetMap data up to date.

• Martin Faust has built Rücksitzhelden, a free app for families on long car journeys that shows ► attractions and family-friendly restaurants along the route using OpenStreetMap data.

• Axel Piepgras has developed ► rueckenwind, an iPhone bicycle navigation app powered by OpenStreetMap data.

• The well-known ‘Strava Slide’ algorithm, which allows drawn routes to be automatically adapted to and optimised for the Strava heatmap, is now available both as a browser extension ‘strava-heatmap-extension’ for Chrome and Firefox, or a JOSM plugin ‘josm-strava-tracer’. This tool allows the geometry of routes to be captured much more quickly and accurately based on aggregated GNSS tracks.

• Ukrainian developers Vladyslav and Daryna Shinkarenko have developed Орієнтир, an iOS navigation app that works without GNSS. Instead, the app uses smartphone sensors to estimate the car’s speed and turns. It also offers offline maps of the whole of Ukraine, powered by OpenStreetMap data.

• Victor explained how OsmAnd’s new search engine, built from scratch and recently released in version 5.5, works.

Programming

• anthaas described how he automated marking small tasks, related to the Ebola campaign in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as done in the HOT Tasking Manager using JOSM and the TM API.

Releases

• HeiGIT has introduced a new openrouteservice web client, which replaces the two previous route planners. This article explains the new features, current limitations, and what users need to know before the old clients and deprecated API URL are shut down on 16 November.

Did you know that …

• … the Magic Earth navigation app is based on OpenStreetMap data? It offers turn-by-turn navigation, offline maps, and speed camera alerts for iPhone, iPad, and Android; navigation is free, whilst additional features are available via a freemium model. The source code is not open. mobilsicher.de tested the Magic Earth navigation app back in 2019 and gave ► it a positive review (we reported earlier).

Other “geo” things

• Geografías acuáticas: espacios de conectividad y sociabilidad, edited by Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos and Flor Trejo Rivera and published by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, demonstrates how aquatic environments, rather than being peripheral or serving as spaces that separate societies, should be viewed as settings for diverse forms of connectivity, and within which forms of social interaction were also established that are, in fact, of great significance in a region such as this, where bodies of water deserve greater attention.

• Sven-Erik Volberg posted a map of the approximate historical boundaries of the larger European states (those with an area over 100,000 square kilometres). The map covers around 1500 years from 500 CE.

• The Direção-Geral do Território has announced ► the ‘XVII Jornadas Ibéricas de Infraestruturas de Dados Espaciais’ (Iberian Conference on Spatial Data Infrastructure), to be held from 11 to 13 November in Porto, Portugal. Those interested can register ► now.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
🇲🇽	Ciudad de México	Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso	State of the Map Latam 2026	2026-10-27 - 2026-10-29
🇨🇭	Rapperswil-Jona	OST RJ Gebäude 6, Rapperswil	20. Mapathon & Mapping Party Rapperswil 2026	2026-10-30
🇮🇹	Pesaro	Biblioteca-Archivio “Vittorio Bobbato”	Linux Day Pesaro	2026-10-31
🇮🇳	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India - Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-11-01
🇩🇪	Hannover	Kuriosum	Stammtisch	2026-11-02
🇭🇺	Budapest	United Platforms, Fény utca 16.	OSM térképest – 2026 november	2026-11-03
			Missing Maps London Mapathon Beginner Friendly (with Training) (Online) [eng]	2026-11-03
🇨🇭	Bern	Provisorium46	Berner OpenStreetMap-Znacht	2026-11-03
🇩🇪	Stuttgart	Forum 3 Café	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen	2026-11-04
🇫🇷		Bar Le Schmilblik	Rencontre mensuelle des contributeurs Paris sud	2026-11-05
🇪🇸	Madrid	TomTom, Edificio Aqua, Calle Agustín de Foxá 4	State of the Map España 2026 (SotMes 2026)	2026-11-06 - 2026-11-07
🇫🇷	Angers	L’Arrière Train, 3 rue de Frémur, Angers	Angers Rencontre mensuelle OpenStreetMap	2026-11-06
🇦🇹	Salzburg	HTL Itzling	Maker Days Salzburg	2026-11-07
🇮🇹		Angera	Mapathon @ Angera	2026-11-07
🇩🇰	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-11-08
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-11-09
🇹🇼	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #94	2026-11-09
🇺🇸	Salt Lake City	Woodbine Food Hall	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night	2026-11-10
🇩🇪	Hamburg	Voraussichtlich: “Variable”, Karolinenstraße 23	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2026-11-10
🇺🇸	San Jose	Online	South Bay Map Night	2026-11-10
🇬🇧	City of Westminster	The Volunteer pub	London pub meet-up	2026-11-10
🇩🇪		temporärhaus	OSM-Stammtisch Ulm/Neu-Ulm	2026-11-10
			iD Community Chat	2026-11-11
🇩🇪	München	Echardinger Einkehr	Münchner OSM-Treffen	2026-11-11
			OSM US Mappy Hour: Mapping Route 66 Past & Present	2026-11-11
🇮🇳	Kottayam	Kottayam, Kerala	State of the Map Kerala (SoTM Kerala)	2026-11-14 - 2026-11-15
🇮🇪	Dublin	4 Inns Court, Winetavern Street, Dublin, D08 XY00	OpenStreetMap Ireland AGM - 2026	2026-11-14
🇮🇳	New Delhi	South Delhi	OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.34 (South Zone)	2026-11-15

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred, vicksun.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

15/10/2026-21/10/2026

Mapping

• Mateusz Konieczny has proposed bot edits that would remove wall=wall from barrier=wall objects (and nowhere else) and do the same for fitness_station=yes and fitness_station=fitness_station on leisure=fitness_station, crossing=yes on highway=crossing, bollard=yes on barrier=bollard objects.

• Requests for comments have been made for the following proposals:

• Tykayn, aka Baptiste Lemoine, proposes phasing out amenity=hospital in favour of healthcare=hospital. Voting on this is planned to take place from 5 to 19 November.
• HuggeK, PizzaTreeIsland and FairwayMapper want to use type=sport, along with golf=course and golf=tee_markers, to map golf courses with multiple courses and tee-dependent values.

Mapping campaigns

• The Ballerup Municipality announced five new MapRoulette challenges covering all five Danish regions, with nearly 90,000 tasks to help improve OpenStreetMap.

Community

• Four ministries of the Government of Québec have granted explicit authorisation to incorporate their geographical data into OpenStreetMap. The OSM Contributors wiki page contains a link to the authorisations. It should be noted that the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forests limits their authorisation to the dataset explicitly mentioned. Québec contributors subsequently started a discussion on the OSM Community forum to plan the steps for integrating these significant additions of data into OpenStreetMap: reviewing administrative boundaries, integrating address points and buildings, and harmonising street names.

• FooBar99 explained how aerial imagery can be used while offline mapping in JOSM. To do this, he uses the Python tool MapTilesDownloader, which downloads tiles at any zoom level.

• OpenCage interviewed Sofia Pahaoja, creator of Touch Mapper, in the latest of their OpenStreetMap interview series. Touch Mapper uses OpenStreetMap data and 3D printing to create tactile maps for visually impaired people.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OpenStreetMap Foundation announced the election of Craig Allan (26.7%), Gregory Marler (26.4%), Héctor Ochoa Ortiz (25.7%), and Maurizio Napolitano (21.2%) to its board. All four candidates reached the required threshold in the first round and there were 1,656 voters in this election, with 595 ballots cast, of which 580 were valid.

• Craig Allan presented the 2026 Chairperson’s report at the OpenStreetMap Foundation Annual General Meeting, as chair of the OSMF Board. Several other reports and documents were also presented at the meeting, including the 2026 Treasurer’s report by Roland Olbricht, the 2026 Personnel Committee’s report and the minutes of the 2025 Annual General Meeting.

• The OpenStreetMap Ops Team reported that several PHP-based secondary OpenStreetMap services were temporarily offline due to a critical PHP security vulnerability.

Local chapter news

• From 2 to 4 October 2026, FOSSGIS hosted ► the FOSSGIS-OSM Community Meeting at the Linuxhotel in Essen, attended by 25 active members. Topics included association work, a Mapnik-style replica of OpenSeaMap for map printing using print.get-map.org, and an exchange of experiences regarding the Panoramax instance. The results are documented on the wiki.

Events

• Stefan Keller is inviting you to a webinar on enterprise data integration with Apache Hop on 27 October 2026 from 11:00 to 12:00 CET. It is online and free of charge. The webinar will cover the latest version, the current status of the GIS plugins, and two case studies from Glue Software Engineering AG.

• KonGeoS, the conference for geodesy students from the German speaking region, took place at Mainz University of Applied Sciences from 15 to 17 October 2026. At the exhibitors’ forum, FOSSGIS members provided ► information about open-source GIS, OpenStreetMap, and the association.

• Katja Haferkorn reported ► on the Smart Country Convention in Berlin, where FOSSGIS e.V. was represented at the lat/lon GmbH stand in the Open Source Park.

Education

• The Spatial Workflow team have assessed OpenStreetMap data completeness in Washington, DC (US), by comparing OSM’s road network with the Census Bureau’s TIGER roads, analysing building and road growth curves using full OSM history data via the ohsome API, and measuring the completeness of key attributes.

Maps

• The web app atm.gr lists ATMs across Greece on a map and in a searchable list, using OSM amenity=atm data combined with data from the banks and refreshed weekly. Attributes missing in OSM are shown as unknown, which indicates to local mappers where data can be improved.

• The Institute of Geography at the Autonomous University of Mexico maintains a web map of geosites, based on OpenStreetMap and Leaflet. Knowledge of geohistory is essential for promoting its appreciation and fostering its conservation. In this regard, the identification, documentation, and dissemination of geosites help bring the Earth sciences closer to different sectors of society and contribute to a greater understanding of the land and the natural processes that shaped it.

• At efimereuonta-nosokomeia.gr there is an independent free service that shows Greece’s hospitals on a map and in a list, including telephone numbers, directions and details of their Accident and Emergency departments. The map is based on OpenStreetMap, and the list works even without an internet connection. No registration is required, and a separate page shows which hospitals are on call today. For emergencies, the home page provides direct links to the numbers 166 (EKAB) and 112.

• MapQuest has added a Halloween-themed Surveillance layer to their Android and iOS applications based on OSM man_made=surveillance data.

• OsmAnd has updated its terrain maps and contour lines for the United States, Canada, and Mexico, using high-resolution national elevation data from the USGS, NRCan, and INEGI. The new data has about a 10 m resolution in the mainland US and about 30 m in Alaska and most of Canada and Mexico, so smaller ridges and steeper cliffs are now visible.

OSM in action

• Jan Kryšpín has launched North Up Daily, a daily map puzzle in which you have to reorient 16 rotated map tiles so that roads and rivers line up correctly, and then guess the location. The game is free to play and requires no account. If you want more, you can practise as much as you like in practice mode or compete on the leaderboard. The map data is sourced from OpenStreetMap.

Software

• Geocracia, a Brazilian news portal, released its AI prompt (beta version) but there is no OpenStreetMap attribution, even after contacting the developer about this problem.

• In episode 313 of the Freakshow podcast, Tim Pritlove introduced ► Kugelblitz, a 3D globe browser ► for macOS that uses various data sources, including Sentinel-2 Cloudless, NASA Blue Marble, Earth at Night, Natural Earth, Mapterhorn, and OpenStreetMap.

• Ratafuel is a free, open-source Android app that helps you find the cheapest fuel nearby in France. It combines open data on fuel prices with OpenStreetMap data on petrol stations. You can filter stations by fuel type, search for them in a selected town, and open a route in a sat-nav app. Ratafuel contains no adverts or trackers; access to your location is optional.

• Stadia Maps explained that a recent update pays closer attention to land cover processing and presentation in the Alidade Bright, Outdoors, and Stamen Terrain map styles.

• Gigazine explained how to use Vespucci, a free, full-featured mobile app for editing OpenStreetMap data.

Programming

• ^[1] Adam Lucke has developed FreeNauticalChart.net, an open-sourced and open-data project that aims to provide free nautical charts.

• Sarah Hoffmann reported that OpenStreetMap has not yet decided whether or not to participate in GSoC 2027. Students are advised not to get involved in projects before the participation announcement in March 2027, when OpenStreetMap’s participation will be confirmed.

Releases

• Simon Legner has released Maplair 4.0.0, an open-source JavaScript library for interactive maps, forked from Leaflet. It integrates features that previously required plugins or workarounds in Leaflet applications, including map rotation, fullscreen mode, search, heatmaps, a minimap, and legends.

• Rphyrin released version 26.10.16 of whathappened.here, a social check-in and review application built on OpenStreetMap. This update added shareable permalinks for user and location pages.

• Tobias Zwick has released StreetComplete version 64.0, which is the first stable iOS version of this editor. It may take some time for the app to become available in the App Store.

Did you know that …

• Daniel Schep has presented OSM Kids! at the SotM 2026 Lightning Talks. The talk was previously given at Mapping USA 2026 (we reported earlier).

OSM in the media

• Jakub Waller’s Papamap was featured on German Televison channel NDR.

• Chase DiBenedetto, of Mashable, explained how commuters can avoid Flock cameras using MapQuest, a navigation app launched in 1996. Its recently introduced ‘Surveillance Layer’ allows users to locate nearby Flock cameras and other surveillance systems. According to MapQuest’s terms, the data comes from OpenStreetMap contributors.

Other “geo” things

• The Regional Court of Frankfurt am Main has ruled , in a judgment that is not yet final , that Google is prohibited from publishing 3D images of a residential property. German case law on the matter is inconsistent, as the Regional Court of Itzehoe reached a different decision in a similar case in 2020.

• Before dominating the oceans with its fleets, Portugal legally built ► its right to navigate them, conquer them, and exclude its rivals. From the pontifical legitimacy of the Portuguese monarchy to the bulls of the 15th century and the Treaty of Tordesillas, the political and legal foundations of the mare clausum transformed the ocean into a space of sovereignty and overseas expansion.

• In his newsletter, Mapas Milhaud, Miguel García Álvarez presented ► twelve browser-based geography games. These included WorldGuessr (guessing locations using Street View), TimeGuessr (estimating the location and year a photo was taken), Worldle (recognising countries from their silhouettes) and Travle (naming countries as a chain of connections). His personal favourite is GeoGrid, in which you fill in a 3×3 grid.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
🇮🇳	Ernakulam	Edapally, Kochi	Kochi Mapping Party 2026	2026-10-24 - 2026-10-25
🇮🇹	Pordenone	Consorzio Universitario Pordenone	Linux Day a Pordenone	2026-10-24
🇮🇹	Bologna	Liceo Copernico di Bologna	Linux Day 2026 a Bologna	2026-10-24
🇮🇹	Parma	Officine On/Off Parma	Linux Day 2026 Parma	2026-10-24
🇫🇷		Inclu K’fé	Cartopartie à Orx	2026-10-24
🇮🇹		Biblioteca comunale Alda Merini	Linux Day Casorate Sempione 2026	2026-10-24
🇩🇪	Berlin	Wikimedia e.V. Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24,10963 Berlin	OSM Hackweekend Berlin-Brandenburg 10/2026	2026-10-24 - 2026-10-25
🇸🇪	Uppsala	Datorföreningen Update	Mapping meetup in Uppsala	2026-10-25
🇮🇳	Bengaluru	Olive Street Food Cafe, 7th Cross Road, BTM Layout	OSM Bangalore Mapping Party	2026-10-25
🇮🇳	Noida	Noida	OSM Delhi NCR Mapping Party No.33 (Noida)	2026-10-25
			a11y-Score: ein OSM-Barrierefreiheitswerkzeug	2026-10-26
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-10-26
🇮🇹	Milano		Formazione Wikimedia Italia - OpenStreetMap: tasking manager	2026-10-26
🇩🇪	Heidelberg	DEZERNAT#16	Rhein-Neckar OSM Treffen	2026-10-26
🇩🇪	Stadtgebiet Bremen	Online und im Hackerspace Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen	2026-10-26
🇫🇷	Saint-Étienne	Zoomacom	Rencontre Saint-Étienne et sud Loire	2026-10-26
🇲🇽	Ciudad de México	Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso	State of the Map Latam 2026	2026-10-27 - 2026-10-29
			Pravidelný Missing Maps CZ-SK online Mapathon	2026-10-27
🇪🇸	Madrid	Online	Mappy Hour OSM España	2026-10-27
🇺🇸	San Jose	Online	South Bay Map Night	2026-10-27
🇦🇹	Wien	Schlupfwinkel (Kleine Neugasse 10, 1040 Wien)	80. Wiener OSM-Stammtisch	2026-10-27
🇬🇧	Derby	The Brunswick, Railway Terrace, Derby	East Midlands pub meet-up	2026-10-27
🇫🇷		La Fabrique des possibles	Réunion du groupe local de Nancy	2026-10-28
🇩🇪	Düsseldorf	Online bei https://meet.jit.si/OSM-DUS-2026	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)	2026-10-28
🇩🇪	Würzburg	FabLab Würzburg	Würzburger OSM-Treffen	2026-10-28
🇨🇭	Rapperswil-Jona	OST RJ Gebäude 6, Rapperswil	20. Mapathon & Mapping Party Rapperswil 2026	2026-10-30
🇮🇹	Pesaro	Biblioteca-Archivio “Vittorio Bobbato”	Linux Day Pesaro	2026-10-31
🇮🇳	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India - Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-11-01
🇩🇪	Hannover	Kuriosum	Stammtisch	2026-11-02
🇨🇭	Bern	Provisorium46	Berner OpenStreetMap-Znacht	2026-11-03
			Missing Maps London Mapathon Beginner Friendly (with Training) (Online) [eng]	2026-11-03
🇩🇪	Stuttgart	Forum 3 Café	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen	2026-11-04
🇫🇷		Bar Le Schmilblik	Rencontre mensuelle des contributeurs Paris sud	2026-11-05
🇫🇷	Angers	L’Arrière Train, 3 rue de Frémur, Angers	Angers Rencontre mensuelle OpenStreetMap	2026-11-06
🇦🇹	Salzburg	HTL Itzling	Maker Days Salzburg	2026-11-07
🇮🇹		Angera	Mapathon @ Angera	2026-11-07
🇩🇰	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-11-08
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-11-09
🇹🇼	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #94	2026-11-09

This weeklyOSM was produced by MarcoR, MatthiasMatthias, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

08/10/2026-14/10/2026

Mapping

• Two tagging proposals, related to graffiti, are open for voting until 26 October 2026. Evyy is proposing a dedicated tag, shop=graffiti, for shops specialising in spray cans, markers, stickers, and other street art supplies, which have often been tagged as shop=craft or shop=paint in the past. Flappiegrrr is proposing to use leisure=graffiti_wall to record places where graffiti may be sprayed legally, and to describe individual walls using the key graffiti_wall=*.

Community

• [1] Altilunium has developed ‘Know Your Mapper’, a web app that explores an OSM mapper’s editing sessions and approximate areas of activity.

• The small team behind OpenClimbing: Jan Václavík, Pavel Zbytovský, and Fabian Weisshaar, have created their second bot proposal to clean up climbing-related tags in OpenStreetMap. Running with assistance from Mateusz Konieczny, the bot aims to improve the consistency and quality of OSM climbing data. OpenClimbing uses this information to power its specialised map with integrated topos for the climbing community.

• Keagan van Rooyen described how he decided to contribute code to the CoMaps project and is currently working on several additional features for the Android Auto platform.

Events

• Sozialheld*innen has developed the a11y-Score, a score that makes the accessibility of public services in any chosen region comparable, based on open data from OpenStreetMap (we reported earlier). They will be presenting it at an online event on Monday 26 October 2026, from 14:00 to 15:00 CEST.

• Open Energy Transition will host a one-hour webinar introducing EarthPV, a tool that combines free Sentinel-2 imagery, the TerraMind geospatial foundation model, OpenStreetMap, open building datasets and human mapping to identify rooftop and ground-mounted solar installations above 10 kWp. The webinar will present the methodology and prototype results using Pakistan as a case study, and explain how the globally applicable workflow can support other contexts and research.

• Stefan Keller announced ► that there will be a PostGIS and PostgreSQL course on 5 and 6 November 2026 at OST’s Rapperswil campus in Switzerland. The two-day practical course covers PostGIS database administration, data import and conversion, spatial SQL, modern SQL features, performance tuning, and extensions such as pgRouting and pgVector.

• The eighth State of the Map Latin America will take place in person in Mexico City, Mexico, from 27 to 29 October 2026. You can find the full session schedule here .

OSM research

• HeiGIT presented a new paper introducing ACTION, a framework for making remote sensing and volunteered geographic information, including OpenStreetMap data, more useful for decision-making. The paper explored how combining satellite observations with local knowledge can support more transparent, reliable, and actionable geospatial workflows.

Maps

• Eugene Muravjev has built an interactive 3D map of Yas Island. The map uses OpenStreetMap data for roads, buildings, parks, and shorelines, supplemented by building footprints from Overture and Microsoft, and vegetation data from Copernicus Sentinel and ESA WorldCover. Major landmarks, including Ferrari World, Yas Waterworld, Etihad Arena, and the F1 circuit plus its tunnels, are modelled by hand using photographs.

• Goldilocks Map shows how many days a year the weather matches your own idea of comfortable (temperature range, humidity limit, and sunshine) for every place on Earth. The interactive map is built with MapLibre GL JS on OpenFreeMap tiles (OpenStreetMap data) and its climate numbers are checked against NOAA station records.

• Historic.place has been migrated from OpenLayers 2 to Leaflet (via Forum ).

• The Milan City Council’s Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Active Mobility and Accessibility has created a uMap showing all the cycle racks in the municipality of Milan.

• Sven Geggus added support for shelters, except those with sleeping=no, to OpenCampingMap (via Mastodon).

• The Birding Discovery team has developed birding.live, a free website that helps users discover common bird species and nearby birding locations worldwide using OpenStreetMap data.

• TectonicPlateMap.org launched an global interactive web map built with MapLibre GL JS and OpenStreetMap vector tiles. The web app visualises all 52 tectonic plates from the PB2002 dataset, active fault lines, real-time USGS earthquakes, and Smithsonian GVP volcanoes.

• Vienna Living Map is a free housing map of Vienna built on OpenStreetMap: Protomaps vector tiles, OSM points of interest, and cycleways. For every address it calculates the hours of direct sun per floor from OSM building outlines and the City of Vienna’s measured roof model.

OSM in action

• Rasmus Jaakonmäki released Fontavio, an app that maps drinking water, refill taps, toilets, showers, self-service laundries, dump stations, and marina pump-outs across Europe, USA, and Canada. The data come from various sources, including OpenStreetMap, national open datasets, and places added directly by Fontavio users. Each place records its source while the OpenStreetMap data are credited under the ODbL licence.

• The ALIS Project is developing ALIS, an open-source survival game set in real cities. In its latest prototype, the team has built a virtual Manhattan using Unreal Engine 5 and OpenStreetMap data, featuring 109,486 buildings, 84,096 road segments, and 28,265 trees.

Open Data

• Wikimedia Enterprise has released an open geospatial dataset that contains 17 million OpenStreetMap elements linked to Wikidata, Wikipedia, and Wikivoyage, as Parquet and GeoParquet files on Hugging Face and Kaggle.

Software

• Jake Low reported several MapRoulette security vulnerabilities that exposed OpenStreetMap access tokens, API keys and users’ email addresses. He took the application offline for around 15 hours, revoked all credentials and released version 4.11.0 with fixes on 7 October. Users must sign in again and re-authorise MapRoulette with OSM, but do not need to change their passwords.

• OpenHistoricalMap’s vector tiles have had many improvements over the past few months, including Simple 3D Buildings, goodies for golf mappers, and non-administrative boundaries (such as time zones, dioceses, and self-governing indigenous territories). Some of these are breaking changes for existing third-party stylesheets.

• Chris has been developing an AI-assisted OpenStreetMap mapping tool for Windows using Rust, Python, and WGPU for 3D features, with SAM 3 and YOLO models to detect features in satellite imagery from multiple sources, and is seeking community feedback.

• Felis Pimeja has been working on the OSM Simple 3D Editor, a browser-based editor for OpenStreetMap buildings and indoor objects.

• Martin Lange has developed TRAMP (Track and Route Analysis, Mapping and Planning), a free and open-source desktop application for Windows, Linux, and macOS that allows users to explore GNSS tracks and plan routes on OpenStreetMap-based maps using Valhalla or OSRM for routing and Photon or Nominatim for search.

• HeiGIT introduced the Sketch Map Tool on LinkedIn, a low-tech solution to support community mapping through offline data collection, digitisation, and georeferencing of local information. The tool enables users to create and analyse paper-based maps using OpenStreetMap data and satellite or drone imagery from OpenAerialMap.

Releases

• Over the past months Johan Morganti has been building a tool to explore every OpenStreetMap changeset since 2005, see trends over time, and drill down to who did what. This tool ingests OSM’s minutely changeset and diff replication from planet.osm.org, plus the full changeset history: 190 million changesets and 19 billion object changes, from 2005 to a few minutes ago.

• HeiGIT announced the release of ohsome 2.0, introducing major improvements to the ohsome API, ohsome quality API, and dashboard for faster analysis and extraction of historical OpenStreetMap data. The article highlighted the new features and provided guidance for migrating from v1 to v2.0 before the legacy services are discontinued on 30 November 2026.

Other “geo” things

• Safwat Halaby developed maplibre-gl-three, a library that enables developers to add 3D models and 3D tiles at geographic locations in MapLibre GL JS.

• Working with voluntary and community organisations for some is a very important way to do geography. In a guide published by the Royal Geographical Society, there are case studies done in collaboration with community and voluntary organisations. The PDF is available.

• Open Geospatial Solutions has developed RustGIS, a free and open-source GIS in pure Rust for mapping, analysing, and sharing geospatial data.

• GMX reported how a couple got lost in Lost Dutchman State Park in the US state of Arizona after using Google Maps. The pair later called for rescue and were airlifted out by helicopter. In a similar incident, one person died in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, after a car carrying 16 people veered off the road while attempting to navigate a steep incline, following directions from Google Maps.

• The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has developed the STOP DISASTERS game. Through play, users explore how decisions about where people live, how buildings are constructed, how ecosystems are protected, and how communities prepare affect what happens when a hazard strikes. The game was originally made as part of the 2006–2007 World Disaster Reduction Campaign, ‘Disaster Risk Reduction Begins at School’.

• The Tiroler Tageszeitung reported (paywalled) on a rival’s map, which has assigned names to places, mountains, and paths in Tyrol and Bavaria that nobody in the local area recognises, such as the ‘Schmusbichl’ in Kaunerberg. Local historians and the Tyrolean Nomenclature Commission are having to use old maps to fight against renaming at the click of a mouse. Donald Trump would probably welcome this as a model to follow; after all, he too has shown that a golf course can quickly be given a new name if you just have the right map in hand. In OpenStreetMap, by contrast, names continue to be assigned based on local knowledge.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
🇧🇪	Gent	TomTom Belgium	Maptime Ghent	2026-10-19
			Missing Maps London Mid-Month for Advanced Mappers (no training provided) (Online) [eng]	2026-10-20
🇫🇷	Lyon	Tubà	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon	2026-10-20
🇩🇪	Bonn	Dotty’s	205. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn	2026-10-20
🇩🇪	Chemnitz	Kaffeesatz, Chemnitz	OSM-Stammtisch Chemnitz	2026-10-20
🇬🇧	City of Edinburgh	Guildford Arms	Edinburgh Social	2026-10-20
🇩🇪		Online	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)	2026-10-20
🇫🇷		MJC de vienne	Réunion du groupe local de Vienne	2026-10-21
🇮🇹	Milano		Formazione Wikimedia Italia - OpenStreetMap: modifica tramite sito e tramite app	2026-10-21
🇩🇪	Karlsruhe	Schwarzer Kater	Stammtisch Karlsruhe	2026-10-21
			OSM US Mappy Hour: Mapping Accessible Trails	2026-10-21
🇬🇷			[Online] OSM Greece - Διαδικτυακή συνάντηση της ελληνικής κοινότητας	2026-10-21
pk		CUI Islamabad	Training on OpenStreetMap (OSM Pakistan)	2026-10-22
🇩🇪	Berlin	Online	EarthPV: Mapping Photovoltaics	2026-10-22
🇸🇰	Bratislava	Prírodovedecká fakulta UK Bratislava	Missing Maps mapathon Bratislava #14	2026-10-22
🇮🇳	Ernakulam	Edapally, Kochi	Kochi Mapping Party 2026	2026-10-24 - 2026-10-25
🇮🇹	Bologna	Liceo Copernico di Bologna	Linux Day 2026 a Bologna	2026-10-24
🇮🇹	Parma	Officine On/Off Parma	Linux Day 2026 Parma	2026-10-24
🇫🇷		Inclu K’fé	Cartopartie à Orx	2026-10-24
🇩🇪	Berlin	Wikimedia e.V. Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24,10963 Berlin	OSM Hackweekend Berlin-Brandenburg 10/2026	2026-10-24 - 2026-10-25
🇸🇪	Uppsala	Datorföreningen Update	Mapping meetup in Uppsala	2026-10-25
🇮🇳	Noida	Noida	OSM Delhi NCR Mapping Party No.33 (Noida)	2026-10-25
			a11y-Score: ein OSM-Barrierefreiheitswerkzeug	2026-10-26
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-10-26
🇮🇹	Milano		Formazione Wikimedia Italia - OpenStreetMap: tasking manager	2026-10-26
🇩🇪	Stadtgebiet Bremen	Online und im Hackerspace Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen	2026-10-26
🇩🇪	Heidelberg	DEZERNAT#16	Rhein-Neckar OSM Treffen	2026-10-26
🇲🇽	Ciudad de México	Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso	State of the Map Latam 2026	2026-10-27 - 2026-10-29
			Pravidelný Missing Maps CZ-SK online Mapathon	2026-10-27
🇦🇹	Wien	Schlupfwinkel (Kleine Neugasse 10, 1040 Wien)	80. Wiener OSM-Stammtisch	2026-10-27
🇬🇧	Derby	The Brunswick, Railway Terrace, Derby	East Midlands pub meet-up	2026-10-27
🇩🇪	Düsseldorf	Online bei https://meet.jit.si/OSM-DUS-2026	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)	2026-10-28
🇩🇪	Würzburg	FabLab Würzburg	Würzburger OSM-Treffen	2026-10-28
🇨🇭	Rapperswil-Jona	OST RJ Gebäude 6, Rapperswil	20. Mapathon & Mapping Party Rapperswil 2026	2026-10-30
🇮🇹	Pesaro	Biblioteca-Archivio “Vittorio Bobbato”	Linux Day 2026 in Pesaro	2026-10-31
🇮🇹	Pesaro	Biblioteca-Archivio “Vittorio Bobbato”	Linux Day Pesaro	2026-10-31
🇮🇳	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India - Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-11-01
🇩🇪	Hannover	Kuriosum	Stammtisch	2026-11-02

This weeklyOSM was produced by Aphaia_JP, Elizabete, HeiGIT, MarcoR, MatthiasMatthias, Nakaner, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

01/10/2026-07/10/2026

Mapping

• Mateusz Konieczny proposed a mechanical edit that would move info about material from bollard= to material=. It would include editing bollard=concrete/wood/stone/rock/metal/plastic.

• Mappers in the United Kingdom are considering removing the brand:wikipedia tag, which was mostly set from presets from the name suggestion index that no longer include them, two years after the same thing was done in the United States.

Mapping campaigns

• Ballerup Municipality thanked OpenStreetMap Denmark volunteers for a successful September 2026 mapping campaign that significantly increased the mapping of accessible parking spaces.

Community

• While you are enjoying the #31DayOSMChallenge don’t forget that the #30DayMapChallenge will soon be here. This year’s list of themes has been published.

• Aselnigu explained how new data gets onto the OpenStreetMap.de map.

• Rawaz explained how Claude AI can help map complex 3D buildings in OpenStreetMap.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OpenStreetMap Foundation Local Chapters and Communities Working Group launched the 2026 Community Microgrants, offering a total of EUR 5000 that will be distributed to various OpenStreetMap communities in grants of up to EUR 500. Applications are open from 5 to 25 October for small, concrete, and time-bounded activities that support mapping, data improvement, knowledge sharing, or community growth.

Events

• OSM ENSTP (École Nationale Supérieure des Travaux Publics, Cameroon) organised ► a practical workshop on bridging paper and digital data for local urban planning on 4 October 2026. In collaboration with HeiGIT, the UN Mappers and GeoWakanda, the club brought participants together on campus to explore participatory mapping.

• The FOSSGIS programme committee announced ► that the next FOSSGIS conference will take place in Heidelberg (Germany) from 9 to 13 March 2027.

• The State of the Map Latam 2026 will take place from 27 to 29 October at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City. Those who wish to attend in person can register now.

Education

• Hans van der Kwast gave a workshop, ‘Hydrological Analysis in QGIS’, at the QGIS User Conference in Laax, Switzerland. They explored the new native QGIS 4.4 tools for flow direction visualisation, stream extraction and catchment delineation, and a diverse range of tools for conducting comprehensive hydrological analysis. Materials are available at @gisocw.

Maps

• nicofr77 has developed Tisseur de Voies, a website that calculates bike loops with a return journey by train. The cycle routes come from OpenStreetMap and the national cycle-route database (France), while the basemap comes from OpenStreetMap. Journey times come from open-data timetables published by SNCF, Île-de-France Mobilités, the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, and the Corsican Railways.

• Yury Kosharovskiy has created Star Ninja, a free web map for planning a night of stargazing. It shows sky darkness, cloud forecasts, and moon visibility for any spot on Earth, using OpenStreetMap data through Nominatim (place search) and MapLibre GL JS with OpenFreeMap tiles.

OSM in action

• Home Assistant 2026.10 has introduced a redesigned map built on the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s vector tile service, marking a significant milestone for its adoption by major open-source projects. The new maps features smoother rendering, dark-mode styling, improved markers, and clustering. Home Assistant proxies and caches tiles locally, reducing the load on OSMF infrastructure. The release credits Guillaume Rischard for initiating and leading the OSMF vector tile project, Paul Norman for developing the tile infrastructure, and the MapLibre, Shortbread, and VersaTiles communities.

• Sebastian Mietzner has made KAIJUMIETZ, a browser game that builds any neighbourhood on Earth from OSM data and lets a giant cat destroy it in two minutes.

• VivaMap, a free quality-of-life map built partly on OpenStreetMap data, now also covers the Netherlands. Four of its nine Swiss dimensions (schools, restaurants and nightlife, healthcare, and part of nature) are computed from OSM points of interest and building footprints, weighted by type and distance on an H3 hexagon grid. The aggregate scores are published as CSV under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Software

• Stadia Maps shows how to build a custom map style in about 30 minutes by forking a MapLibre style, recoloring it in Maputnik, and hosting the JSON yourself, including authentication setup and common styling problems.

• Stadia Maps has rebuilt its boundary processing pipeline so that each boundary retains the same disputed status at every zoom level, resulting in smaller tiles.

• Heikki Kalliokoski has developed copilot.travel, a free web planner for road trips in Europe powered by OpenStreetMap data. It routes drives with self-hosted Valhalla and describes sights using linked Wikipedia/Wikidata entries or their OSM tags.

• After two years of development Alexandr Lovkov has shared his web app RouteCycle, for creating convenient and engaging cycling routes. The app supports displaying landmark photos from Wikimedia Commons and Strava integration for tracking unexplored roads and landmarks.

• The Wikimedia Enterprise team published an article about how CoMaps downloads Wikipedia articles to link them to OpenStreetMap data to provide offline access.

• Erick de Oliveira is bringing back the OSM Smart Menu as an open-source extension for Chrome and Firefox. With a single click, it opens your current location at the same zoom level on other maps, in mapping tools such as iD, JOSM, or OSMCha, and also in Wikipedia articles containing coordinates without the need to enter any data.

• Rua de Cima is a free tool for house hunters in mainland Portugal. It uses official statistics to compare ► a home’s asking price with nearby sale prices and shows walking and driving times to schools, health care, public transport, shops, and beaches. Place and road data come from OpenStreetMap, routes are calculated using Valhalla, and the basemap uses Protomaps.

Releases

• GraphHopper has released version 11.1, fixing a remote code execution issue.

• Nearly two months since the last report, we received a new recap of changes to openstreetmap.org. Some of these include a new version of iD (with updated tagging schema), tweaks to notes, and a new effort to track and help fix errors that were invisible to the team. But the spotlight is on the changes to visibility settings for uploaded GPX traces. These were announced back in May (we reported earlier), and have now landed for the general public, including a page that mappers can use to update their past traces in bulk in order to bring them up to the new spec.

• HeiGIT announced a major release of openrouteservice with version 10.0.0, also known as Amalthea. This release focused mostly on the technical foundation of the engine. It upgraded Java and Spring Boot, reduced the set of release artefacts to a fat jar and Docker images, and moved the slim Docker image to a hardened distroless base.

• Organic Maps released its September 2026 update with route optimisation, improved alternative routes, individual track hiding, and intermittent water area rendering.

Did you know that …

• … the Earth is getting rounder?

• … you can easily edit OSM public transport relations using OSM Relatify?

Other “geo” things

• Heise reported that the European Space Agency determined a position using Galileo’s future Signal Authentication Service for the first time under real-world conditions. The technology is intended to make various types of GNSS spoofing attacks detectable.

• The Nigeria Postal Service has launched its National Digital Alphanumeric Postcode, a precise, GIS-located address system for every building in Nigeria. To mark the launch, OpenCage shared several geo-trivia facts about Nigeria.

• Sentient Media has published an interactive map of Iowa’s concentrated animal feeding operations that shows nearly 11,000 facilities, 126.4 million animals, estimated manure volumes, and violations since 2003. It uses data from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources alongside Sentient Media’s own estimates; the data and code are available on GitHub.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
🇨🇭	Bern	SBB Headquarter	Open Transport Community Conference 2026	2026-10-06 - 2026-10-09
🇬🇭		Ghana	Everywhere She Maps workshop 2026	2026-10-07 - 2026-10-08
🇹🇭	กรุงเทพมหานคร	Brighton College Bangkok Mapathon	Missing Maps Mapathon (Beginner) - Bangkok, Thailand	2026-10-08
🇹🇭	กรุงเทพมหานคร	Chulalongkorn University	Fund Geo Class Mapathon, Survey Engineering Chula	2026-10-08
🇧🇪	Bruxelles - Brussel	Galerie Bortier	Brussels meetup - byebye Thierry & Joost	2026-10-08
🇩🇪	Bochum	Das Labor, Alleestraße 50, Bochum	OSM-Treffen Bochum	2026-10-08
🇩🇪	Berlin	Grosse Hamburger Strasse 37, 10115 Berlin	220. OSM-Stammtisch Berlin-Brandenburg	2026-10-09
🇨🇭	Bern	Restaurant Kairo	OSM-Znacht in Bern	2026-10-09
🇮🇹	Catania	Biblioteche Riunite Civica e A. Ursino Recupero	Modifichiamo Wiki e OSM insieme! - Catania	2026-10-10
🇹🇭	กรุงเทพมหานคร	Public House Hotel Bangkok	OSM Thailand Community & HOT Meet-up	2026-10-10
🇫🇷	Angers	École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers	OpenStreetMap, des cartes à la carte !	2026-10-10
🇭🇺	Salgótarján	Salgótarján - völgyváros gyár	Salgótarján Mapping Party 2026-10-11	2026-10-11
🇩🇰	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-10-11
🇫🇷	Angers	École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers	OpenStreetMap, des cartes à la carte !	2026-10-11
🇧🇪		Espace Public Numérique (EPN) de Neufchâteau	OpenStreetMap	2026-10-12
			Panoramax Nederland - Online Community Meeting #1	2026-10-12
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-10-12
🇳🇱	Amsterdam	TomTom HQ	2026 Autumn Maptime	2026-10-12
🇩🇪	München	Echardinger Einkehr	Münchner OSM-Treffen	2026-10-13
🇩🇪	Hamburg	Voraussichtlich: “Variable”, Karolinenstraße 23	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2026-10-13
🇩🇪		temporärhaus	OSM-Stammtisch Ulm/Neu-Ulm	2026-10-13
🇬🇧		Canolfan Cefnfaes	🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 North Wales Mapathon Gogledd Cymru 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿	2026-10-14
🇪🇸	Barcelona	Barcelona	Assemblea d’OpenStreetMap Català	2026-10-14
🇧🇪	Bruxelles - Brussel	Tour & Taxis, Avenue du Port 86C - 1000 Brussels	FOSS4G Belgium	2026-10-15
			OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting	2026-10-16
🇩🇪	Potsdam	11-line	Potsdamer Mappertreffen	2026-10-16
🇦🇷	Pergamino	Hub de Innovación	Encuentro OSM Argentina 2026	2026-10-17
🇫🇷	Metz	Espace Arob@se - Metz	Atelier OpenStreetMap Metz	2026-10-17
🇮🇳	Noida	Noida	OSM Delhi NCR Mapping Party No.33 (Noida)	2026-10-18
			Missing Maps London Mid-Month for Advanced Mappers (no training provided) (Online) [eng]	2026-10-20
🇫🇷	Lyon	Tubà	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon	2026-10-20
🇩🇪	Chemnitz	Kaffeesatz, Chemnitz	OSM-Stammtisch Chemnitz	2026-10-20
🇩🇪	Bonn	Dotty’s	205. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn	2026-10-20
🇬🇧	City of Edinburgh	Guildford Arms	Edinburgh Social	2026-10-20 - 2026-10-26
🇩🇪		Online	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)	2026-10-20
			Formazione Wikimedia Italia - OpenStreetMap: modifica tramite sito e tramite app	2026-10-21
🇩🇪	Karlsruhe	Schwarzer Kater	Stammtisch Karlsruhe	2026-10-21
			OSM US Mappy Hour: Mapping Accessible Trails	2026-10-21
🇩🇪	Berlin	Online	EarthPV: Mapping Photovoltaics	2026-10-22
🇩🇪	Berlin	Wikimedia e.V. Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24,10963 Berlin	OSM Hackweekend Berlin-Brandenburg 10/2026	2026-10-24 - 2026-10-25
🇸🇪	Uppsala	Datorföreningen Update	Mapping meetup in Uppsala	2026-10-25
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-10-26
			Formazione Wikimedia Italia - OpenStreetMap: tasking manager	2026-10-26
🇩🇪	Heidelberg	DEZERNAT#16	Rhein-Neckar OSM Treffen	2026-10-26
🇩🇪	Stadtgebiet Bremen	Online und im Hackerspace Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen	2026-10-26

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, Rob Yoegel, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

24/09/2026-30/09/2026

About us

• We’re excited to announce that weeklyOSM is now accessible via news.osm.org, honouring the voices and contributions of our global community equally. The new domain redirects to weeklyOSM.eu.

Mapping campaigns

• Eugene Alvin Villar announced the #31DayOSMChallenge proposed by the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s Local Chapters and Communities Working Group. See the Daily Challenges and note that you don’t have to contribute every day.

Community

• Raquel Dezidério Souto wrote, in her OSM User Diary, that she has edited two new volumes of the book Case Studies in Collaborative and Participatory Mapping (one of which is a thematic dossier on risk and disaster reduction). She authored chapters on the application of OpenStreetMap in two case studies conducted in collaboration with the Brazilian Ministry of Integration and Regional Development (part of volume 2). In total, 35 chapters were published, and the two e-books are available as open access on the Editora IVIDES portal.

• In Episode 284 of the Libre à Vous podcast, Anne L’Hôte presented a segment titled ‘complete your street’.

• In a blog post Christoph Hormann reflected on the challenges of communication within open-source communities such as OpenStreetMap. He highlighted how language barriers, differing cultural backgrounds, and the peculiarities of digital text-based communication can lead to misunderstandings in discussions, and calls for greater understanding and thoughtfulness in these exchanges.

• Reddit user u/Legitimate-Weight768 is currently mapping their hometown in Marcílio Dias, Canoinhas, Santa Catarina, Brazil, and is asking on Reddit for tips on how to improve their mapping skills with OSM.

• The Wikimedia Ghana User Group has organised Wiki Loves Places 2026 in Ghana, aiming to collect at least 250 geotagged images of places, document 250 new place entities on Wikidata, and add or update 250 locations on OpenStreetMap.

• A local category for Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) has been set up on the OSM Community forum.

• 9_tab has written about Planet Trails in Switzerland. How many are there on OSM? How detailed is the mapping? What scale do they use? Do they include Pluto? What else? Which trails may be missing?

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Dorothea Kazazi announced that the OSMF board candidates’ manifestos and answers to the official questions, by Brian Sperlongano, are now available on the OSM Wiki.

• Christoph Hormann discussed the upcoming OSMF board election 2026, saying that having four candidates for four seats makes the election ‘meaningless’ and could seriously damage the board’s legitimacy as a democratically elected representation of OSMF members.

Local chapter news

• OpenStreetMap US has published its September 2026 newsletter.

• InsertUser tooted that UK-based OSM mappers were able to vote for the next UK quarterly project until 28 September.

Events

• The Centro Argentino de Cartografía (CAC) has posted a reminder on LinkedIn that the registration deadline for the 13th Congreso de la Ciencia Cartográfica, which is also the 4th Congreso Virtual Internacional, was 30 September 2026. The virtual congress will take place from 6 to 8 October 2026 and is being jointly organised by the CAC and the Argentine Instituto Geográfico Nacional.

• Alpha Amadou Diallo reported that the municipality of Pire Goureye, Senegal hosted a collaborative mapping training activity with OpenStreetMap on 26 and 27 September 2026.

Education

• Nelson Gonçalves published learning material introducing web mapping and uMap.

OSM research

• Thiago Kikuchi and others have developed ► an interactive uMap showing the physical environment of urban river basins in Northern Paraná, Brazil, combining publicly available data on contour lines, slopes, soil types, hydrography, water bodies, springs, and watershed boundaries.

Maps

• Mark Dimond used OSMnx to visualise which road in England carries the most buses.

• Martin has developed a map that shows which konbini is closest to you in Tokyo and which chain dominates each area, using OpenStreetMap data.

• NoEscapeMap has developed NoEscape 2.0, a web map that geocodes past cases of border-crossing attempts from Ukraine’s open court registry data, intended to help tourists and researchers analyse ► risks and avoid ► danger.

• Stamen Design reported that their partner Stadia Maps has updated the underlying data used in several of Stamen’s basemaps, focusing on an overhaul of water features, such as rivers, lakes, and coastlines.

• Map Amore showcased ‘The Arrogance of Space Mapping Tool’, a tool that shows how much space cars occupy in our cities.

• Ogmios has built World Wide Waterways: Flussdiagram.me, a website where waterways are rendered in 1D maps with additional metadata from OpenStreetMap and Wikidata.

OSM in action

• Sozialheld*innen has launched ► a11y-Score, a tool that makes accessibility in Germany visible and comparable through a score from 0 to 100 for federal states, 418 districts and independent cities, along with Germany as a whole, based on OpenStreetMap geodata.

• BoxThisLap reported on TerraDrive, a new open-source map generator that converts OpenStreetMap and elevation data into driveable 3D environments. Released under the MIT licence, the tool utilises OSM’s road geometry, lane details, intersections, and building footprints to recreate real-world road networks, which can then be exported as playable levels for the vehicle simulation game BeamNG.drive.

• Spino87 posted PizzaRank, a directory of 30,931 Italian pizzerias, a good 24,000 of which were sourced from OpenStreetMap, and also made the OSM portion available ► as a .CSV or .JSON file under the ODbL licence, as simple attribution is not sufficient for a derived database work. On the OSM Community forum he asked for advice on how to report any errors found in the process back to OSM; in discussions with Martin Koppenhöfer it emerged that the duplicates and incorrect municipality names were due to peculiarities of the osmium export tool or his own script, whilst the six pizzerias that have permanently closed should now be reported individually as notes. The data also revealed that the oven=wood_fired tag has hardly been used to date, which is why both suggested promoting it more actively via presets and a StreetComplete quest.

Open Data

• After twenty years of service, IGN France is replacing ► Geoportail with its new portal designed as a single point of access to maps and territorial geographic data. The goal is to make the map an accessible, open, and useful digital tool both for everyday use and for major decisions, whether you’re simply curious, a hiker, a local elected official, or a professional. It contains maps from IGN and its partners, aerial photographs, and various maps (cadastral, forests, historical, topographic, and routes, etc).

• Jake Low announced that Layercake, a distribution of OpenStreetMap data separated into thematic layers and converted into GeoParquet format, has a new website.

Software

• Tykayn showcased Qualiwiki, a web dashboard to compare the content coverage between the English and French versions of the OSM Wiki.

• The PapaMap shows the nearest changing table that parents can reach using OpenStreetMap data and is now available as an iPhone app, with an Android version currently in development.

• Tobias Zwick announced the first public beta of StreetComplete for iOS.

Programming

• HeiGIT introduced HeiSlime, a Python toolbox that uses OpenStreetMap context to select images useful for analysis before processing them with a computer vision model. The result is a smaller, more targeted image set that saves processing time.

• The OSMF sysadmins tooted that upgrading to Mapnik 4.3.2 lead to significant performance improvements for raster tile rendering. On top of that, there are technical improvements to OSM Carto by leijuv and nakaner. Detailed explanations can be found on GitHub. Another, as yet unmerged, pull request to OSM Carto promises more performant sorting of features.

• Sarah Hoffmann reported that Kai Johnson has improved the CPU usage metering per client on an Overpass server. The measurements are used to ban heavy users by IP address and/or application. She also noted that most of the bad traffic comes from poorly programmed speed camera apps.

• In two Habr articles, Sunspirit described how his desire to create his own walking route led to the development of the route planner putemer.ru. In a follow-up technical article he explained why he switched from live Overpass API queries to his own OSM database, built from Geofabrik extracts and including a PMTiles map set, and uses elevation data, road network counts, plus cache settings, and how easily plausible measurements can lead to false conclusions.

Releases

• Amanda McCann recently added several new features to WaterwayMap, including multilingual names and integration with Wikidata and Wikipedia.

• Michael Johnson released NodeODM 3.6.2 to match the latest OpenDroneMap 3.6.2 release.

Other “geo” things

• ^[1] The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution reported that Marie Tharp was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2026. Using thousands of sonar readings from research vessels, Tharp and Bruce Heezen revealed a 40,000-mile underwater ridge girdling the globe, helping confirm plate tectonics and continental drift theory, which were controversial among geologists at the time. This work led Tharp to create the World Ocean Floor Map, published in 1977 by the Office of Naval Research and still widely used today. The Columbia Climate School has made an interactive guide to the ‘Heezen–Tharp World Ocean Floor Map’.

• Researchers at Tufts University, led by Farshid Vahedifard, have analysed more than 190 million satellite and ground measurement points along the US coastline and found that 71.5% of the areas are sinking by more than one millimetre per year. The Gulf Coast is sinking the most, with 92.6% of measurement points showing downward movement at a median rate of 2.5 millimetres per year. The study also overlaid the subsidence map with population and infrastructure data and found a disproportionate impact on disadvantaged communities.

• NATO is seeking to procure a global vector basemap compliant with STANAG 2592 NGIF to support web mapping, rapid mapping, geospatial analysis, routing, and geolocation services. The package will centre on vector data combining current Overture Maps data with vendor-furnished data and other open or purchaser-provided sources, alongside derived products such as raster and vector caches, routable networks, and geolocator files. The procurement has an estimated value of EUR 3.5 million and is expected to be awarded in February 2027.

• A Lithuanian musician and self-styled ‘mythographer’ has renamed ► a striking rock formation at the Predigtstuhl, near Bad Reichenhall, on Google Maps from ‘Teufelssattel’ to ‘Wächter der Alaunen’ (after an ancient Celtic tribe that fascinates him) whereas the historical name is documented as early as 1580 by Philipp Apian. The local historical society, led by town archivist Johannes Lang, subsequently contacted Google, as the responsible Bavarian surveying authority had omitted the name from its map solely for graphical reasons, but had not replaced it. It was only with the technical support of a computer scientist that the old name was successfully restored. Lang sees this as an example of the growing trend towards ’emotional historiography’. The BR Quer programme also reported this at 00:39.

• MapTheNet displays a map of websites. Domains are placed near other domains they are linked to, and scaled according to the number of weighted incoming links. You can search a domain and see how it is connected to others, for example weeklyosm.eu.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
🇮🇳	Kottayam		Mapathon Pre-event SotM Kerala 2026	2026-10-01 - 2026-10-05
🇮🇹	Messina	Fablab Messina (via Croce Rossa 63, 98124 Messina)	Hackathon Wikimedia & OSM	2026-10-02 - 2026-10-04
🇩🇪	Essen	Linuxhotel Essen	FOSSGIS-OSM-Communitytreffen Nr. 26 im Linuxhotel	2026-10-02 - 2026-10-04
🇪🇸	Langreo	Casa de la Cultura “Escuelas Dorado”	GeoCamp 2026	2026-10-03
🇫🇷		Mairie de Laillé	OSM Mapping	2026-10-03
🇮🇳	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India - Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-10-03
🇩🇪	Essen	Verkehrs- und Umweltzentrum	Essen OSM-Treffen	2026-10-03
🇮🇳	Chennai Corporation	Velachery, Chennai	Chennai GLUG Velachery OSM Mapping	2026-10-04
			TNEI Mapathon 2026	2026-10-05
🇹🇼	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #93	2026-10-05
🇨🇭	Bern	SBB Headquarter	Open Transport Community Conference 2026	2026-10-06 - 2026-10-09
🇬🇧	Sheffield	Rutland Arms	OSM Sheffield - Monthly Social	2026-10-06
🇪🇸	Madrid	Online	Mappy Hour OSM España	2026-10-06
🇦🇹	Salzburg	Bewohnerservice Elisabeth-Vorstadt	OSM-Treffpunkt	2026-10-06
🇩🇪	Braunschweig	Stratum 0	Braunschweiger Mappertreffen im Stratum 0 Hackerspace	2026-10-06
			Missing Maps London Mapathon Beginner Friendly (with Training) (Online) [eng]	2026-10-06
			iD Community Chat	2026-10-07
🇬🇭		Ghana	Everywhere She Maps workshop 2026	2026-10-07 - 2026-10-08
🇮🇹	Milano	Building 4, SRN 4.1.1 Politecnico di Milano	PoliMappers Maptedì	2026-10-07
🇸🇰	Žilina	Fakulta riadenia a informatiky UNIZA	Missing Maps mapathon Žilina #24	2026-10-07
🇧🇪	Liège	Barricade, Liège	Carto party OpenStreetMap Café Crypté Liège	2026-10-07
🇪🇸	Barcelona	Barcelona	Junta d’OpenStreetMap Català	2026-10-07
🇩🇪	Stuttgart	Forum 3 Café	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen	2026-10-07
th	กรุงเทพมหานคร	Brighton College Bangkok Mapathon	Missing Maps Mapathon (Beginner) - Bangkok, Thailand	2026-10-08
🇧🇪	Bruxelles - Brussel	Galerie Bortier	Brussels meetup - byebye Thierry & Joost	2026-10-08
🇩🇪	Bochum	Das Labor, Alleestraße 50, Bochum	OSM-Treffen Bochum	2026-10-08
🇩🇪	Berlin	Grosse Hamburger Strasse 37, 10115 Berlin	220. OSM-Stammtisch Berlin-Brandenburg	2026-10-09
🇨🇭	Bern	irgendwo im Breitsch, wird noch definiert	OSM-Znacht in Bern	2026-10-09
🇮🇹	Catania	Biblioteche Riunite Civica e A. Ursino Recupero	Modifichiamo Wiki e OSM insieme! - Catania	2026-10-10
🇫🇷	Angers	École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers	OpenStreetMap, des cartes à la carte !	2026-10-10
🇩🇰	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-10-11
🇫🇷	Angers	École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers	OpenStreetMap, des cartes à la carte !	2026-10-11
🇮🇳	New Delhi	East Delhi	OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.33 (East Zone)	2026-10-11
			Panoramax Nederland - Online Community Meeting #1	2026-10-12
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-10-12
🇳🇱	Amsterdam	TomTom HQ	2026 Autumn Maptime	2026-10-12
🇩🇪	München	Echardinger Einkehr	Münchner OSM-Treffen	2026-10-13
🇩🇪	Hamburg	Voraussichtlich: “Variable”, Karolinenstraße 23	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2026-10-13
🇩🇪		temporärhaus	OSM-Stammtisch Ulm/Neu-Ulm	2026-10-13
🇬🇧		Canolfan Cefnfaes	🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 North Wales Mapathon Gogledd Cymru 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿	2026-10-14
🇪🇸	Barcelona	Barcelona	Assemblea d’OpenStreetMap Català	2026-10-14
🇧🇪	Bruxelles - Brussel	Tour & Taxis, Avenue du Port 86C - 1000 Brussels	FOSS4G Belgium	2026-10-15
			OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting	2026-10-16
🇦🇷	Pergamino	Hub de Innovación	Encuentro OSM Argentina 2026	2026-10-17
🇫🇷	Metz	Espace Arob@se - Metz	Atelier OpenStreetMap Metz	2026-10-17

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, Nakaner, PierZen, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

17/09/2026-23/09/2026

About us

• Next week we will launch our completely revamped website; an exciting milestone for us! With Hugo as our new framework, a self-hosted commenting system (Remark42), and our own Listmonk server for managing mailing lists, we’ve modernised our publishing workflow and automated key processes. The source code is available, along with the complete archive in Markdown format, in the FOSSGIS GitLab repository. Cross your fingers for a smooth transition.

Mapping campaigns

• [1] After almost 15 years, mappers in the US state of Ohio have finished mapping the boundaries of all 1,309 townships there. The community overcame a lack of accurate, authoritative, external datasets by reconciling a variety of sources. Work remains to clean up and update municipal boundaries, which often influence township boundaries.

Community

• Walid Nouh has interviewed members of the OpenStreetMap France board on the Projets Libres podcast. The episode’s guests were asked to talk about OSM-FR, who they are, what the association does, and its current activities.

• Because there were three votes against the Lgbtq=* proposal without a reason being provided (see the discussion on the OSM Community forum about it), Spughetti, the author of the proposal, has written a proposal to introduce a strict requirement to provide a valid reason to vote against a proposal. The reactions on some posts show a split in the community.

Imports

• Imports of boundary and cadastral datasets in Belgium and France have more than doubled the size of OpenHistoricalMap since the beginning of August. The new data skews OHM more heavily toward recent decades but gives contributors more opportunities to improve historical coverage based on present-day features.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OpenStreetMap Foundation is inviting you to its 20th Annual General Meeting, being held on Saturday 17 October 2026 at 16:00 UTC. The meeting will take place online. The agenda includes apologies for absences, the minutes of the previous Annual General Meeting, reports from the Chair, the Treasurer and the Personnel Committee, the election of the Board, and any other business.

Events

• At the 2026 Ukrainian Urban Forum ‘After Nature’, held in Cherkasy, a dedicated discussion focused on GIS and crowdsourced geospatial data for communities. Fedir Gontsa, a member of the Ukrainian OpenStreetMap community, spoke about the project and showed how micromapping can help cities collect data on accessibility, green spaces, and other features of the urban environment.

Maps

• OsmAnd has published an experimental heatmap similar to Strava Heatmaps but based on GPX traces uploaded by mappers to the OSM API.

• Roni Lindholm made wayside.cc, an OpenStreetMap-powered web map that displays small points of interest that are hard to find elsewhere, such as public toilets, drinking water, playgrounds, post boxes, luggage lockers, shelters and more.

• Wynndale has argued in favour of moving OSM away from the Mercator projection, as modern processors have long been capable of rendering vector tiles in any projection. Mercator not only distorts sizes, but also causes the scale to vary between zoom levels depending on latitude, and creates a gap around 1,000 km wide at both poles. As alternatives, he suggests geographical coordinates with cosine scaling for large-scale maps, as well as area-preserving projections such as Equal Earth, and further illustrated the principle using an orthographic globe view.

OSM in action

• Der Spiegel used OpenStreetMap as its map base to display election results in Berlin’s individual constituencies.

• Geht-Doch Wien, Walk-Space, and Radlobby created ► a map to visualise potential locations for public seating in Vienna, based on OpenStreetMap data. This map shows how seating at regular intervals can support independent mobility for people with mobility impairments, with seating every 100 metres recommended for an inclusive and barrier-free city.

• The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) maintains UN/LOCODE (United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations), a global UN/CEFACT standard for codes relating to trade and transport locations, which is freely available under a CC BY 4.0 licence. The codes can be searched via the online directory, and the list is also available as a SKOS vocabulary in Turtle format. Interested parties can submit requests for changes and new entries via a Data Maintenance Request. The maintenance team decides on these requests at regular meetings, which are open to the public. The new platform uses OpenStreetMap to display the registered coordinates and Nominatim for search.

Software

• Chris Debian reported that Mapilio Mobile, a mobile app for turning photos into street-level imagery and map data, is now open source.

• Sanjay Bhangar has noted that osm-seed moved out of the Development Seed GitHub org and into its own home at github.com/osm-seed. The change reflects how the project is actually being used and maintained today.

• Peter has built a maxheight editor that makes contributing maxheight data more interesting as it calculates the chance of an important bridge-related restriction. The editor also makes it also easier for armchair mappers as it displays Mapillary signs and street images from various open services.

• HeiGIT released two analysis tools based on shadow data to support active mobility during summer months. The hiShade plugin in the Climate Action Navigator shows how shade is distributed across a neighbourhood. The shadow routing application calculates pedestrian routes that keep people out of the sun.

Programming

• Timothé Baleras, Martin Constantino-Bodin, and Ugo Comignani developed Cosmetyc, a library for manipulating OpenStreetMap data in OCaml. The development of this library led to an article, presented at the 37th Francophone Conference on Applied Languages.

• Jesse Back said on LinkedIn that he cold emailed 1,000+ German farmers by using satellite data to estimate how many hectares of land they work. You can watch the video on YouTube, where he explains his workflow in more detail, which includes OpenStreetMap and Overpass API.

Did you know that …

• … map projections seem to be having a moment? Tobias Jung has a website where you can view 355 different projections and compare between them. You can also read Tobias’ 2018 review of the Equal Earth projection.

OSM in the media

• Heise has published a YouTube video about OSM-based alternatives to Google Maps.

Other “geo” things

• Ben Joffe has developed an equal-area projection that uses simple closed-form functions in the forward and inverse directions. By adjusting parameters a map can seamlessly transition to Mercator when zooming in. The method also can be used as a new compromise cylindrical projection that also transitions to Mercator when zooming in.

• Pinlyx has analysed the Turkish website data from the Overture Maps Foundation Places dataset, which contains no OpenStreetMap data, to check how many business websites remain accessible. Their analysis found that of the 685,343 Turkish business websites listed, 271,566 websites did not respond, and 164,281 no longer resolved to anything.

• London Centric reported how drug dealers in London are using Google Maps to advertise themselves by hijacking searches for pharmacies.

• Sebastian Gräff, from The European Correspondent, has published a map that shows where the concert genres of Europe perform (excluding ‘pop’) and asked the reader ‘Europe hosts over 125,000 concerts a year. Who’s playing where?’.

• Yandex.Maps has started embedding ads in its free map widgets that are used on many sites. In the comments, there was discussion of alternatives, including self-hosting using OSM. However, some users noted that most of the alternatives require technical training and reading documentation, which is quite difficult for owners of small websites.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
🇮🇳	Bengaluru	NIMHANS Convention Center	OSM India @ IndiaFOSS 2026	2026-09-25 - 2026-09-27
			UN Mappers Mappy Hour	2026-09-25
🇲🇽	Torreón	Universidad Tecnológica de Torreón	Conferencia “OpenStreetMap: Datos abiertos y más”	2026-09-25
🇲🇽	Torreón	Universidad Tecnológica de Torreón	Taller “Mapeando mi entorno”	2026-09-25
🇩🇪	Düsseldorf	Online bei https://meet.jit.si/OSM-DUS-2026	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)	2026-09-25
🇩🇪	Karlsruhe	Geofabrik, Amalienstraße 44, 76133 Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend September 2026	2026-09-26 - 2026-09-27
		Kanjikode, Palakkad, Kerala	OSM Workshop SotM Kerala Pre-event -1	2026-09-26
🇫🇷	Nantes	Le Wagon Nantes	OpenStreetMap, la balade de la data	2026-09-26
			Sudan Solidarity Series	2026-09-26
🇸🇪	Uppsala	Datorföreningen Update	Mapping meetup in Uppsala	2026-09-27
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-09-28
🇫🇷	Saint-Étienne	Zoomacom	Rencontre Saint-Étienne et sud Loire	2026-09-28
🇩🇪	Magdeburg	Netz39 e.V. , Leibnizstraße 32, 39104 Magdeburg	4. OSM Stammtisch Magdeburg	2026-09-29
🇺🇸	Palo Alto	Startup Island Taiwan	South Bay Wiki and OpenStreetMap Meetup	2026-09-29
🇩🇪	Mannheim	RaumZeitLabor, Mannheim	Rhein-Neckar OSM Treffen	2026-09-30
			Auburn Red Cross Missing Maps Mapathon	2026-10-01
🇫🇷	Angers	L’Arrière Train, 3 rue de Frémur, Angers	Angers Rencontre mensuelle OpenStreetMap	2026-10-01
🇫🇷		Bar Le Schmilblik	Rencontre mensuelle des contributeurs Paris sud	2026-10-01
🇮🇹	Messina	Fablab Messina (via Croce Rossa 63, 98124 Messina)	Hackathon Wikimedia & OSM	2026-10-02 - 2026-10-04
🇩🇪	Essen	Linuxhotel Essen	FOSSGIS-OSM-Communitytreffen Nr. 26 im Linuxhotel	2026-10-02 - 2026-10-04
🇪🇸	Langreo	Casa de la Cultura “Escuelas Dorado”	GeoCamp 2026	2026-10-03
🇮🇳	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India - Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-10-03
🇩🇪	Essen	Verkehrs- und Umweltzentrum	Essen OSM-Treffen	2026-10-03
			TNEI Mapathon 2026	2026-10-05
🇹🇼	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #93	2026-10-05
🇨🇭	Bern	SBB Headquarter	Open Transport Community Conference 2026	2026-10-06 - 2026-10-09
🇦🇹	Salzburg	Bewohnerservice Elisabeth-Vorstadt	OSM-Treffpunkt	2026-10-06
🇩🇪	Braunschweig	Stratum 0	Braunschweiger Mappertreffen im Stratum 0 Hackerspace	2026-10-06
			Missing Maps London Mapathon Beginner Friendly (with Training) (Online) [eng]	2026-10-06
			iD Community Chat	2026-10-07
		Ghana	Everywhere She Maps workshop 2026	2026-10-07 - 2026-10-08
		Barricade, Liège	Carto party OpenStreetMap Café Crypté Liège	2026-10-07
🇩🇪	Stuttgart	Forum 3 Café	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen	2026-10-07
		Barcelona	Junta d’OpenStreetMap Català	2026-10-07
		Brighton College Bangkok Mapathon	Missing Maps Mapathon (Beginner) - Bangkok, Thailand	2026-10-08
		Galerie Bortier	Brussels meetup - byebye Thierry & Joost	2026-10-08
🇩🇪	Bochum	Das Labor, Alleestraße 50, Bochum	OSM-Treffen Bochum	2026-10-08
		irgendwo im Breitsch, wird noch definiert	OSM-Znacht in Bern	2026-10-09
🇮🇹	Catania	Biblioteche Riunite Civica e A. Ursino Recupero	Modifichiamo Wiki e OSM insieme! - Catania	2026-10-10
		École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers	OpenStreetMap, des cartes à la carte !	2026-10-10
🇩🇰	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-10-11
		École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers	OpenStreetMap, des cartes à la carte !	2026-10-11
🇮🇳	New Delhi	East Delhi	OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.33 (East Zone)	2026-10-11
			Panoramax Nederland - Online Community Meeting #1	2026-10-12
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-10-12
🇳🇱	Amsterdam	TomTom HQ	2026 Autumn Maptime	2026-10-12

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, Nakaner, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

10/09/2026-16/09/2026

Mapping

• v7.2.0 of the iD tagging schema has been released and includes tweaks to labels, new icons, changed fields for various presets, new search terms, better documentation, improved build scripts, and more. Helper presets for some subvariants of aerialway stations, silos, and parking spots were added to make mapping easier. An actual new preset was added for offshore platforms. It includes bugfixes such as dropping bad suggestions, taginfo report includes addTags, and post boxes in USA no longer have duplicate drivethrough fields. Work continues in the background on some larger features, but changes listed above will soon be present in iD, GoMap!!, EveryDoor, StreetComplete, and other editors.

Community

• Andy Allan gave a talk at State of the Map 2026 about how OpenStreetMap’s transport layer migrated from server-side rendered map tiles to client-side rendered vector styles.

• The CoMaps team shared their experience of attending State of the Map in Paris.

• dia-jules explained, in the context of the USA, how unnecessary traffic light penalty times arise in OSRM and similar route planners, and how to reduce them specifically. If junctions on shared trunk roads are tagged as usual with highway=traffic_light at each node, the router counts multiple delays per junction, even though in reality only one set of traffic lights is passed. The more precise method instead places the tag individually at the stop line using traffic_light=signal and traffic_light:direction, so that each route passes through only one traffic light junction. To prioritise the revision, dia-jules drew on traffic volume and accident data from the Illinois Department of Transportation for the Greater Chicago area.

• Emmanuel Arrechea looked back on State of the Map 2026, held at the École Géodata in Paris, where he and other members of LaNum Pays Basque and Mapadour joined 535 participants from 45 countries. He picked out five points from more than 180 talks and workshops, among them the sponsorship of the conference by companies such as Michelin, TomTom, Esri, Thales, and Capgemini, and the way organisations including IGN, SNCF, and Géovélo build their services on OSM data. He also highlighted Grant Slater’s talk on AI crawlers straining OSMF infrastructure and driving some 400 fake account registrations a day. Most sessions are available on OSM France’s PeerTube channel with French subtitles.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Chris Fleming explained, in an OSM Blog post, how naming works in OpenStreetMap, from the primary name= tag to additional keys such as name:en= and official_name=. He used the recent official_name:en-US=Lake America addition to Lake Ontario as an example of how the name tag remains unchanged even after an official renaming, so the lake remains findable under both names. He also noted that OpenStreetMap volunteers have mapped over 115 million names to date.

Local chapter news

• Jochen Topf and Katja Haferkorn of FOSSGIS reported ► that the German Federal Ministry for Digitalisation and Public Sector Modernisation is inviting the open data community, stakeholders, and the interested public to participate in an online consultation to gather proposals and suggestions for a more developed framework, to be known as the ‘Roadmap for Open Data’. FOSSGIS has also compiled a statement on the topic.

Events

• The State of the Map 2026 is already documented on Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and OpenStreetMpa Wiki.

Education

• High5apps explained how to add a website tag to a shop or amenity using JOSM. This short tutorial sparked quite a discussion on HackerNews.

• Aoyama Gakuin University’s Furuhashi Laboratory have published a video lecture for the 2026 academic year’s ‘Basic Spatial Information Science B’ course, which covers various topics related to OpenStreetMap.

OSM research

• HeiGIT presented an analysis of cycling infrastructure in 885 European cities, using OpenStreetMap data together with tree canopy and heat-stress data to assess how well cycling routes are protected from heat.

• HeiGIT presented new indicators for its hiWalk tool, developed in collaboration with Walk21, that use OpenStreetMap and other open data to assess factors such as path lighting, tactile paving, tree shade, and access to everyday services, providing a more comprehensive picture of urban walkability.

Maps

• cultours.app is a free interactive map of roughly 100,000 cultural heritage sites in Germany: castles, churches, ruins, memorials including Stolpersteine, Roman and prehistoric sites, towers, and viewpoints. Data comes from OpenStreetMap via Overpass, enriched with Wikipedia and Wikidata. No login, no cookies, no tracking. The developer introduced the project in the German community forum and is looking for feedback on a couple of tagging questions there.

• Dachlast.de presented an OSM-based camping map for Germany and neighbouring countries, which combines a route planner with eight data layers. The map shows campsites, motorhome pitches, drinking water points, toilets, showers, supply and disposal points, charging points, and petrol stations along the planned route. The data is ‘harvested’ weekly from OpenStreetMap and, according to the operator, comprises around 400,000 points in the area stretching from Denmark to northern Italy, eastern France and western Poland.

• The Planet Thinks is a fully turnable globe displaying live changesets on OpenstreetMap as coloured sparks.

OSM in action

• [1] The Institute of Data Sciences at the DLR (German Aerospace Centre) explained ► how geoparsing, that is, the identification of place names in texts and their association with geographical points, lines, or polygons, makes geodata usable for crisis management, supply chains, and research. The team is developing methods for toponym recognition and disambiguation, comparing these against multilingual benchmark data and applying them in various DLR projects, such as geolocating social media content during crises or analysing supply chains in the aviation industry. These methods are also being incorporated into the EU project OpenWebSearchEU, which aims to create a European alternative to dominant search providers, as well as into the collaboration with the Joint Research Centre on news analysis for European decision-makers.

• Heise reported that the interactive map by the action alliance ‘Heiße Luft’ shows the locations of planned and under-construction data centres in Germany.

• Greenways Ireland presented the official website of the Irish Department of Transport for the country’s growing network of car-free cycle and walking routes. The interactive map uses OpenStreetMap with proper attribution and can be filtered by region, theme, and route length. As well as route descriptions, the site provides up-to-date information on route closures and an overview of the national greenway strategy.

• The Bayreuther Tagblatt reported ► that St.-Georgen-Straße in Bindlach will be completely closed for around four days from 21 September due to development work. One positive point is that the map of the surrounding area used in the article is credited as ‘© openstreetmap.org/copyright’.

• Dominik Hochwarth, of Ingenieur.de, reported ► that TU Graz has developed an OpenStreetMap-based tool that estimates the amounts of concrete, brick, and wood contained in buildings. The programme first determines a building’s size and geometry using OpenStreetMap data, then incorporates its building type, year of construction, construction method, and energy efficiency class. Based on this information, the software identifies a suitable building archetype and calculates which materials were likely used in its construction.

Software

• Steven Hooper has built BadCaddie, an app that uses OpenStreetMap golf-course data for course discovery and hole maps, alongside GNSS yardages, scorekeeping, and club suggestions, based on recorded shot distances. It is available for iPhone with an Apple Watch companion and as a plugin for Even Realities G2 glasses.

• Ian Wagner explained how Stadia Maps has been taking a fresh look at the cartographic decisions at every level of their map stack. Their recent water layer changes and water label updates have made a visible difference to the Stamen Terrain style.

• Tina reported that OsmAnd now allows users to colour their tracks based on speed, altitude, or slope data. Custom colour palettes help turn complex GPX data into clear, meaningful visual stories.

Releases

• The CoMaps team has released version 2026.08.31, which is now out across all release channels. New features include the display of reviews from Mangrove Reviews and a new transport modes UI on iOS.

• The OpenStreetMap Carto maintainers have prepared version 6.1.0 of the OpenStreetMap Carto stylesheet. Christoph Hormann detailed the visible changes introduced by this release in an OSM diary post.

Other “geo” things

• TechCrunch reported that Tern has won a contract from the US Army to deploy its low-cost GNSS alternative technology. The US$11.26 million contract will see the Army use Tern’s navigation technology in vehicles. According to its official website, Tern is developing a positioning system that does not rely on satellites, signals, or external infrastructure. It has been tested by the US Departments of Transportation and Defense.

• ABC Science’s Julian O’Shea explored how Australia has been mapped ‘wrong’ from a 1547 world map to modern GPS.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
🇩🇪	Kiel	Kieler Innovations- und Technologiezentrum	OSM auf der Kielux 2026	2026-09-18 - 2026-09-19
🇮🇳	Mumbai	Lokhandwala Garden, Andheri	OSM Mumbai Mapping Party No.14 (Andheri)	2026-09-19
🇮🇳	Delhi	Too Mikkii Tapas, South Extension	OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.31 (South Extension)	2026-09-20
🇪🇸	Madrid	Online	Mappy Hour OSM España	2026-09-22
🇬🇧	Derby	The Brunswick, Railway Terrace, Derby	East Midlands pub meet-up	2026-09-22
🇩🇪	Berlin	Online	OSM-Verkehrswende #79	2026-09-22
🇮🇹	Catania	Piazza Roma, Catania (Punto di incontro)	Mappiamo le piste ciclabili - Catania	2026-09-22
		Building 4A, First Floor - Politecnico di Milano	PoliMappers Maptedì	2026-09-23
🇫🇷	Nantes	Le Wagon Nantes	OpenStreetMap, la carte à la carte !	2026-09-23
🇩🇪	Hannover	Kuriosum	Stammtisch	2026-09-23
🇩🇪	Würzburg	FabLab Würzburg	Würzburger OSM-Treffen	2026-09-23
🇬🇧	City of Westminster	Blue Posts pub	London pub meet-up	2026-09-23
			Pravidelný Missing Maps CZ-SK online Mapathon	2026-09-24
🇧🇷		100% online	🇧🇷 Lançamento de livros sobre mapeamento colaborativo	2026-09-24
🇩🇪	Freiburg im Breisgau	CCCFR, Adlerstr. 12 a, Freiburg/Br.	OSM-Treffen Freiburg/Br.	2026-09-24
🇮🇳	Bengaluru	NIMHANS Convention Center	OSM India @ IndiaFOSS 2026	2026-09-25 - 2026-09-27
			UN Mappers Mappy Hour	2026-09-25
🇲🇽	Torreón	Universidad Tecnológica de Torreón	Conferencia “OpenStreetMap: Datos abiertos y más”	2026-09-25
🇲🇽	Torreón	Universidad Tecnológica de Torreón	Taller “Mapeando mi entorno”	2026-09-25
🇩🇪	Düsseldorf	Online bei https://meet.jit.si/OSM-DUS-2026	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)	2026-09-25
🇩🇪	Karlsruhe	Geofabrik, Amalienstraße 44, 76133 Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend September 2026	2026-09-26 - 2026-09-27
🇫🇷	Nantes	Le Wagon Nantes	OpenStreetMap, la balade de la data	2026-09-26
			Sudan Solidarity Series	2026-09-26
🇸🇪	Uppsala	Datorföreningen Update	Mapping meetup in Uppsala	2026-09-27
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-09-28
🇩🇪	Magdeburg	Netz39 e.V. , Leibnizstraße 32, 39104 Magdeburg	4. OSM Stammtisch Magdeburg	2026-09-29
🇺🇸	Palo Alto	Startup Island Taiwan	South Bay Wiki and OpenStreetMap Meetup	2026-09-29
🇩🇪	Mannheim	RaumZeitLabor, Mannheim	Rhein-Neckar OSM Treffen	2026-09-30
🇫🇷	Angers	L’Arrière Train, 3 rue de Frémur, Angers	Angers Rencontre mensuelle OpenStreetMap	2026-10-01
🇫🇷		Bar Le Schmilblik	Rencontre mensuelle des contributeurs Paris sud	2026-10-01
🇮🇹	Messina	Fablab Messina (via Croce Rossa 63, 98124 Messina)	Hackathon Wikimedia & OSM	2026-10-02 - 2026-10-04
🇩🇪	Essen	Linuxhotel Essen	FOSSGIS-OSM-Communitytreffen Nr. 26 im Linuxhotel	2026-10-02 - 2026-10-04
🇪🇸	Langreo	Casa de la Cultura “Escuelas Dorado”	GeoCamp 2026	2026-10-03
🇮🇳	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India - Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-10-03
🇩🇪	Essen	Verkehrs- und Umweltzentrum	Essen OSM-Treffen	2026-10-03
🇹🇼	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #93	2026-10-05

This weeklyOSM was produced by Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, HeiGIT, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

03/09/2026-09/09/2026

Mapping

• Voting has started on the lgbtq=* proposal and is open until and including 19 September.

Mapping campaigns

• In a talk at State of the Map 2026, Enock Seth Nyamador explained how massive mapathon campaigns carried out by paid mappers affiliated with large companies or organisations could potentially ‘kill’ the OpenStreetMap movement in Ghana.

Community

• [1] The editors at weeklyOSM don’t just collect and write articles to keep you as well informed as possible about the OSM universe; they also map , some with such great success. We would like to offer our warmest congratulations to @ediyes, from our Spanish team, on this achievement! With her Peruvian team , Edith came second , behind the Guatemalan team .

• rphyrin explained the situation around Jakarta following the recent Anak Krakatau eruption, while showing how OpenStreetMap data is being used in an early warning system to alert people about the areas expected to be affected by volcanic ash. Anak Krakatau, meaning ‘child of Krakatau’, is an active volcano in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra that emerged from the caldera left by the catastrophic 1883 Krakatau eruption, which killed an estimated 35,000 people.

Local chapter news

• Katja Haferkorn reported ► that the FOSSGIS e.V. networking meeting took place on 2 September, with 25 participants joining the online networking platform. The next networking meeting will be held on 9 December 2026.

Events

• Are you a Stadia Maps customer? They just announced that they’re sponsoring local meet-ups to align with their core values of providing fair, transparent treatment for developers.

• Christoph Hormann shared a general commentary on the State of the Map 2026 conference in Paris, which he had recently attended.

• State of the Map Asia 2026 was held in Osaka, Japan, on 6 and 7 September.

OSM research

• Maurizio Napolitano wrote ► about ‘Stress in bici’, an experimental map based on OpenStreetMap that shows bicycle routes in Italy, colour-coded according to stress level. The development of the platform is also described in a research paper, ‘TS-BikePlan: A Data-Driven Tool for Enhancing Cycling Infrastructure and Safety’, published in the Journal of Urban Technology .

• Giuliano Cornacchia et al. have studied the recommended routes given by software navigation services and found out that as adoption increases, route diversity declines. Further, traffic and emissions converge onto fewer roads leading to lesser benefits (which eventually turn negative over a certain threshold) in terms of CO₂ emissions and traffic load. For the purposes of this study, the road networks were sourced from OpenStreetMap.

• The OSM Road Monitor team presented their work at SotM 2026 in Paris. By combining community-driven mapping with independent Earth observation data, the project aims to support more reliable and timely road information.

Maps

• Continuing the discussion around the recent UN shift from the Mercator to the Equal Earth projection, the OpenStreetMap community on Reddit has started discussing whether OSM should make the switch as well. Meanwhile, back in 2025, also prompted by a discussion about OSM map projections, Andy Townsend had already shown us that anyone can render OSM data in whatever projection they want.

• Mathias has published a map, ‘Polizeikarte’ , which brings together public press releases from German police authorities. It shows around 63,600 incidents from 260 locations across 14 federal states. Geocoding is handled by Nominatim, whilst the visualisation is provided by MapLibre GL JS using tiles from OpenFreeMap. Official reference layers can be overlaid, such as the accident atlas from the statistical offices, which contains 585,815 accidents from 2018 to 2025. The project is non-commercial and is not affiliated with any public authority.

Open Data

• Iconem has recently updated terrain-viewer, an app made to ingest, style, and render open-data terrain-sources for relief visualisation, feature detection, and mapping! They’re using it to detect archaeological sites, and there is some overlap with mapping landmarks within OSM from terrain sources, whether public worldwide like Mapterhorn, or national, since the tool can ingest custom national mapping agencies data sources.

Software

• Stadia Maps explained the distinction between forward geocoding and reverse geocoding and how choosing the right endpoint and parameters can make a big difference for any application.

• Strongly motivated by the urge to avoid getting a speeding ticket, Moonshot Studios GmbH have developed YouSpeed, a mobile intelligent speed-assistance app powered by OpenStreetMap speed-limit tags, area context, and daily diffs. Other apps of Moonshot Studios include Woladen (where to charge your electric car) and Tankzeit (best time to fuel up your car).

• rphyrin has made ‘ivebeen_here’, a platform for OSM users to share their personal stories about particular places.

Programming

• Agasta08 published the full report for their 2026 Google Summer of Code project, ‘Category Support in Nominatim’, thanking mentors Sarah Hoffmann and Marc Tobias, as well as OpenCage for sponsoring the development server used for the planet-scale database setup. Agasta explained how the category model has been implemented in Nominatim.

• Inspired by a discussion at the recent State of the Map, rphyrin tried out ‘Photon’, an open-source geocoder built for OpenStreetMap data, and built a custom front end that allows users to copy the coordinates of search results.

Releases

• OsmAnd released version 5.4 for iOS with a redesigned My Places interface, a rebuilt Plan a Route tool, and a new Astronomy plugin. The Android release came with a refreshed Search UI, the ability to attach media to Favorites, and 3D Buildings with roof shapes.

• Altilunium LocationPad v26.9.5 has been released – a web app for marking, labeling, and revisiting places on an OpenStreetMap-based map.

• Sourtest v26.9.6 has been released.

• The August 2026 release of Organic Maps has been released, introducing several new features, including multi-selection for bookmarks and tracks, a CarPlay dashboard, the ability to hide tracks on the map, and more readable share links.

Did you know that …

• … the recent ChatGPT update can now show OpenStreetMap-based map data based on your chat query, complete with proper OpenStreetMap attribution?

OSM in the media

• Brian Bergstrom has launched Dulcet GIS, a podcast about cartography and civic mapping. The first episode covers the UN General Assembly’s adoption of the Equal Earth projection and sets it alongside the executive order renaming Lake Ontario, noting that OpenStreetMap was the only major map that did not change the name. The episode explained the on the ground rule and how disputed names are handled in the data model, and closed by pointing listeners to OSM-based apps and to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.

• The latest event of the Ingolstadt Citizens’ Network was held ► on Sunday 6 September, focusing on the theme ‘Navigation using OpenStreetMap data’. The event demonstrated how OpenStreetMap can be used in everyday life, which apps are based on it, and how people can contribute to improving the maps themselves. The event was free and open to everyone, with no prior knowledge required.

Other “geo” things

• The United Nations General Assembly has voted by an overwhelming majority in favour of adopting a world map based on the 2018 Equal Earth projection, which more accurately reflects the actual size of countries and continents, moving away from the Mercator projection. In New York, 164 states voted in favour of the resolution, which was sponsored by Togo and backed by the African Union. The United States was the only country to vote against ► it, describing the initiative as an ‘ideological agenda’. Six countries abstained.

• Scientists, led by space physicist Endawoke Yizengaw of The Aerospace Corporation in the US, have discovered that the solar flares of 11 November 2025 caused widespread, coast-to-coast disturbances in the atmosphere across the continental US. The disturbances could potentially throw GNSS positioning off by more than 10 metres in some places, the researchers say, significant enough to disrupt precision agriculture and autonomous vehicles.

• After announcing that Lake Ontario would continue to be called that on their maps, the MapQuest app went to number one for navigation on the iOS App Store in the US.

• Maggie Downs, of the BBC, visited Vienna’s Globe Museum, the only public museum in the world dedicated entirely to globes.

• Oliver Bünte, of Heise, reported that the US Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit has tested a quantum sensor-based flight navigation system over the Pacific that allows an aircraft’s position to be determined precisely without relying on GNSS. Instead of relying on signals from navigation satellites, the system detects changes in the Earth’s natural magnetic field and creates a magnetic field map from these measurements. Based on this map, the system can determine an aircraft’s position entirely independently of GNSS signals, weather, and visibility conditions.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
🇩🇰	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-09-13
🇬🇧	Greater London	1 Cabot Square, 7th Floor, Canary Wharf E14 4QJ	EAW Volunteering Event	2026-09-14
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-09-14
🇪🇸	Madrid	Online	Mappy Hour OSM España	2026-09-15
			Missing Maps London Mid-Month for Advanced Mappers (no training provided) (Online) [eng]	2026-09-15
🇺🇸	San Francisco	Near BART 24th St. Mission station	Bay Area WikiSalon	2026-09-15
🇫🇷	Lyon	Tubà	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon	2026-09-15
🇩🇪	Bonn	Dotty’s	204. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn	2026-09-15
🇩🇪	Chemnitz	Kaffeesatz, Chemnitz	OSM-Stammtisch Chemnitz	2026-09-15
🇦🇹	Stainach-Pürgg	Online	22. Österreichischer OSM-Stammtisch (online)	2026-09-15
🇺🇸	San Jose	Online	South Bay Map Night	2026-09-15
🇩🇪		Online	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)	2026-09-15
🇨🇭	St. Gallen	Rosenbergstrasse 59, 9000 St.Gallen	Map The Climate! Ein Mapathon	2026-09-16
🇫🇷		MJC de vienne	Réunion du groupe local de Vienne	2026-09-16
🇩🇪	Köln	Lokal K, Hackländer Straße 2, Köln-Ehrenfeld	OSM Stammtisch Köln	2026-09-16
🇫🇷	Nantes		COntrib’atelier	2026-09-16
🇺🇸	San Francisco	Et al.	A Synesthete’s Atlas: Cartographic Improvisations Between Eric Theise, Gusty Winds May Exist, Ron Heglin, and Petra Zélie	2026-09-16
🇩🇪	Karlsruhe	Schwarzer Kater	Stammtisch Karlsruhe	2026-09-16
🇩🇪	Kiel	Kieler Innovations- und Technologiezentrum	OSM auf der Kielux 2026	2026-09-18 - 2026-09-19
			OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting	2026-09-18
🇮🇹	Catania	Centro Atena, via Fimia 34, 95128 Catania (CT)	Modifichiamo Wiki e OSM insieme! - Catania	2026-09-18
🇮🇳	Mumbai	Lokhandwala Garden, Andheri	OSM Mumbai Mapping Party No.14 (Andheri)	2026-09-19
🇮🇳	Delhi	Too Mikkii Tapas, South Extension	OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.31 (South Extension)	2026-09-20
🇪🇸	Madrid	Online	Mappy Hour OSM España	2026-09-22
🇬🇧	Derby	The Brunswick, Railway Terrace, Derby	East Midlands pub meet-up	2026-09-22
🇩🇪	Berlin	Online	OSM-Verkehrswende #79	2026-09-22
🇮🇹	Catania	Piazza Roma, Catania (Punto di incontro)	Mappiamo le piste ciclabili - Catania	2026-09-22
🇫🇷	Nantes	Le Wagon Nantes	OpenStreetMap, la carte à la carte !	2026-09-23
🇩🇪	Hannover	Kuriosum	Stammtisch	2026-09-23
🇩🇪	Würzburg	FabLab Würzburg	Würzburger OSM-Treffen	2026-09-23
🇬🇧	City of Westminster	Blue Posts pub	London pub meet-up	2026-09-23
			Pravidelný Missing Maps CZ-SK online Mapathon	2026-09-24
🇧🇷		100% online	🇧🇷 Lançamento de livros sobre mapeamento colaborativo	2026-09-24
🇩🇪	Freiburg im Breisgau	CCCFR, Adlerstr. 12 a, Freiburg/Br.	OSM-Treffen Freiburg/Br.	2026-09-24
🇮🇳	Bengaluru	NIMHANS Convention Center	OSM India @ IndiaFOSS 2026	2026-09-25 - 2026-09-27
			UN Mappers Mappy Hour	2026-09-25
🇲🇽	Torreón	Universidad Tecnológica de Torreón	Conferencia “OpenStreetMap: Datos abiertos y más”	2026-09-25
🇲🇽	Torreón	Universidad Tecnológica de Torreón	Taller “Mapeando mi entorno”	2026-09-25
🇩🇪	Düsseldorf	Online bei https://meet.jit.si/OSM-DUS-2026	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)	2026-09-25
🇩🇪	Karlsruhe	Geofabrik, Amalienstraße 44, 76133 Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend September 2026	2026-09-26 - 2026-09-27
🇫🇷	Nantes	Le Wagon Nantes	OpenStreetMap, la balade de la data	2026-09-26
			Sudan Solidarity Series	2026-09-26
🇸🇪	Uppsala	Datorföreningen Update	Mapping meetup in Uppsala	2026-09-27
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-09-28

This weeklyOSM was produced by MarcoR, MatthiasMatthias, Rob Yoegel, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred, tkk.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

27/08/2026-02/09/2026

Mapping campaigns

• Hiki introduced the Deutsche Bahn Metadata Cleanup project, an effort to improve the quality of OpenStreetMap data around German railway stations.

• Denmark’s OpenStreetMap community has made mapping accessible parking spaces its September 2026 project, encouraging contributors to survey and add missing spaces nationwide to improve the country’s free accessibility data.

Community

• Bigbug21 blogged on the current state of defibrillator mapping in OpenStreetMap, concluding that much has been achieved, but there is still plenty of work to be done.

• While attending State of the Map 2026, Juminet noticed a decline in the influence of big tech companies within OpenStreetMap, suggesting a shift back toward the volunteer contributions that formed the heart of the project in its early days. This contrasted with his experience at State of the Map 2018, when major technology companies were investing heavily in OpenStreetMap mapping.

• Anne-Karoline Distel showed how to map disused fish weirs on OpenStreetMap.

• Rawaz has mapped population data from Iraq’s 2024 census onto OSM administrative boundaries, covering admin levels 2 through 6.

• rphyrin praised Stylus Labs Maps after SotM 2026 as the best mobile OpenStreetMap vector map app they have tried.

• rphyrin plans to share his experiences from attending the global State of the Map 2026 online. He is still writing about the first day, with the remaining days a work in progress.

• Vishal Kumar shared several insights on the role of AI in mapping, from State of the Map US 2026, held 11 to 13 June.

Local chapter news

• OpenStreetMap US has published its August 2026 monthly newsletter, featuring the OSM US team heading to Paris for State of the Map 2026, an upcoming September Mappy Hour in collaboration with Foursquare, and the announcement of its newest Charter Project, OldInsuranceMaps.

Events

• [1] Volker Krause wrote about his attendance at SotM 2026 in Paris.

• A 360° version of the SotM2026 group photo is now online on Panoramax!

• The official PeerTube channel of State of the Map 2026 can be found here.

• Muki Haklay has shared his impressions of attending State of the Map 2026 in Paris. Muki, Professor of Geographical Information Science at the UCL Department of Geography, won the IEEE Pervasive Computing’s Test of Time Award for his 2008 paper on OpenStreetMap.

Education

• Lucy Kago reported, as a UN Mappers’ ambassador, that UN Mappers Kenya has completed its first ever Youth Climate Mapping Externship, a seven-week virtual programme designed to equip young Kenyans with real geospatial tools and apply them to climate challenges in Nairobi. Nineteen university students participated in the programme. The initiative had the support of IVIDES DATA (as a full sponsor), GeoMind Solutions and Geospatial Developers (as technical partners), and Community Mappers Kibera (as community partner). You can see the results on the UN Mappers’ blog.

Humanitarian OSM

• HOTOSM interviewed the CoMaps team about how the app was used to help rescuers after the earthquakes in Venezuela.

Maps

• Cody Blatt has created DepthScout, a depth-mapping platform designed to aid fishing, which uses shoreline data from OpenStreetMap.

• Map4 has released a free trial version, limited to 50 queries per day, of their US telecom fibre intelligence dashboard, built on top of OpenStreetMap basemap data.

• The Plataforma latinoamericana y del caribe por la justicia climática (Latin American and Caribbean platform for climate justice) maintains ► a uMap for mapping ‘false solutions’ to the climate crisis, those which claim to advance the protection of the planet and its inhabitants through approaches that include deception, technical shortcomings, so-called technological innovation, and rhetoric but which perpetuate consumption and the hoarding of wealth as we know it. The initiative is a collaboration ► of organisations from 15 Latin American countries.

OSM in action

• The California Ocean and Coastal Monitoring Inventory is an interactive dashboard of ocean and coastal monitoring programmes operating within 12 nautical miles of the California coast, using basemap data from OpenStreetMap.

Open Data

• The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre tooted that it is making its archive of Landsat data accessible ►, with support from the Technical University of Munich and the German Aerospace Centre.

Software

• Ashuttl has made linecast, a free open-source collection of terminal apps for weather, radar, sunshine, moon data, tides, and maps that uses public data sources including OpenStreetMap-derived vector data.

• Inspired by a recent Mapterhorn talk at State of the Map 2026, rphyrin has developed a web app that accepts coordinates pasted from JOSM and displays an interactive 3D terrain visualisation. The app can help JOSM users better understand the three-dimensional geographic context of the area they are currently mapping.

Programming

• Developer NameError has built Draw.city, a US geography game where players draw circles on a map to estimate populations and explore census demographics and OpenStreetMap points of interest.

• rphyrin has experimented with Sourdough to build a mobile-friendly vector map that treats roads uniformly and prioritises displaying as many mapped points of interest as possible, especially at high zoom levels.

• An agentic bot (Claude Code) ’explained’ ‘its’ approach to filling in Belgium’s national secondary road route relations on OpenStreetMap in an OSM Diary entry. The community’s response to the edits can be judged from the posts in the OSM Community forum thread.

Did you know that …

• … a curated collection of all European E-roads, an international network of major roads connecting countries across Europe, is mapped in OSM?

Other “geo” things

• Natsuhei Eno, a Senior Policy Officer at the Tokyo Foundation, published an article on the Foundation’s blog discussing what supports regional information infrastructure. Featuring Associate Professor Yasuyuki Matsumoto , of Setsunan University, who researches civic activities using OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia (such as Wikipedia Town and mapping parties), the article highlighted the importance of citizens participating not merely as recipients but as contributors to local information.

• Ryan Christoffel reported that Apple Maps is now showing advertisements to their customers; they will appear both as suggested places in the map and in the search result list with a little blue ‘ad’ text next to them.

• Kaio Bárbara has developed climateBR, a software package that provides tools for downloading, processing, and analysing historical meteorological data from Brazil’s National Institute of Meteorology.

• Science Daily reported that NASA has successfully tested a system that allows satellites to navigate without GNSS by using other spacecraft and debris as landmarks in orbit.

• Neha Arora and Aboudy Kreidieh, of Google Research, reported that coordinating a small fraction of navigation routes in Google Maps can measurably improve driving speeds and reduce emissions across an entire city.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India - Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-09-05
	大阪市	中崎町ホール Nakazakicho HALL, Salon de AmanTo天人 (Osaka)	State of the Map Asia 2026	2026-09-06 - 2026-09-07
	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #92	2026-09-07
	Madrid	Online	Mappy Hour OSM España	2026-09-08
	Braunschweig	Stratum 0	Braunschweiger Mappertreffen im Stratum 0 Hackerspace	2026-09-08
	Hamburg	Voraussichtlich: “Variable”, Karolinenstraße 23	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2026-09-08
		temporärhaus	OSM-Stammtisch Ulm/Neu-Ulm	2026-09-08
	Tours	Étape 84	Rencontre locale de Touraine	2026-09-09
	Berlin	Kastanienallee 7-9, 10435 Berlin	219. OSM-Stammtisch Berlin-Brandenburg	2026-09-10
	München	WikiMUC	Münchner OSM-Treffen	2026-09-10
	Bochum	Das Labor, Alleestraße 50, Bochum	OSM-Treffen Bochum	2026-09-10
	Zürich		191. OSM-Stammtisch Zürich	2026-09-11
	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-09-13
	Delhi	Too Mikki Tapas, South Extension	OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.32 (South Extension)	2026-09-13
	Greater London	1 Cabot Square, 7th Floor, Canary Wharf E14 4QJ	EAW Volunteering Event	2026-09-14
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-09-14
			Missing Maps London Mid-Month for Advanced Mappers (no training provided) (Online) [eng]	2026-09-15
	San Francisco	Near BART 24th St. Mission station	Bay Area WikiSalon	2026-09-15
	Lyon	Tubà	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon	2026-09-15
	San Jose	Online	South Bay Map Night	2026-09-15
	Chemnitz	Kaffeesatz, Chemnitz	OSM-Stammtisch Chemnitz	2026-09-15
	Bonn	Dotty’s	204. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn	2026-09-15
	Stainach-Pürgg	Online	22. Österreichischer OSM-Stammtisch (online)	2026-09-15
		Online	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)	2026-09-15
	St. Gallen	Rosenbergstrasse 59, 9000 St.Gallen	Map The Climate! Ein Mapathon	2026-09-16
	Köln	Lokal K, Hackländer Straße 2, Köln-Ehrenfeld	OSM Stammtisch Köln	2026-09-16
	Nantes		COntrib’atelier	2026-09-16
		MJC de vienne	Réunion du groupe local de Vienne	2026-09-16
	Kiel	Kieler Innovations- und Technologiezentrum	OSM auf der Kielux 2026	2026-09-18 - 2026-09-19

This weeklyOSM was produced by MarcoR, MatthiasMatthias, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred, mcliquid.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

20/08/2026-26/08/2026

Mapping

• In early August, v7.1.0 of the iD tagging schema was released, bringing new features to iD, GoMap!!, EveryDoor, and other editors. It includes multiple new presets (for example, for rooftop solar thermal collectors and building=tent), marks some fields as openinghours-like, new values in fields such as cuisine, some region-specific tweaks, many better icons, fixes destination fields, and stops asking translators to translate the same phrase twice in many places, also better documentation, better repository structure, and many other improvements.

Community

• A poll by Mateusz Konieczny asks which improvements to iD presets are especially wanted.

• Sven Geggus discussed how to integrate data from Nomady, an Airbnb-like booking portal for small private campsites, into OpenStreetMap and OpenCampingMap.

• Rphyrin prepared for the State of the Map 2026, which took place in Paris and online from 28 to 30 August 2026.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OpenStreetMap Foundation announced that Proton AG has been recognised as a Platinum Corporate Member, following two donations over the past two years, totalling around €70,000.

Local chapter news

• FOSSGIS tooted that the FOSSGIS Conference is seeking a host venue for 2028. Interested parties can submit applications to host FOSSGIS 2028 by email until 16 October 2026. They also welcome expressions of interest in hosting future events, such as FOSSGIS 2029 or FOSSGIS 2030.

• OpenStreetMap US announced that the OldInsuranceMaps project has joined YouthMappers, Yesterdays, and OpenHistoricalMap as an OSM US Charter Project.

Events

• ^[1] You can visit the page featuring the amazing posters which are being presented at State of the Map 2026.

OSM research

• Radim Štampach et al. have assessed the performance of the fAIr mapping environment (we reported earlier) compared with manual mapping in JOSM. They concluded that fAIr reduced the performance gap between novice and experienced contributors but introduced AI-related errors, while manual mapping in JOSM was faster and more accurate overall.

Maps

• Mobi Mapr built ► a visual dashboard to analyse the accessibility of ice cream parlours in Germany, using OpenStreetMap data.

OSM in action

• OK Lab Flensburg have developed ‘Open City Planner’, an interactive city planning GIS application for Flensburg’s city centre, powered by OpenStreetMap data.

Software

• The Prototype Fund is offering a new funding line aimed at young individual developers or small teams residing in Europe, focusing on open-source software infrastructure or data security.

• Stadia Maps explained their initiative around reworking their cartography from the ground up. There are some details about their recent overhaul of water name labeling.

Programming

• Yassa9 explained how to geolocate a photograph using OpenStreetMap data, geometry analysis, and CUDA GPU programming.

Did you know that …

• … the Valhalla router can route through pedestrian areas? OSRM has it too; after a pull request, which started in May 2025, was recently merged.

• …. r/Fahrrad invited the German cycling community on Reddit to improve the data quality of Komoot, Strava, and Bikerouter by contributing to OpenStreetMap through the StreetComplete app?

• … there’s a discussion on the OSM Wiki about mapping the Moon using the same principles as OpenStreetMap?

OSM in the media

• Ivan Nechaev, of Georgia Today, reported that the Georgian OpenStreetMap community worked online with 2025 aerial imagery from the National Agency of Public Registry, tracing buildings, checking roads, and adding addresses in Ambrolauri (western Georgia) and the surrounding area.

Other “geo” things

• The Iconoclasistas celebrated 20 years of participatory mapping ►.

• Radio France Internationale reported ► on the digitalisation of documents (including maps, documents, and photos) related to the historic mineral exploration in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which are archived in the AfricaMuseum. According to François Kervyn, a geologist and head of the museum’s Earth Sciences department, the documents were previously available only by special order for researchers, but digitisation is expected to make them more accessible.

• Shachar Maidenbaum has published a study analysing how Israel’s military GNSS spoofing tactics affect local people, eliciting reactions ranging from navigation apps being disrupted, to grocery deliveries being directed out of the country, and users of dating apps matching with people across borders.

• Jennifer Ouellette, of Ars Technica, reported that Japanese researchers have developed the muometric positioning system, an alternative to GNSS that uses cosmic-ray muons instead of radio signals. Muons are highly penetrating, charged particles constantly reaching Earth’s surface from different directions. By placing synchronised muon detectors at multiple locations and comparing the timing and directions of the same muons passing through them, the system can determine their relative positions. This could enable positioning underground, indoors, and underwater, where radio signals cannot penetrate effectively.

• NDR reported that Laura Hantschel, Lukas Hort, Annika Neumann, and Clara Mülle of ‘Pipapo Games’ have developed MapMap, a cartography-themed puzzle game, during their studies. The gaming community has responded enthusiastically to its release, noting a sudden emerging trend of cartography-themed games. They mentioned another recent example, ‘Beware of the Cartographer’, which focuses on mapping a mysterious land during the Age of Enlightenment, drawing borders between two warring kingdoms, meeting the locals, and balancing their demands with the requirements of the mission (we reported earlier).

• Duan Yuanqiang and others have updated their S2Coast-2023 dataset (version 3), the first global 10 m resolution coastline dataset derived from enhanced Sentinel-2 composite imagery, under a CC-BY 4.0 International licence. There are polyline and polygon features, modelled tide data for some places, and coastal examples. The OSM coastline dataset was used for validation. The article was published in Remote Sensing of Environment.

• Jules Rumeau has developed Scopus, an HD LiDAR viewer using IGN data that runs entirely in the browser. For a given area, the tool calculates the terrain hidden beneath vegetation and displays it side-by-side with aerial photography. Sunken lanes, low stone walls, ruined huts, and other features obscured by trees in standard imagery become visible within seconds.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
		Cité Descartes	State of the Map 2026	2026-08-28 - 2026-08-30
	Essen	Verkehrs- und Umweltzentrum	Essen OSM-Treffen	2026-08-28
	Bengaluru	Nagarabhavi	OSM Bengaluru Mapping Party	2026-08-29
	Jalpaiguri	Kadamtala Madrasa Math, DBC Road, Jalpaiguri	14th OpenStreetMap West Bengal Mapping Party + AnkushTheHero Day	2026-08-30
		Gurukripa, Sion	OSM Mumbai Mapping Party No.14 (Sion)	2026-08-30
	Uppsala	Datorföreningen Update	Mapping meetup in Uppsala	2026-08-30
	Hannover	Kuriosum	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover	2026-08-31
	Saint-Étienne	Zoomacom	Rencontre Saint-Étienne et sud Loire	2026-08-31
	Heidelberg	DEZERNAT#16	Rhein-Neckar OSM Treffen	2026-08-31
	Salzburg	Bewohnerservice Elisabeth-Vorstadt	OSM-Treffpunkt	2026-09-01
	Münster	BRASSERIE Münster	OSM-Stammtisch Münster	2026-09-01
	San Jose	Online	South Bay Map Night	2026-09-01
			Missing Maps London Mapathon Beginner Friendly (with Training) (Online) [eng]	2026-09-01
	Brno		Kvartální OSM pivo - SOTM/2 CZ [Brno]	2026-09-02
	Praha	Přírodovědná fakulta Univerzity Karlovy	SOTM/2 CZ	2026-09-02
			OSM Indoor Meetup	2026-09-02
	Stuttgart	Biergarten Tschechen & Söhne	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen	2026-09-02
	Bordeaux	Aquilenet, 20 Rue Tourat, 33000 Bordeaux	Rentrée bordelaise du groupe local OpenStreetMap	2026-09-03
	Angers	L’Arrière Train, 3 rue de Frémur, Angers	Angers Rencontre mensuelle OpenStreetMap	2026-09-03
		Bar Le Schmilblik	Rencontre mensuelle des contributeurs Paris sud	2026-09-03
	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India - Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-09-05
	Osaka	中崎町ホール Nakazakicho HALL, Salon de AmanTo天人 (Osaka)	State of the Map Asia 2026	2026-09-06 - 2026-09-07
	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #92	2026-09-07
	Braunschweig	Stratum 0	Braunschweiger Mappertreffen im Stratum 0 Hackerspace	2026-09-08
	Madrid	Online	Mappy Hour OSM España	2026-09-08
	Hamburg	Voraussichtlich: “Variable”, Karolinenstraße 23	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2026-09-08
		temporärhaus	OSM-Stammtisch Ulm/Neu-Ulm	2026-09-08
	München	WikiMUC	Münchner OSM-Treffen	2026-09-10
	Bochum	Das Labor, Alleestraße 50, Bochum	OSM-Treffen Bochum	2026-09-10
	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-09-13
	New Delhi	Outside Delhi	OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.32 (Outside Delhi)	2026-09-13
	Greater London	1 Cabot Square, 7th Floor, Canary Wharf E14 4QJ	EAW Volunteering Event	2026-09-14
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-09-14

This weeklyOSM was produced by MarcoR, Mateusz Konieczny, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.