Adding hotels along my route in Nevada/Calif. trip

-Lowry Park Zoo Tampa, FL - Took GPS tracks of trails and other features in the zoo & the park. A few others have modified and added to my work to make this area really accurate and useful.

-Al Lopez Park - Tampa FL - Took GPS tracks of trails and features. Also add the pavilion / shelter numbers. This map is much more useful than the city maps. Someone could potentially make a great app for one of the cancer walks, or other events they have in the park using this data.

-Other parks in Tampa - McFarland & the Downtown park where the Bro Bowl is.

-Water Features - this is my my largest contribution to the OSM community. From a cartographic perspective, adding more blue onto basemaps makes them look better. I have experimented with several options, and it appears the best way to do this is to start with the SWFWMD LU data and select out the FLUCFCS codes that are water. Then bring this shape into OSM and make them permanent. If anyone would like to help with this enormous undertaking hit me up and I will help get you started. I can provide a zip file of the selected LU. I also plan on doing wetlands.

Completed of the Queens and Brooklyn local bus routes and many fill-ins and a couple of error corrections. Bus routes also include non-revenue turnarounds not listed directly on maps as any research would indicate. Please let me know (and/or edit) any obvious errors I may have made.

Will probably review my work and other existing work for accuracy and to reflect any changes since the info was originally entered. Hopefully I didn't screw up too bad.

Pinhal Grande new updates and also asked for city streets to Agudo, Itaara and Polesine city halls

Streets of Lassance, OlhosDAgua added and corrected some roads in MG

We all know that while we have over a million, actually over 1.2 million now, user accounts, the number of actual contributors is quite a bit lower. Often you will see a number of 200'000 quoted, however that only considers the last editor of an object and not all the editors.

Analysing the mid May 2013 changeset dump gives a total of 335'000 unique user ids that have created a changeset. We can see this number increasing more or linearly in recent years:

Over the last 12 months we have averaged roughly 7'000 new contributors per month, in total a good 80'000 per year:

The numbers only take half of May in to account so it is too early to see if the announcement of the iD editor will already have a noticeable effect. In the long run we hope for a clear increase in the number of account holders actually contributing.

Been trying the (new) iD editor. Very nice.

Is it bad form to write 2 diary entries in one day? Possibly. But the network drives in the office have conked out, and it's Friday afternoon, and I have this all ready to go, so what the hell.

London's lost rivers have fascinated me ever since I first read about them, and since I started cycling in London the contours have fascinated me too. Finding a way to visualise these things was what first got me into OSM (via Maperitive), but I never found the time to finish the job to a reasonable standard. So here's a first attempt, see what you think:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dfisher81/8746062959/

Croydon takes a lot of stick -- it was heavily bombed during the war, with any remaining traditional aesthetics being destroyed in the '60s under a council masterplan to establish it as a centre of commerce. It's a "working-class" town in unfashionable South London, with high levels of poverty, and of course was hit by rioting in 2011.

But it's also cheap (for London) and easy to get around, generally friendly, and has various places of interest if you know where to look. It also has a number of local blogs and webpages, including the excellent Completists' Guide run by Kake Pugh (http://croydon.randomness.org.uk -- a sometime OSM contributor herself I think). As you can see if you click through, it's a treasure trove of POI info. So instead of gathering POIs from scratch, I've been able to print off details from the site to take with me on surveys, making notes where needed (kinda like Walking Papers). I've now added building and shop info for all of central Croydon, with only London Road (aka West Croydon aka Broad Green) to go.

With a new shopping centre and various "public realm improvements" planned, hopefully the town is on the up, and maybe OSM (and the Completists' Guide) can help in some way, who knows.

There are quite a few ways in the database which are passing by several times the same point. Such an example: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/191420773

There are lot of those in this area, but I've such seen a ways a bit everywhere in the map. It seems like it's pretty easy to do with Potlatch, and really hard to fix :-/

Anyway, is there a tool to fix such a way? Or maybe someone has a tip on how to fix them easily?

Cycle route stats

In an effort to calculate some cycle route stats in Scotland for this weekend's cycling protest called Pedal on Parliament, I created a cycle stats website.

It uses an R script to download the latest data from fabulous Geofabrik, it then cookie cuts .osm Scotland into MSP constituencies. The boundary data is from OS Open Data (simplified and processed into polylines in QGIS). The .osm data is converted into data.frames and analysed using osmar library for cycle route relations and ways.

There are more than a few assumptions and hacks in the process and some unexpected results.

Basically, I think I'm asking a bit too much of the osmar library and I need to try a database approach. But it works - kind of.

website

source code

Just a preview of what I'm working on right now

Traced the building footprints of HOT task. I uploaded without comments.

Got bored with doing postboxen now. I'm as confused as h**l about FMR's ever-changing bus routes, and their strange geometry. I've started to do the 43 route from Malvern to Upton s/ Severn, but I can't get the hang of relations. Specifically, how do I get a relation marked as "incomplete" (or does this mean "incompletely downloaded"?)? How to do spurs/loops ? How to accommodate a one-way loop where both directions of a route appear to go in the same direction ? How to accommodate the situation where a route serves the same roads/stops in the same direction on the same trip ? (There's one bus route here which serves one stop, dives into a housing estate, and emerges and serves the same stop again; sometimes the drivers go round and round this loop all day, until they reach escape velocity.)

Hentet JOSM editoren til min Linux computer.

Første waypoint er Bålplads ved waterway i Lyngby Åmose fra UU gruppens kanotur dt2011-08-03.

For details of railway lines including internal official names see:- http://www.networkrail.co.uk/aspx/10563.aspx

subs:- http://www.networkrail.co.uk/browse%20documents/sectional%20appendix/anglia%20sectional%20appendix.pdf http://www.networkrail.co.uk/browse%20documents/sectional%20appendix/kent%20sussex%20wessex%20sectional%20appendix.pdf http://www.networkrail.co.uk/browse%20documents/sectional%20appendix/london%20north%20eastern%20sectional%20appendix.pdf http://www.networkrail.co.uk/browse%20documents/sectional%20appendix/london%20north%20western%20north%20sectional%20appendix.pdf http://www.networkrail.co.uk/browse%20documents/sectional%20appendix/london%20north%20western%20south%20sectional%20appendix.pdf http://www.networkrail.co.uk/browse%20documents/sectional%20appendix/scotland%20sectional%20appendix.pdf http://www.networkrail.co.uk/browse%20documents/sectional%20appendix/western%20sectional%20appendix.pdf

These documents are large and based on the electronic updating version described in the first link.

The general availability of these documents seems to change as people in the business are pushed to use the databank version rather than the pdf editions .

The contents changes with operational changes but much of the route names, for areas not permanently modified after railway works, stay pretty stable. info junctions and some signal names is often also present.

Tomorrow evening we're going mapping around Marble Arch!

This will be a very beginner-friendly introduction to mapping. So if you're in London come along, and tell all your friends. Anyone who's never tried OpenStreetMapping, or curious about other ways of doing it. All you people lurking following @OSMLondon ... Come tomorrow evening!

OSMLondon events have always been wide-open for beginners to come along to, but I'm stressing this aspect in the tomorrows event. This is part of an exciting new event formula in which we alternate "pub meet-ups" and "mapping parties".

Last month we met at the Iron Duke pub with the intention of kicking off the mapping season. This is a good spot for some of the mapping priorities of central London, and I'm pleased that Derick managed to fill in some awesome details around St James Street. For my part I had signed up for a slice of cake to the South, but I spent so long in the office preparing a print-out of building outlines to check... that it go too late so I just went the pub (ohhh! That's cheating!) It was the daylight confusing me.

Outside the pub (in the new evening daylight) the hot topic of conversation was...

An academic paper all about London OpenStreetMap mapping parties! (PDF)

Amazing and slightly weird that these people have analysed this in such detail. It feels a bit like somebody wrote a ten page academic paper about my personal bad habits. It's weird that they do all of this without ever attending a mapping party themselves, but we figured it was a scientific analysis in which the scientist decides to avoid interfering with their subjects!

In judging the participation and retention rates of mapping parties, their data source was raw edit data in OpenStreetMap. Can't argue with that. But the analysis seemed to me to have a few holes. They've looked at the location and times of mapping parties over the years, based on the wiki records. They did observe that in the summer of 2008 we had a lot mapping parties. This was actually a mapping blitz. A "marathon" of epic proportions, with evening mapping happening in far-flung locations, and happening every week. We were filling in obvious gaps in the map at that time. I imagine this yields some clear and easy to correlate editing data. These days there's fewer obvious juicy gaps to tackle. As a result mapping parties have largely been in central London, a bit less frequent, and probably attracting a bit less participation in actual mapping. I like to think that these days London's map attracts more casual localised contributions from people dotted around London. The character of mapping party events has changed massively over the years. I'm not sure if this has been properly accounted for in their analysis.

In analysing edits they used a 48hour time window. Justifying it as follows: "We found that in 40% of mapping parties the peak of activity was on the day of the event, while in 89% of cases the peak activity was within 30 hours after the party. In 99% of cases, the peak activity was within 48 hours, after which the daily edits stabilise to the norm previously observed."

That's pretty interesting, but certainly doesn't fit with my own editing patterns these days. I quite often wait several days before inputting data. Also these days I often add more data (more objects) tracing building outlines in preparation for a mapping evening, with only minor tweaks and additions afterwards. Back in 2008 however, I was probably quite diligent about adding the data in (new streets!) soon after, particularly as we needed to be ready to do it all again the following week! Also back then I imagine that editing activity would have stood out a lot more from the lesser background editing.

So I had those quibbles, however reading on, there's definitely some very thorough and valid approaches. For example "OSM users greatly differ in terms of the amount of contributions they make, and over what timespan. In order to quantify the impact of mapping parties on different types of users, we have grouped them based on the number of contributions they made in the six months prior to each party". So I'll be in their "Group 4" heavy contributors category. They go on to say that these users don't actually get much mapping done at mapping parties "We cross checked the names of some of these contributors against what is publicly available in OSM wikis, and found that many of these users take on organisational roles, visiting an area prior to the party, creating ‘cake diagrams’, and identifying ‘problems’ they wish the party to fix." ...Got me down to a tee. And I think there's quite a few other OSMLondoners who probably managed to wheedle their way into the heavy contributors category despite never really bothering with any mapping at the London events.

These groupings also allowed them to scientifically conclude what we already know, that we suck at retaining newcomers. In this graph we score quite well on retaining experienced mappers (pink and blue), but pretty hopelessly with the newbies (red and grey)

CONCLUSION! "mapping parties do cause an increased editing activity during the events themselves; they also sustain engagement over time, though mostly for already active contributors; however, they largely fail on their third goal of engaging new-comers. After just a week following the party, these users stop contributing to OSM and do not come back to other mapping parties again"

In our huddle of "Group 4" retained mappers outside the Iron Duke pub, we had a good chat about all these things ...then we went for burritos

So it is with these things in mind, that I've shifted the way the events are organised just a little bit. Alternating "pub meet-ups" and "mapping parties" Not a major shift, but half the time we'll just call it what it is, a "pub meet-up" in which people who know each-other are meeting-up. We don't preclude newcomers of course, but we face the fact that it will most likely be the usual crowd (Nothing wrong with that. It's always fun!). But then for the "mapping parties" we try to angle it a little more towards newbies. I'm not under any illusions that this small change will make much difference, but it's probably taking things in the right direction. Also if I can chill out on the promotion effort and the cake diagram drawing effort for some of the events, that will be welcome, and maybe I'll have more time to do better promotion of these less frequent "mapping party" events.... was the plan... but I didn't get much time this time around. Promotion is a job for everyone though. Please reach out to people who may be interested, and pass on the link: http://bit.ly/londonosm9

...and I'll see you tomorrow evening for a beginner-friendly mapping session!

Looks like I’ve been a member for 330 days. Most of my edits have been in Canberra.

Incomplete list of edits:

Added footpaths in local suburb & surroundings (Weston Creek).

Added some green spaces.

Minor fixes of redaction things when it happened.

Parliamentary Triangle. Including memorials in Kings Park/Commonwealth Park. Surveyed Nerang Pool surroundings.

Named landmarks around lake e.g. Rond Terraces, Kurrajong Point, RG Menzies Walk, Aspen Island etc.

Parliament House grounds. Including all (AFAIK) water coolers.

Charles Sturt University.

Governor General’s residence (Government House).

Lake Burley Griffin circuit. Including most water coolers.

Also Yerrabi Ponds, Tuggeranong Lake and Lake Ginninderra circuits.

Circularising roundabouts—including State Circle and Capital Circle.

Retagged all ACT nature reserves (AFAIK).

Naming some residential areas e.g. apartment blocks, and also the local shops in several suburbs (incomplete).

Office areas in Deakin (surroundings of John James Hospital, and south of Alfred Deaking High).

Swinger Hill

Adding dog parks.

Realigned Forest Drive and added some new National Arboretum features.

Minor Canberra University edits.

Parking aisles here and there.

Latest project: surveying, drawing, consolidating, and cleaning up all Canberra off-road signed cyclepaths. I did this for the area south of the lake, then for Lake Burley Griffin itself. Most recently, I’m trying to fix up the northwest (Belconnen to Dunlop) and northeast (Gungahlin) areas. Currently fixing up Harrison. There could be some places I’ve missed, particularly the inner-south, ANU and Fyshwick areas. That may have to wait till after our winter.

I am not able to find a tool to tag a photograph of a particular location/feature in openstreetmap edit environment. please help