I decided to spend some time mapping on OpenStreetMap after starting at Mapbox to help build better mapping tools later. After having show and tells with Mapbox buddies, I started off with mapping my hometown. Though I had not very perfect memory of the places in my hometown as I am away from it from many years, but there were few places which I was sure about. As it is advised to add data with 100% accuracy only, therefore I tagged only the sure places in OSM. When I downloaded the data for my city Gandhidham in JOSM, to my surprise, the city was well traced by a remote mapper. Therefore I worked on adding known POIs. It was fun to look for my home from the satellite imagery and tag its address.

Next I traced roads in city called Raipur. It was like taking part in an enjoyable drawing task while keeping a few rules in mind. Adding intersections, junctions, classification of roads has a huge impact on the routing. So I did that quite carefully.

Later I moved on to tracing buildings in Baga Beach, Goa. While working on this task I found many buildings that were quite interesting. Also, there were many row houses present in that area. Therefore to do it efficiently, I tried exploring the shortcuts of JOSM i.e. Making a big building and splitting it into pieces.

The most fun and interesting part of mapping was Field Mapping. To execute this we went in a group and split into sub-groups for covering a bigger region to map. I teamed up with Srividya. We planned to collect details like building addresses, levels, amenities , trees, streetlights in the neighborhood area of Mapbox office.We used OSM Tracker, mobile application for field mapping. For mapping all the buildings and amenities, we assigned each building a text note with all its details and took few photographs of the same which later helped us to upload the information in JOSM. For mapping trees and streetlamps , the presets came in handy, as you just have to tap on the mobile screen, whenever you encounter any tree or streetlamp. But the problem being we could not find any preset for tree and streetlamp. Therefore Srividya and me found out this trick to encode things up. We used ‘Shelter’ preset for tree and ‘Surveillance’ preset for streetlamp. Field mapping helped to explore and understand the neighborhood better.

Overall, mapping the places was a wonderful experience. Looking forward to keep making more edits in OSM.