OpenStreetMap
Hi,
I arrived at OSM in order to put my HOA on the map, literally. We've been looking for inexpensive ways to update our neighborhood map. The exported PNG at approx. 1:1000 fits our need almost to a tee and looks great to boot, AND by adding details to OSM the data and effort will serve the greater good (I'm a huge open source booster and user).
If anyone else is looking at using OSM data in the context of their homeowner association or other local cooperative organization I'd like to hear from you. I believe there are huge opportunities for map data serving as entry points to more detailed (textual) data, and for highly detailed map/blueprint data to help visualize assets which we manage.
Discussion
Comment from z-dude on 7 May 2011 at 05:30
for the pedestrian area around the pool, I suggest highway=pedestrian area=yes
Comment from Sam Wilson on 7 May 2011 at 09:54
I'm part of the Fremantle Society, who're setting up a civic wiki called FreoWiki, and we're planning on using OSM maps on that extensively. I've been doing a bit of mapping around the place, in patches. Mainly using Walking Papers (and some people here have raised the idea of helping school children contribute this way, although nothing's happened yet).
The council here has recently implemented something called IntraMaps which looks pretty interesting (and slow, and not slippy). It doesn't really do anything that OSM can't... it's got things like 'Municipal Heritage Inventory', which shows where all the local government heritage-listed buildings are (which we can put on OSM); and all property boundaries (which we can only guess at because that data belongs to LandGate).
Comment from JoshD on 7 May 2011 at 11:37
Welcome to OSM, and great to hear you're interested in HOAs! I think working with local HOAs are a great way to promote OSM.
I've been working in our local HOA in Virginia, and have had great interest from the Board of Trustees and other residents. There's interest to provide walking/biking directions, and of course locations of all the amenities and trails, and to eventually create a nice printed map. I've written an article for our newsletter which you can read here:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/JoshD/diary/13743
Also, I've created a wiki page for HOAs here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Homeowners%27_association
An important unresolved tagging issue involves subdivisions and neighborhoods. Our HOA (and I imagine some others) are divided up into multiple areas. I've created an article on it, and we should try and get a proposal through:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Neighbourhood
I'm sure there are some other issues that are of particular interest to those mapping HOAs. I would encourage you to continue creating diary entries on your project, to make suggestions or improvements to the HOA wiki article, and feel free to ask on the mailing list about uncertainties you might have. It would be great to stay in touch, as I'm not only mapping our HOA, but am getting contacts with other HOAs near me, and I'm sure we could learn from each other.
Happy mapping!
Comment from Former OSM contributor on 7 May 2011 at 14:08
To give you an idea what can be achieved detail-wise, you might what to take a look at how my village has turned out. http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=53.00168&lon=-2.33517&zoom=16&layers=M It takes time but it is worth it.
Comment from Former OSM contributor on 7 May 2011 at 14:09
Sorry, 'might what' should read 'might want' in my previous post!
Comment from ChristophWeber on 7 May 2011 at 20:52
Wow, what great feedback! Thanks guys.
@Andrew: Beautiful work, the loving detail is very apparent.
@Josh: Enjoyed the newsletter article. Your HOA is obviously much larger than mine, we are just 128 units, so few of your tagging issues apply to my neighborhood. Nevertheless, I plan to follow your work, so thanks for the hookup.
Sam's IntraMaps come close to what I have in mind after getting the OSM work done, but my dream solution would be a fast, fluid and fun site. My other online love is the Drupal CMS. A shop in Washington DC, DevelopmentSeed, has done a great deal of work integrating maps and textual information into interactive Drupal websites. As an example, check out http://afghanistanelectiondata.org/election/2009/data/. Now project that general site technology onto the highly localized needs of a single neighborhood, and you can begin to imagine what's possible.
Comment from JoshD on 9 May 2011 at 11:10
I think it would be great to ease the creation of hyperlocal sites, such as for HOAs. I would like to eventually create something like that for our HOA, that might have a custom stylesheet and some sort of specialized search or listing of amenities.