Thanks ClipArtJoel!

Does this mean you wish to make the maps in our region more complete? Or simply AU/NZ/SR’s effect on HOT?

I want to increase representation of AU/NZ/South Pacific mappers on the board, particularly indigenous mappers. This should help make our regions maps better, yes, but I want to build the community in this area of the world. Get a SoTM Oceania running, get more involvement with companies in the AU/NZ/South Pacific OSM communities, etc.

I feel that we need better aerial first, Australia is pretty bad, but NZ is OK. Still sounds pretty good, A one click for buildings is much better than tracing them out. How close are we to having such a tool? Because mapping out all the houses is time consuming, so you certainly have my interest ;).

There is already published research that can do this in academia, we just need to start moving it over into the OSM community (this isn’t trivial, of course). What is important to me is that we do this with the local communities in mind: bottom-up, not top-down. Facebook has already started doing ML with OSM data, but I have my suspicions about the process, and I think these tools should be available for all mappers, not just those working for big corporations.

Rory, thanks for the question. I’m really only just starting out on this particular adventure, and I’m still in the establishing contacts stage. While I agree that this is a very important goal for our community, it can only be lead from within the indigenous communities themselves, so I’m establishing contact with some local communities in Brisbane here at the moment and trying to spark interest. Things are progressing, but slowly.

I have noticed that there was an indigenous mapping conference recently in Canada with some OSM representation by Mapbox (https://www.indigenousmaps.com/). More events like that, and more focused on open data would be awesome.

Stereo, I’m still thinking this through, but I envisage one approach is tools like MapRoulette saying something like “Our robot over-lords think there are buildings in this area that aren’t mapped. Can you please map them?”. Similar approaches could be taken with StreetComplete/OpenMapKit for on-the-ground confirmation of ML outcomes.

As for mapping directly in JOSM/ID/etc., there might be approaches that allow one-click building/road/landuse mapping, where a editor can click an automatically created feature to confirm it is real before it appears on the map, or ML tools can refined boundaries of manual edits.

Finally, ML might be able to perform a QA role, or identify possible changes in the map, to allow local mappers to confirm and make the changes themselves.

The most important thing is that there will always be humans in the loop, and ideally local humans, confirming the details before they get added to the map.

@phillippec, yes I will answer the questions on the Talk page shortly (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Foundation/AGM17/Election_to_Board). I’m planning on getting through them this weekend.

aharvey,

Thanks for the questions.

What do you see as the main issues we face specific to our region? Do you have any details on local matters which you’d like to take higher to the OSMF level?

I think the main issue for our region is organisation, and that is something that the local AU/NZ/PI informal groups (including myself) are currently working on. There is a huge spatial community down here, but we don’t have a local organisation to help drive the adoption of OSM data by these commercial and non-commercial communities. I don’t feel that there i anything particular that the OSMF needs to do differently to help our region out, but that by providing representation from our region to OSMF I will also be able to provide back assistance to local companies, organisations and local community groups in promoting the use of OSM more widely.

I’m very interested to hear about your plans, thoughts or ideas on how we can help encourage indigenous populations to map things important to them.

Me too! It’s still very early days, and focusing on relationship building at the moment. My main plan at the moment is to talk to indigenous communities and see if there is interest. This should be their project - I just want to spark an interest, and help it grow.

What do you see OSMF can help with that we can’t do already at a country level?

A lot of indigenous communities across the world are largely invisible in their large, often well mapped, countries (in OSM), and often the features important to a euro-centric map may not relate well to their experiences.

I think that a more inward-facing effort with, or similar to that of, missing maps could help put these - often very disadvantaged - communities on the map, and then give these communities local ownership of aspects of their current and former lands that are important to them. I am already (slowly) working on establishing relationships with local indigenous communities here in Brisbane, but I hope that a position on the board would allow me to examine this idea on a worldwide scope, giving respect to the similarities and differences of indigenous communities across the globe.

Finally, thank you for your comments on machine-learning automation. I think that there is a lot to be said for these efforts, but I think a democratisation of these tools is very important. These tools should be designed to map one road, one building at a time, always with a human in the loop, ideally a local human. I am just as skeptical of large-scale ML efforts as much of the OSM community is of large-scale imports.

Any chance these will restart? It looks like they’ve been dormant since April.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:man_made%3Dtower

Hi Fairfield. I've seen a bit of your mapping work around Brisbane lately!

I'd ask permission before you copy details from those reports. We are only really supposed to rely on what is on the ground or that we have been granted permission for this sort of thing.

- David

RichardB, with regards to the possibilities of traffic modelling, that is why tracing every trip would be useful, not just the ones in which you are actually doing OSM mapping.

Hi and welcome to OSMing in Brisbane! A few of the Brisbane OSMers are going to have a mapping party in a Month, and we'd love it if you wanted to come along and meet up. Details here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Brisbane/Mapping_Parties/2009-02 .

Hi there! Welcome to OSM Brisbane. If you are interested in meeting some more of the Brisbane OSMers, we are having a mapping party in around a months time. Details are here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Brisbane/Mapping_Parties/2009-02.

Yes, this area will be fun to align given that neither potlatch or josm are particularly well suited to that job. So I guess you'll be putting your name down to finish slice 6 at the mapping party then?

Have you tried Gosmore? It should be perfect for what you want to do.

Oh, and if you look here you can see that the CIA figures include unpaved roads in that total, so tracks should be included.

And, I'd reckon other than maybe coastlines, the other ways like rivers, footpaths, cycleways and area boundaries are probably a fairly small amount of kilometreage compare to the car-navigable roadways in OSM.

Well, I did say 'completely unscientific' :) However, if you add up from highway=residential down to highway=trunk in the same table you get 18257352 km, which makes the completeness figure 56.45%. Still not too bad.

OK, I think the best email address is probably DeputyPremier@ministerial.qld.gov.au . Does OSM have any boiler-plate that would be useful for this sort of thing?

I use NaviPOWM on my Windows Mobile phone to do my OSMing. Has good support for showing OSM vector data.

Apparently. Also, it appears you cannot edit diary entries once you've saved them.