See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Communities

4 PRs have been submitted. Sadly they have too many commits, making them difficult to review before merging.

I have shortened and pushed 2 of the 4 PRs. 100 to 10 commits on the first and about 50 to 6 on the second.

Unext is stage 3. Every commit of every stage has 100% automated tests code coverage.

The first stage was the hardest as my first attempt was not organized by layers. All the commits were scattered and unordered. Getting that down to 10 was brutal. The second PR was about half the effort. 3rd and 4th should be quicker.

One my the design ideas for microcosms (aka communities) will be to view diary entries of a geographic region using diary_entry.location. Another idea is to show the diary entries of members of a community. For example my normal mapping buddy Andrew Wiseman mapped his vacation trip to Bermuda. Granted that can also be seen through friendships.

But I like the idea of search by content. We could use PG’s full text search to index the content.

imagico,

I forgot to answer your last question.

I’ve been developing this feature for the past year on my own personal time. I do not get paid for this. I’m not a professional mapper, and don’t generally work in the GIS/mapping industry aside from placing a map on a website i developed 10 years ago.

I don’t ask for money, though it was offered by OSM US. I didn’t apply for a Microgrant.

I built this because I’m a community organizer and I need better tools in OSM for that.

Brian

imagico,

The word microcosm is quite descriptive. If you break it down “micro” is Greek for small, and “cosm” is Greek for kósmos or world. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/microcosm It literally means small word. This feature is built to support the small communities that exist all around our large world.

I tried translating it in https://translate.google.com/. Among the most popular indo-european languages, here are the results. I can’t speak to non-indo-european, but I’m sure “small” and “world” would translate just fine into any language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers

Is there a language where it doesn’t translate? Yes, please explain more, because I don’t understand your non-translatable argument.

I also don’t agree with your point on documentation. This new feature is an alternative to Meetup. Meetup has about 140,000 organizers (over 25 million users). I doubt these people needed documentation. Ideally the feature is so easy it doesn’t need documentation.

I ask that you head over to https://microcosms.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/microcosms . Register an account, join a microcosm, RSVP for an event. After that, let me know if you think documentation is needed.

While the dev site is only in English, OSM uses https://translatewiki.net to crowd source the translation into other languages. See https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:OpenStreetMap

Since we’re using Bootstrap, it’s pretty easy. Here’s the source:

[OSM Testing Site: Microcosms](https://microcosms.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/microcosms){: class="button"}

Thanks Richard!

Jonathan,

“Share my Location” - osm.org already has a “share” feature. See the button on the right side of the map. However it’s not share my location on Twitter/Facebook. I want OSM mappers to say, “Hey I’m Here” and share that AND at the same time promote OpenStreetMap.

“Single Sing On” - I’m already using the Oauth provider by OpenStreetMap for my MappingDC Blog http://mappingdc.org/blog . Trac is next http://mappingdc.org/trac . So why doesn’t the wiki also use it? Does Help use it? It’s doable. I’m sure there are technical reasons. As a team we can work together to resolve this issue.

“WeeklyOSM.US” This idea comes from my fellow mapper friend Brandon Knight who runs a “newspaper” that automatically aggregates news articles and tweets about geospatial technology and human health issues. (http://paper.li/geobrando/1359315797) Though it’s not active now, the idea remains that bots could aggregate data. Some of us write diaries, many of us write blogs. Let’s set up a planet aggregator for US based articles.

“Mapping Mayor” - I don’t know if would encourage bad behavior, and by that I assume you mean poor mapping. Maybe we only open the came to those with over 500 edits. Maybe we count the number of tags edited instead of the number of nodes. Do you have more information about the failure? Was it on a mailing list.

In fact this failure is great news. Because it tells us what when wrong and points us in a direction on how to make it better.

I should mention my use case is turning 1 building into n stores.

Extrude doesn’t build a second store. It will just move an edge. Though shift+extrude will leave nodes in place.

The building tool drops extra nodes, i.e. it doesn’t join them on adjacent areas.

The terracing plugin works very well. The problem with the terracing plugin is it assumes all “stores” in a building are the same width and it’s hard to adjust that.

I also like the “Split Object” function which belongs to utilsplugins2, iirc.

Hey Did I ever mention the time I hosted a mappy hour and I was the only person that showed up? At least I had a good beer.

Find out what referred them to MapRoulette.

David, Let me know how i can help. Brian

That’s the idea. I find that so much time is wasted at mapping parties dealing with geometry. And that’s a steep learning curve for newcomers. The fun part of mapping is capturing names, numbers, and types of buildings. Also point features like statues are easy to capture.

I formed this opinion after trying to split one building in Hyattsville into n stores. It’s hard to do that an preserve the geometry. It’s hard!

Also I feel users are more invited to update a map of unidentified areas than an empty map of roads.