Given the COVID-19 pandemic, even though Turkmenistan has reported no cases, I spent part of this week checking the tags of hospitals and clinics in that country to make sure anyone using OSM data could find the nearest hospital or clinic, if it is in the OSM database. Overpass Turbo came in very handy for this exercise.

After completing that task, I started tinkering with Overpass Turbo and pulled up the hotels in Turkmenistan. In Mary I discovered four different locations had been entered in the OSM database for the Soviet-era Sanjar Hotel. Only one could be correct. Fortunately I found a ground-level photo of both the hotel and its associated cafe among the Mapillary images I had collected in years past, and so was able to identify the correct buildings for hotel and cafe, and delete incorrect tags from the others (one of them is the Mary province tax office–hardly a good place to spend the night).

Background

Shortly after the new year began, the OSM Foundation chair started contacting members of the OSM community writ large to collect information on the state of the community and project, and to assess attitudes toward the Board’s work. Most conversations were confidential in order to ensure that respondents would speak openly, frankly, and honestly (and it is the chair’s sense that virtually all of them did, and in fact some of them were quite brutally frank about the Board’s perceived shortcomings). Thus, this report will not detail “who said what”. It will, rather, tend more to aggregate viewpoints expressed during the conversations, with illustrative but unattributed quotes.

The chair began by polling members of the Board of Directors of the Foundation, and expanded to members of the Advisory Board, including both corporate members and local chapters. The latter tended to be conference calls with multiple members of those chapters. These calls generated recommendations that the chair talk to pillars of the OSM community or representative members of a tribe (e.g., software developers), so the chair reached out to those individuals as well. Another result was outreach to local communities not formally affiliated with the OSMF, and those conversations proved to be among the most fruitful. The chair held one conversation with a local community and two with corporate representatives face to face due to the happy coincidences of parties being in the same geographic location.

This effort is not over. If anything, the conversations revealed a desire for better communication between the Board and the community’s various tribes (including working groups), which can only be satiated by making the effort to reach out, to schedule calls, then just to call. Geographic coverage of the current outreach effort remains a work in progress; to date the chair has made no calls to Latin America, for example.

The Top Lines

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Due to the corona virus pandemic the annual face-to-face meeting of the OSMF board of directors shifted to what we wryly termed a “screen-to-screen” meeting using the Zoom video conferencing account of our facilitator, Allen “Gunner” Gunn. To our collective surprise, the video conference went fairly well. It was not as good as meeting face to face, but was far better than audio only, and so much so that the board plans to experiment with shifting from using Mumble (audio only) for monthly board meetings to a video conferencing platform.

In keeping with the FOSS philosophy of OSMF, we will try BigBlueButton, an open-source videoconferencing platform. Thus, if OSMF members want to tune in to the next board meeting, watch for announcements that we will meet in a video conference. We will ask that non-members of the board keep their cameras and microphones off, and that only board members have their cameras and microphones on.

Minutes of the “screen-to-screen” meeting remain in process. Bottom line up front: the board has taken on board much of the information in the SWOT analysis, last year’s survey, and the 40+ conference calls I have made to community members, local communities and chapters, and members of our advisory board. We accept all criticism that has come our way and are working on how to address the problems you have identified to us.

In March I flew to Riga for what will likely be the last in-person regional SOTM for a while due to the pandemic, State of the Map Baltics (many thanks and kudos to Rihards Olups for pulling it together and being my host in Riga). My presentation on “Winds of Change in OSM” was well received. I plan to deliver an updated version of that presentation during the virtual SOTM in July, so if you are interested in a synopsis of what I have been hearing from across the community, and my take on it all, be sure to tune in.

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Johns Hopkins University in collaboration with ESRI and others has posted a coronavirus tracking dashboard here that includes an interactive map. The base map comes from a mix of sources including OpenStreetMap. If you click on the icon consisting of four squares in the upper right corner of the map, you get a list of basemap sources, and If you zoom in to a particular country, the source of the geodata automatically appears in the lower right corner of the map along with the other virus-related data sources. It is nice to know that OSM is helping in the effort to contain and reduce the impact of coronavirus.

Last week I visited Baku for only the second time, and managed to see the new seaport at Alat. The Mapillary images I collected are now on line so perhaps I can update the map at some point.

Mapping these days is taking a back seat to OSM Foundation business, unfortunately. Chairing the OSM Foundation board has turned into at least a half-time job. In the last two months I have held 32 conference calls with various OSM stakeholders: mappers, users of data, corporate members of the Foundation, old-timers, software developers, and local communities in ranging from Ireland to Japan and the Philippines. That effort will continue as I reach out to members of the OSM community and hear what advice they have, what they perceive as OSM’s needs, and their thoughts on what the board should be doing to support OSM. I am boiling down everything and will present some preliminary assessments–my personal take on what it all means, not the board’s–at SOTM Baltics on March 6.

The organizers of SOTM Baltics have kindly invited me to speak so I will travel to Riga in early March to attend that conference as well as to visit the famous map stores there. This will be my first regional SOTM but I hope far from my last!

Putting on my hat as chairman of the board of the OSM Foundation, I have created a wiki page at osm.wiki/OSM_SWOT to collect the OSM community’s thoughts on OSM’s strengths and weaknesses, and opportunities and threats OSM faces. I respectfully ask that OSM community members share their perspectives on that wiki page.

Since returning to the United States from Turkmenistan last June, I have been plowing through the mass of information collected, but which I did not have time to study thoroughly. Yesterday, while (Turkmen-English dictionary in hand) I was deciphering Parliamentary Resolution No. 111-IV of 10 May 2010, I found reference to one of the six towns (‘‘şäherçeler’’ in Turkmen) not yet on the OSM map. That resolution ‘‘inter alia’’ renamed the village around the Danew rail station to Bahar (which means “spring” in Turkmen) and upgraded it to town status. Fortunately user jaimemd had mapped that rail station and its surrounding village five years earlier, so I was able to retag Bahar.

One town down, five more to go. The detective work continues. When done, all current “towns” in Turkmenistan will be on the map, along with all “cities” as defined under Turkmen law.

As I mapped Turkmenistan a couple of years ago, I noted that two locations were marked as the town of Darganata. Only one could be correct, and in my explorations I determined which one was Darganata, then pursued the correct name of the other, which turned out to be a village named Çarwadar. I made the correction, but filed away a question in the back of my mind: why would a mapper insert such an obvious error in OSM?

The answer came to light yesterday as I examined a Soviet military map of the area. In Soviet times, Çarwadar was a state farm named Sovkhoz Dargan-Ata, or in Russian совхоз “Дарган-Ата”(the contraction “sovkhoz” means “state farm”). Not a town, not even a village in Soviet terms, but a state farm community named in honor of its big brother a few kilometers away. Mystery solved! Today Çarwadar is a full fledged village, not just a farm community, and enjoys its own name, which means “herdsman”. The old state farm focused on sheep raising, and presumably the residents of Çarwadar still do.

My review of “The Red Atlas” has been posted online by Cartographic Perspectives. You may find it here: https://cartographicperspectives.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1589/1815

I’ve been scanning Soviet military maps for information relevant to the OSM map of Turkmenistan, coupled with data collected between 2015 and 2019, and among other things have identified yet another numbered highway, the P-28. It connects the A-388 highway south of Yoloten to Tagtabazar and a few villages to the east and southeast, all the way to the Afghanistan border. Bit by bit, the OSM map of Turkmenistan is becoming ever richer.

At some point I intend to do a fulsome correction of Turkmenistan’s borders. The existing ones were largely drawn from CIA maps to get something in place but are not as accurate as the lines on the Soviet military maps. Bear with me, this will be a time-consuming project! But as winter sets in, when it is cold outside and the rain is coming down, doing this will be more attractive than chopping firewood or pruning dead limbs, and I will get to it.

The following is copied from the Indiana University website:

“The bulk of Indiana University’s Russian Military Topographic Map Collection is made up of the Soviet Red Army topographic maps, which were produced for defense and economic planning. This collection came to Indiana University from the duplicate map room of the Library of Congress Map Collection in the early 1990s. These maps cover not only parts of Russia and Eastern Europe, but extend as far north as Scandinavia, as far west as Germany and the Netherlands, and as far south as Iran.

“An interactive index map of the collection is located here: https://iu.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=098c42997ca441029b69f0597ff92ea6

“For more information, visit the Cyrillic Maps Collection.”

There are very few maps of Central Asia, but coverage of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltics, Poland, and eastern Germany is pretty good. The maps of former Soviet states are uncopyrighted, but odds are good that coverage outside the USSR was taken in violation of local copyrights and so may not be used in OSM.

Now that I have been away from Turkmenistan for six months, my efforts at continuing to map that country are by necessity confined to “armchair mapping”, using a combination of Soviet-era military maps that identify municipalities (albeit by Soviet-era names, which often differ from current names), the “Districts in Turkmenistan” list of names of municipalities I posted some time back to the OSM wiki, and the various official name-change documents I also posted to the wiki. It is different from primary data collection on the ground, which I must confess I miss.

Some of the local mappers I trained are continuing to collect and post data, however, so there is some work going on based on local knowledge, and that is a good thing.

And now Europe:

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Here are a couple more maps from the geography textbook, now uploaded to Wikipedia, this time of Asia as seen in 1916:

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During a recent visit to the American Midwest, Ann and I browsed an antique shop where I found a copy of Tarr & McMurry’s 1916 edition of “New Introductory Geography”, a textbook, for five dollars. Since it is long out of copyright I have begun scanning some of the lovely color plates and have posted two of Africa to Wikipedia.

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Nice article from the Daily Mail about the new map of Antarctica’s land mass. It notes, “Glaciologists at the University of California, Irvine say it is the most precise map of the continent ever created and reveals the layout of the land under the ice sheets.” The whole article is worth reading.

Here is the link to an article in the Washington Post about OSM: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/these-students-make-maps-for-the-philippines-and-belize-they-never-leave-campus-to-do-it/2019/12/01/2a4fee3a-0a1c-11ea-8397-a955cd542d00_story.html

My banquet speech at the North American Cartographic Information Society’s annual conference last month was not videographed, but a couple of members asked for recordings, so I used Power Point’s voice recording feature to run through the slides while reading the narrative into a microphone. I then converted the Power Point into an mp4 file using Office 365. The result is not perfect but if you are interested in learning how the mapping exercise in Turkmenistan improved quality of life, you can find the video on YouTube here.

Today I was in Best Buy looking for something else and saw it was selling the LG Phoenix 4 with 16Gb RAM and Android 7 for $39.99 plus tax (prepaid AT&T but I don’t intend to use airtime). I splurged on it, brought it home, connected to home wifi, installed Mapillary, and on my next road trip will try it as a new dedicated imagery collection device. I cannot really justify spending hundreds of dollars on a GoPro or other pricey dedicated device; my cartography habit has to be kept relatively low cost (I say that having bought a new PC a few years back, the specs of which were calibrated to creating wall maps using Maperitive…)

I also began my first “armchair mapping” of Turkmenistan, working on some imagery collected earlier to update the map, and correcting some errors inserted by novice mappers. I have not yet started a serious examination of the Soviet military maps but that will come.