I am terrible at keeping journals, and this will probably be no exception, but I have been enjoying some folks’ regular updates about what they have been up to in the OpenStreetMap world. So let’s give this a try! Two weeks late already for October; life got in the way..

Mapping

I’ve had a pretty active mapping month, but also all over the place, more so than usual.

• I participated in a virtual mapping party at work. We worked on a HOT Tasking Manager project. This is the first time in a while that I had really worked with Tasking Manager. It’s generally easy to use but sometimes the instructions can be clearer. It was good to get out of my mapping ‘comfort zone’.
• I did my usual surveying while out and about using GoMap!! while the weather is still nice.
• I read somewhere that Geofabrik’s OSM Inspector had gotten an update with some new categories, so I gave that a new try. I ended up spending quite a bit of time untangling some invalid polygons.
• Used RapiD to add some government-provided GIS data. I also wrote about this, see below.

Meeting

• We had our monthly OpenStreetMap Utah meetup and it was a special and fun one! I decided I wanted to try out Every Door, the mobile POI and micromapping app. We went to a local mall and I wrote about it. We will do this again!

• I attended the OSM US Mappy Hour about OpenDroneMap, although I think technically that was still September :) OpenDroneMap is cool, and I wish I had time for another hobby.
• The second Mappy Hour I attended this month was about Healthy Communities. Jing-Huei Huang and Aaron Hipp from NC State University talked about the using (and mapping!) OSM playspace data in Colorado to understand and improve play equity. I love hearing about interesting uses of OSM data!
• I participated in the weekly planning meetings for the upcoming Mapping USA conference. It’s coming together nicely!
• I attended a MapAlong session from TeachOSM. Highly recommend it, always learning something new there.

Publishing

I have been active on the OSM Diaries this month! Perhaps to satisfy my need for sharing now that I am on a Twitter break. My posts this month:

• Changeset age / confusion
• Specialized Mappers
• Mall Mapping with Every Door

• osmdiff 0.3.2

• I submitted two proposals to MappingUSA and one to Pista Ng Mapa / SOTM Asia. I hope to hear back before the end of the month! (Since I am also on the program committee for MappingUSA, I will not vote on my own submissions.) Update: both were accepted!

MapRoulette

I guess this needs a header of its own. It’s a project that many people use and follow, and I think about it almost every day.

• I met with the developer team weekly, as I always do, on Tuesdays. I don’t do any development work on MapRoulette myself anymore, but I am lucky to have some talented people maintaining the code and adding new features.
• Through work, I had the opportunity to start working with a couple of great students through the Major League Hacking program. They were very quick to get acquainted with the codebase and are now working on a metrics dashboard for MapRoulette.
• I am organizing an in-person meeting to discuss the next steps for MapRoulette. I am inviting some “heavy users” from various companies, as well as representatives from OSM US and community members. My goal is to come closer to a roadmap for 2023 and perhaps into 2024 that benefits both normal mappers and organizational users of MapRoulette. I also want to discuss project governance.

Developing

I usually don’t have much time to do any actual software development anymore, even though I enjoy it very much. This month, I found some time to dust off osmdiff, a Python module to interact with OSM diffs and Augmented diffs. I released version 0.3.2. Working on that gave me some ideas for the (much more widely used) Overpass API Python interface I maintain. More on that perhaps next month.

That’s all I can remember. I hope to do this again next month!