I began working with OSM in 2007 following my retirement from MapInfo Limited and a life-long career in cartography, which I loved. I purchased a Garmin eTrex Legend HCx and loaded it with an .img file from http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/. I proceeded to walk and record the streets of Henley-on-Thames and its neighbouring villages for several years - they were poorly represented in OSM, then - and learnt how to digitise and upload subsequential data using JOSM, the OSM offline editor. I turned my attention to countryside walking, a long-standing love. I focused on the Chiltern Way and its extensions for two years, covering it all south of the M40. I was able to create worthwhile relations in JOSM.
An extremely fortunate occurrence led to my discovery of Locus Map a couple of years ago that, with its faithful rendering of maps and wealth of features, was a transformation. Installed on my Android ‘phone with OSM mapping from OpenAndroMaps and Elevate themes from Tobias, then Voluntary UK from John Percy raised my involvement and enjoyment to a whole new level. It is a brilliant combination for working in the field. I felt encouraged to walk the countryside much more, using http://www.petes-walks.co.uk/ and http://fancyfreewalks.org/Chilterns.html with a great deal of pleasure. I came to recognise, however, there were paths in my immediate area I had not walked in my thirty-odd years here. My focus turned to them, which ignited my interest in Public Rights of Way (PRoW). I tasked myself with walking every PRoW, parish by parish, in the Oxfordshire Chilterns. The County Council offers a download of all of its PRoWs in MapInfo .tab format at https://www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/cms/content/countryside-access-maps. I used MapInfo Professional at work for many years and was able to create a table of PRoWs for my area of interest by parish with the help of Ordnance Survey’s parish-level boundaries in Boundary-Line, adding PRoW references as recommended in Robert Whittaker’s http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Rjw62/PRoW_Table, plus Chiltern Society references, courtesy of Nick Moon. I find QGIS very difficult to master, but it has proved an excellent means of converting .tab files to .kml. I have discovered .kml files are better than .gpx files in Locus Map because the column entries of the table can be seen fully. Robert Whittaker has created a reference, http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/prow/progress/, that, fortunately for me, contains Oxfordshire. This has proved immensely valuable in highlighting errors in and omissions of PRoWs and their tags, using Overpass Turbo. Armed with this information, I can walk and check the parishes fully. I add/amend information and upload data using JOSM still, which goes from strength to strength in my opinion. I have come to Vespucci http://vespucci.io/ a second time and respect it now as a very good reference source in the field. The benefits are twofold: my walks bring me a sense of purpose and newfound satisfaction and OSM finds itself with better and more complete information.