OpenStreetMap
OSMCha is almost eight years old now. A project that I started in my spare time to try to solve some data quality issues of the Brazilian OpenStreetMap community, grew up, became my job for some years, and is now an essential component of the OSM software ecosystem.
Since the beginning, Mapbox has been a crucial partner for OSMCha. They believed in the idea right after I presented it at a State of the Map LatAm conference. In 2015, they had around 10 people doing quality assurance in OSM data and there wasn’t a clear workflow on how to keep track of the changes in OSM. The main idea behind OSMCha was to register all changesets in a database, run some automatic checks to flag possible quality issues, and make the changesets searchable. That solution seemed interesting to the Mapbox team, so they started using it right away, improved the tool, and kept it running during all those years.
However, since June 2021, OSMCha is running without constant maintenance, and only one new feature was added, with the sponsorship of Wikimedia Italia. The lack of a team responsible for monitoring and maintaining the infrastructure caused a few days of downtime.
Now it’s time for a new phase in the OSMCha history! OpenStreetMap US has just accepted it as a charter project. This partnership will provide the structure to raise funds for development and hosting, and will also open the possibility for the entire OSM community to influence the future of OSMCha.
In collaboration with the OSM community, I believe we will be able to keep OSMCha running and provide yet more value for the users.
Soon, we will announce how you can engage in the OSMCha community meetings. Right now you can join the #osmcha channel in the OSM US Slack and continue reporting issues in the GitHub repository.
We also welcome companies and non-profit organizations that are interested in supporting OSMCha. Write to wille AT developmentseed.org if you want to have a chat about how you can collaborate with us.
Discussion
Comment from adrianojbr on 11 March 2023 at 12:48
Congratulations!!
Comment from Glassman on 11 March 2023 at 18:25
Wille,
I want to thank you and the rest of the developers that work on OSMCha. It has been my goto tool for years.
I look forward to seeing the new features you and your team develop.
Best,
Clifford
Comment from wille on 13 March 2023 at 17:39
Thanks, Clifford and Adriano!
Comment from Ichchha on 14 March 2023 at 08:03
This is great news! Congratulations and best wishes :)
Comment from arnalielsewhere on 14 March 2023 at 15:40
Felicidades, Wille! <3
Comment from RicoElectrico on 14 March 2023 at 16:46
Thanks. People would like OSM to attract many more new mappers and scale up, but before that we need our monitoring to become more robust. Right now the OSM community (and DWG) are able to manage vandalism and other harmful edits, but barely. Only the relative obscurity of OSM makes this not a problem right now. Google Maps for instance has been plagued with vandalism for the past few years.
Comment from mmd on 27 March 2023 at 17:10
Maybe that’s a good opportunity to work on the underlying infrastructure as well. Turning spinning wheels into faster responses.
Comment from canfe on 7 May 2023 at 14:41
I am one of those who developed the requests for the new option paid by Wikimedia Italy. This modification, as developed, is hardly useful. For example, if I only want to see the new buildings mapped in the area, I don’t want them “drowned” together with all the highways mapped in the changeset. It is very slow to distinguish them to validate them when both buildings and highways are displayed together. Here is an example of such a changeset: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/135742484.