What I did in OpenStreetMap in July 2021

• Mapping
  • TOG, a hackerspace was involved with years ago, recently moved premesis. I was called on to update OpenStreetMap! Rather than deleting tags from the old building and adding to the new, I moved the OSM way to the new place. TOG was initially mapped as a node, then upgraded to a way years ago. I even made sure to bring that along.
    • I posted on fediverse/mastodon and twitter.
  • I continued to do regular mapping, either the Irish building mapping project, or with StreetComplete
• Hacking
  • RRR - Round River Retiever. I made a programme to find “round (and non-round) water bodies”, which could be used to improve OSM data.
    • It’s osm-round-river-retriever on GitHub.com.
    • I posted on twitter and mastodon/fediverse
    • Some sugested making an Osmose QA check or MapRoullette task, but I don’t have the time to implement that.
  • During the talk on osm-carto at SotM 2021, I was asked if it rendered emojis (apparently I’m an emoji expert now?), and found an example, where it’s rendered in monochrome. I used this bash command osmium tags-filter ~/osm/data/ireland-and-northern-ireland-latest.osm.pbf name -f opl -o - | grep -P "name=[^,]+%1f[0-9a-fA-F]{2,8}%" | head to find it.
  • Suggested a simple patch for the openstreetmap-americana website
    • Since I’m a genius, I initially made the PR against my fork
  • Discourse Forum
    • Some OSMers are trying to install a Discourse web forum software for OSM.
    • They are using the #discourse-community-rollout channel on the OSMUS Slack server
    • I was unable to create an account, resulting in a bug report. It was funny that my OSM username is viewed as a canonical example of weird usernames
    • For some reason it works now.
  • Pints in the Sun
    • It’s getting hot, so Pints in the Sun would be useful. But it’s broken.
    • I asked around, and eventually someone filed a bug report
  • Since it’s hot, I wanted an ice cream. I made a map of distance to the nearest ice cream parlor, which I posted on mastodon/fediverse and twitter.
• Mastodon
  • Mastodon supports migrating your account. So I moved to @amapanda@en.osm.town. My other personal masto account remains the same.
    • But the Mastodon hosting company I use, masto.host, doesn’t update that. So I need to ask them to change to make my new account an admin.
  • I talked to the State of the Map Organising Committee to ask them to set up a crossposter to copy the @sotm twitter account posts to mastodon @sotm@en.osm.town, which they did in time for State of the Map 2021
  • Moving to OSMF funding
    • I started a mastodon poll to ask the users of the server if they were OK. After 1 week, 21 people voted, and 86% approved of OSMF funding it. Most concerns were about moderation independence.
    • The OSMF FOSS Policy Special Committee had recommended this move
• State of the Map 2021
  • RainbOSM meet
    • I registered a self-organised social meet-up
    • Posted on mastodon/fediverse, ~~the hellsite~~ twitter, and diversity-talk@ mailing list
  • AOSMFBAAAoAAAA
    • I organised an ~~AMA~~ Ask the OSMF Board Almost Anything About our Agenda, Actions And Activities.
    • Thankfully enough people asked questions during the talk that we were able to fill the time.
    • No videos have been released from SotM yet at the time of writing. It’s possible there will be no video of that, but if there is, I’ll report on my recollections.
• OSMF Board
  • A company contacted the board to ask about using OSM data, I had a phone call with them. They thought there was some special licence one could buy so that one would not be required to share back derived data. I gently informed them that was not the case. 🙂
  • Moving outside UK
    • quick reply to public list
  • Advisory Board
    • We want to have another meeting, so I made a poll to pick a day & started an agenda.
    • Based on some requests, we asked the AB if we should add local chapter group email addresses to the advisory board list, or maintain the current standard of just individual people. At the time of writing this decision has not been made yet.
    • Another way to solve these requests, is for the OSMF to publish the archives of the advisory board list. So we’re consulting with the AB. At the time of writing this decision has not been made yet.
  • OpenSnowMap trademark grant
    • OpenSnowMap has requested a trademark grant from the OSMF. I started a circular resolution to sign that, it passed, so I printed, signed, scanned, uploaded & shredded the contract.
    • One OSMF board member rightly pointed out the racist origins of the term “grandfathering” for this. I agree we should change that
• OSMF Microgrants
  • It’s about time for the OSMF to look back at the 2020 microgrants programme and decide what (if anything) to do next.
  • I contacted the OSMF Microgrants Committee to ask them to prepare their report with recommendations. At the time of writing that is not due yet.
• Local Chapters
  • FOSSGIS has upgraded to the current version of the Local Chapters Agreement
  • OSM UK
    • Acknowledged OSM UK’s inquiry
• HOT trademark grant
  • We have a draft IP/trademark agreement from the outside counsel. After reading it, I had some questions to the LWG.
• Pseudonyms
  • Someone has asked me about signing up to OSMF as an associate member with only a pseudonym.
  • I started a board circular resolution, and at the time of writing the board has decided that that is not allowed.
• RainbOSM, LGBTQIA+ in OSM
  • For a while now, there’s been RainbOSM, a telegram group for LGBTQ+ & allies in OSM
  • I started the RainbOSM OSM wiki page
  • Along with Mikko we started a @RainbOSM twitter account, which is naturally mirrored to @RainbOSM@en.osm.town on mastodon
  • We registered the domain RainbOSM.org
• (posted what the hashes meant)

2021: Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May June

2020: Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May June July Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec.