I'm just back from Linuxtag 2009. Today I listened to an excellent talk by Jochen Topf about quality control in OSM. The talk was a good digest of the ideas spread in the last months:

We don't need and don't have a central quality control body, but a crowdsourcing quality control progress. A broad collection of tools emerged in the last year to help getting good quality data: The OSM Inspector, the JOSM Validator, the ITO OSM Mapper, the "unmapped places" heuristics (e.g. from Gary68), only to name a few. There are also published lists of streets from goverment to compare against. He did also show the tool used to check the progress of time limited ortho photography provided by LVG Bayern. I intend to research if we could also use this tool for our canton Neuchâtel, were we also got ortho photos.

But not only Jochen Topf did well: The people at the OSM booth did also a good job. Even if the booth was quite small and in the edge of the hall, it was covered with nice map posters from all over the place. The booth was always crowded - as usual...

I only missed the group of regular meeting this year.

~Andy