I’ve recently completed 365 days mapping and went past my 400,000th map change and thought I would reflect a little on it.

I never actually started out to do a year of mapping. I had signed up to OSM way back in 2016 but never made an edit. I don’t recall why, but the project probably seemed impenetrable to me back then. Fast forward to the middle of Covid I started to think about how I could volunteer my time and so I started editing on OSM.

It was only when I noticed I had gone over half a year that I thought a year of mapping was achievable and set it as a goal to myself. Some days were just one edit, some large edits.

Being honest, I would not recommend people to do a year of mapping as it became somewhat forced towards the end. Especially when I had missed a couple of days when I first started mapping so had to keep going for a few extra months to fill them in! I also went through phases where it looked to myself like substantial progress had been made and then periods where there I realised how much was still to be done in my area.

My initial OSM journey started with doing general StreetComplete and OSM editing/tinkering and then I settled on a main objective to map as much residential buildings in the large blank areas Aberdeen, Scotland. Why? To be honest, I don’t really know. Possibly because if they had not been done in over 11 years then they would never get done as people may not see them as a priority or fun to do. I also felt getting the main foundations of an addressable city would have many use cases. Along with the building outlines, I wanted to put down as much addressing as possible leaving just a street side survey to add the house number which can easily be done by anyone using StreetComplete or OSM.

… See full entry