“30 Day Map Challenge” happened over November. Remembering this from last year, I knew we were in for a bombardment of cartographic creations on the #30DayMapChallenge hashtag. Combining this with a search for “OpenStreetMap” mentions I sat back and let the mappy goodness flow into my tweetdeck for the whole month.

Here’s some I particularly liked:

• Julian_H0ffmann’s London buildings in 3D as shaped like phone boxes. Weird! In fact Julian_H0ffmann did lots of really nice 3D stuff with OSM data throughout the month.
• Patrycja Krajczyńska’s Snowflake decorated ski map. OSM data can always make for a good looking ski map, but snowflake decorations and icey colours make we want to have this for christmas wrapping paper!
• Matthew Law’s different grid delineations of Southern Ontario. We like a bit of clever data crunching.
• Radames Ajna’s animated grid of OSM GPS traces - Not sure the old GPS data is much practical use these days, but nice to see it surfaced as art.
• Kontur’s map of ‘mapping hours by all contributors’ i.e. where there are more OSMer’s staying up all night mapping
• Antonia Blankenberg’s old style map of Brussels. Gotta love a good pretending-to-be-medeival old-style map.
• Topi Tjukanov’s Closest grocery retail chain from each building in Helsinki. Supermarkets are pretty smart about spacing themselves evenly. Maybe this is an under-appreciated way of dividing a city into ~equal areas.
• JediPro’s Map of @F1 circuits used in the 2021 season. Makes me wonder how many car racing circuits there are in the world.
• Heikki Vesanto’s Venice, with Murano glass inspired colour scheme. You’re allowed a map with too many colours if it’s Murano glass inspired.
• Dr. Dominic Royé’s how wind farms are distributed in Europe prompted some interesting discussions. I like dense point maps like this. We should give more OSM tags this treatment.

I’m sorry, this diary entry would be much more fun if we could embed tweets, or otherwise put the images all on here. You’ll have to open them all. It’ll be worth it! Alternatively you can look yourself through the whole lot of tweets mentioning #30DayMapChallenge and OpenStreetMap. There’s a lot!

As usual with such things, a large part of me wanted to take part myself, but… a map creation every day? I admit I predicted I would fail and so didn’t even try. Hats off to all the dedicated folks who saw it through. I confined myself to “liking” them all on twitter.

I also retweeted some maps from @OSMLondon (any featuring London).

And speaking of OSMLondon… in October we got back to the pub for our first real face-to-face pub meet-up since the pandemic. That was great! And we’re going to do it again tomorrow night! If you’re in London, come along and join us. All the details on the wiki