Hey, this is my first post here and I think it would be fitting if I’d tell all of you why I even created an account here and started making my own edits on OSM.

Background

First, you need to know that I’m a student at Westpomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin in department of computer science. That means that me, and 90% of people there are nerds with interests like: trains, transportation, hacking, programming, opensource and… well… maps.

How it started?

It all started during a normal day at University. We were walking from one building on campus to another when I noticed that my friend has a map open with a lot of pins and some questions on his phone. I asked him what it is and he told me about “Street Complete”. That’s it! I already knew that my ADHD butt found a new hyperfocus for the indefinite amount of time. I installed it and 3 of us started adding the detail information on the map around our campus.

Street Complete era

So… for the next few days I had Street Complete open on my phone during every tram ride and every walk. I wanted to fill every question. This took some time, I answered some question around the Poland in Szczecin, Kielce, and recently in Wałcz.

Taste for more

Right now I’m at my family house in a village where most OSM information where updated several years ago. I went on a walk and - as usual - opened Street Complete. It was great until I came by a few buildings that were demolished few years ago, but were never deleted from the map. I knew that I can’t just leave them there and I couldn’t do this from Street Complete. I went back home and booted my laptop. I opened the OSM editor for the first time and started making edits around the village. Adding houses that were build recently, deleting stuff that no longer existed, updating the zones, etc.

Before I realized I got hooked. It’s so satisfying to make some edits and then see the results. I’ve been making edits everyday for few days ago. I joined community Discord, and learnt quite a few things about how OSM and editor works.

And that’s where we are now… I think I’ll stay here making more edits and updating things that need to be updated. I’ll mainly work on Szczecin and Wałcz, since those are the two places I know the best, but I might make some changes in different places from time to time as well.

Thank you to anyone that read this, I hope you’ll have a great day / night.