Hello OSM community,

This is a short post. I wanted to give a status update on my GSoC project to integrate notes into the iD editor. Details can be found under the notes issue and the notes branch. Notes are now appearing! They are toggleable by turning on and off a notes layer under Map Details. In the future, the notes service will likely be moved into the osm service. My next step is to populate the sidebar with feature details when a note is hovered or clicked. To do this, notes should be an osm entity and queryable.

The road ahead

I’ve been discussing with my mentors about what I should do once I’ve completed notes. WIth many ideas floating around, I will likely turn my attention to QA and the social aspects of OSM. Much like notes, including keep right into iD will give users another guide for what to work on and improve. Also, as suggested by Marc Farra, there’s a growing desire to link a lot of the social aspects of osm together, including osm groups, osm’s wiki, user diaries, etc. One idea is to take a survey of all the notes that have been created, and categorize what they are used for. This could give insight into why people are creating notes, how to make them more social, and common issues associated with them (e.g., bulk uploads, confusions about how they work, etc.). One possible outcome would be to add a section to a user’s osm.org dashboard that shows comments and closures related to their notes as well as suggests other notes to work on. More on this later, but if you have any suggestions or questions, please let me know!

Cheers from sunny and rainy Charlottesville, VA, USA.

-Thomas