TL;DR: There are quite a few places on the continent that still need mapping. If you want to know why and how I came to that conclusion, read on ;-)

Preface

Since March 2023 there’s a handy bot called @SmallTownUSA@en.osm.town on the Fediverse, that posts a daily “task” out to its followers, highlighting “small towns” in the United States of America, that, to use the same phrasing, “seem like they could use some mapping”, along with a screenshot of the (Carto) map of the area.

Sparing the full technical details, the program randomly picks an entry from an overpass export of all nodes that have any place tag and a population tag with a value of less than 1000 (hence the name “SmallTown”) in the USA (currently 11389), asks overpass whether there are 10 buildings or less in 800 meters around that node and if so, posts about it.

As the bot has been doing this for about 10 months now, there seem to be at least 300 places that match the above description. Naturally, I wondered, how Europe would fare in comparison. Chatting with the bot’s developer, Matthew Wildon (OSM, Fediverse), they told me, that they checked France for potential candidates and found none and then didn’t look into it any further.

What’s on on the Continent?

My interest was now piqued. Would a similar “SmallTownEurope” bot make any sense, or would it run out of things to post within a week? Or is Pascal Neis’ Unmapped Places of OpenStreetMap Result Map enough to find areas where mapping is needed?

… See full entry

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