OpenStreetMap
Wow, time flies when you’re making edits. I’ve already made over 350 of them, and didn’t realize it until today.
I’ve moved around a bit the last few years. In that time, I’ve tried to maintain OSM wherever I’ve lived. I’ve straightened roads, added buildings and parking lots. I’ve worked on maproulette a number of times, crossing the country and the globe looking for inconsistencies. And as the missus and i are adopting from Africa, I’ve looked over our kids’ country of origin and tried to fix a few things there.
As for the tools of my trade, I’ve pretty much relied on ID. I don’t know if JOSM would be an improvement, since most of my work is done on a rinky-dink laptop with a track pad for a mouse.
In my early days, I probably made some errors in the stuff i added. I guess we all start out that way. It’s part of the learning process. But it has been fun to watch the areas I’ve worked on grow and develop.
I support OSM because it’s a great free community-based resource. It’s interesting to see who has cared enough to fix this or that. I hope this good work continues.
Discussion
Comment from mcld on 30 September 2014 at 07:07
Congratulations! Happy 350th! :)
iD is fine for a lot of purposes. The main times you start to need JOSM are when you’re doing big jobs like tracing hundreds of buildings. That’s when JOSM’s advanced features make the workflow faster, but of course it takes time to learn it.
Comment from DaCor on 30 September 2014 at 22:56
Once you do learn it though, you’ll likely never go back
In saying that, I use iD in work where I can’t instal josm on some machines
Comment from Stalfur on 1 October 2014 at 00:57
I started with Potlatch2 and frankly it scared me away from the project for years.
I then discovered JOSM in 2013 but then iD entered beta and I loved it. I still use iD for minor changes but bring out JOSM when it is time to get serious (mapping entire town, neighborhood etc).
I’ve just started to make vital signs for the two countries I am focusing on, Iceland and Botswana. Both are fairly small and very sparsely populated compared to most other countries so it is doable to produce this once a month.
I think it shows the contributors that they are not alone and that they do put their mark on the map.