I recently updated this map:

and this one:

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I had a fantastic time at SOTM US. Thanks to all at OSM US for their work putting the event together.

I gave two presentations, one on MapRoulette and one on the new Meet Your Mappers tool. I posted annotated slides for the MapRoulette talk on my blog.

Dear Overture Team and OpenStreetMap Community,

This diary entry is a follow-up to an in-person conversation I had with some of the Overture team at State of the Map U.S. To their credit, they were quick to admit to and apologize for some of these omissions and verbally committed to making appropriate changes. I am therefore posting this entry for the following reasons:

• to fully document my concerns,
• to invite others to (respectfully please!) share their perspectives,
• to hold the Overture team accountable for making these changes.

Clarity on Attribution Page

In my opinion, Overture does not take care to spell out the necessity of OpenStreetMap attribution on their Attribution and Licensing page. After an optional citation comes the following language:

The Overture Maps Foundation does not require text attribution or an OMF logo on maps, visualizations, and graphics created with our datasets. If you would like to credit Overture, we suggest: © Overture Maps Foundation.

So far it seems pretty easy to use Overture data. We can attribute…but only if we want. Easy peasy! After that, the potential for additional attribution requirements is raised:

Some of the data sources we use in Overture datasets do require their own attribution, according to their licenses. For example, our Explore tool displays several Overture datasets that are made wholly or in part from OpenStreetMap data, so we added the following line of attribution to adhere to the requirements of the Open Database License: © OpenStreetMap contributors, Overture Maps Foundation.

Let’s take a close look at this paragraph. In Overture’s only mention of OpenStreetMap attribution requirements (that I could find), they frame it as a passing example. It’s as if the OpenStreetMap community should feel lucky that Overture chose us as their example of potential attribution requirements. To me, this deflection of our dataset’s license comes across as deeply disrespectful.

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Just reached 1000 edits, so thought it would be good to dump what I have learnt so far.

I started using OSM during the COVID 19 lockdown living in Hampshire, there were many walks available but the routes were not always clear on google maps. OSM was far better and I used it for information about walks before proceding. The level of detail was great and really useful.

Fast forward to 2023 and I decide to start contributing using StreetComplete and MapComplete. I drive an Electric vehicle and the information on charge points is so obscure I wanted to contribute. This led me down a rabbit hole of StreetComplete, filling in addresses, road surfaces, bus stop shelter. Anything and everything. I learnt the importance of information that would be useful to users.

Only in the last year, have I picked up mapping, this time using ID editor, chnaging tags was a little daunting but I slowly got there. I noticed some areas around me were missing house numbers. I learnt the importance of doing a survey on foot. There’s so much to learn from looking around IRL.

The last few weeks, I have been mapping out areas that had no buildings, only Residential Areas. A few thousand terraced houses later (feels like it) and quite a few places are on the map around Yarmouth (yeah I moved from Hampshire in this time!). Most imporatntly, check the alignment of background layers before starting a new edit! It is also useful to turn off layers not used, really makes things easier to see.

Latest update, I own a drone and can produce aerial images, very useful for areas not on Bing maps. This also gives me access to a 3D view of the area, very useful for double checking my survey notes!

Maybe I’ll do another one of these at 2000 edits?

Didn’t think would see a day(again) where I have to use tor with bridge as proxy AND a vpn for accessing internet including OSM and it’s wiki but here we are… Sighs 🤦🤦🤦

Those guys at government always can and will shock/surprise civilians to the death (yet again)

Never a dull moment!

Hi everyone. I recently started contributing to the map around my university’s campus, and I thought I should get in touch with the community a little. I’ve only labeled major buildings in the campus plus some road fixups, but I hope to continue contributing more to the map around here.

Oh yeah, this account is old, but I don’t even remember having it until I tried to sign up lol.

I typically write my notes in English when they can be resolved by anyone. Even residents from another country than Sweden.

Om anteckningarna pekar mot att en behöver kunna förstå svenska för att fixa ett problem så tenderar skriva jag på svenska istället.

Spending countless hours terracing thousands of buildings yet didn’t even bother to correct the errors caused by it?

Hello OSM community,

My name is Nicole and I’m on the governance team at MapSwipe, a humanitarian mobile and web app where volunteers can contribute to geospatial data projects.

I presented a talk, “MapSwipe Today and Its Future in OSM” at State of the Map US 2025 in June in Boston, Massachusetts. The talk had two main purposes:

a.) Let people know more about MapSwipe, its history, and what it can do with it today

b.) Begin a discussion within the OSM community about what it might mean for MapSwipe to become its own OSM editor, especially if AI or machine learning models are involved.

Whenever mapping and AI or machine learning come up in the same sentence, it’s logical that folks get worried. There are a lot of unknowns, and the potential for something like bad edits to get out of control. MapSwipe’s community wants to ensure that if we are going to move forward with any ideas and plans around becoming an editor that has any AI in the mix, that we also make sure the OSM community is present in our discussions.

This diary post is to collect thoughts from the OSM community on this topic.

Once the recorded talk is processed, I’ll also add the link to that here.

Looking forward to the discussion!

Nicolelaine

This week I’ve been mapping rural communities in Honduras, focusing on areas within the Tegucigalpa Health Region. My work has included adding paths, correcting road alignments, and identifying visible structures such as houses and community centers.

Today we at Unique Mappers did our weekly presentation were I made a presentation on Humanitarian Use of OpenStreetMap where i talked about OSM what it is why it is crucial in Humanitarian context how it provides critical data in poorly mapped or un mapped areas. I still talked about the basics( getting started with OSM), the intermediate OSM data use(Analysis and virtualization) and advanced used of OSM. I still talked about the tools and resources( software) used with OSM and example is the HOT tasking manager, QGIS [qgis.org], Umap and many other software, site, organisation using OpenStreetMap

Hi :) I am mapping Eritrea these days and found some objects I am not able to identify. Can you help me with your wisdom?

1

I suspect those are some living buildings, but I might be wrong.

2

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As I write in my profile, I was really peeved off, that dozens of “Camino Apps” (apps used to track users along the Ways of St. James, the Caminos de Santiago) did ask their users for updates to opening hours or bed counts in albergues, but never contributed back to OSM what they’d discovered.

I launched a “test balloon” in 2023, renaming an accommodation to reflect its real name, and lo and behold, of the 23 apps I checked, 22 had suddenly also changed the name, meaning they used OSM data, but didn’t ever give back to the community.

So I changed it, wrote a Camino App that did contribute back. We don’t expect our users to have OSM accounts. Instead, we recruited a bunch of volunteers, who are served the changes, check them personally, and then contribute them back to OSM.

First step: fountain potability. Along the Caminos are thousands of fountains providing drinking water to the 500k pilgrims walking the Way every year. Spain is excellent, when it comes to drinking water quality, but sometimes fountains dry out, become undrinkable, or become drinkable again. Nothing sucks more than going 1000m out of your way to find out that fountain has been closed.

I’ll semi-manually start updating fountain “drinking_water=” tags over the next 30 days along the most famous route, the Camino Francés. Once that’s stable and enough volunteers have been trained and shown that they can do this without harming the dataset, we’ll expand to hostel data.

This blog was originally posted on my personal site:

Prograham.net - Strava Workouts Make OpenStreetMap Stronger

I’m not much of an armchair mapper. Partly because ground surveying with Everydoor and StreetComplete is what got me started mapping in OSM. But I think it’s also because I hate having to decipher blurry aerial imagery. I still do it from time to time, but ever since I discovered how to use the Strava heatmap, I’m hooked.

To hopefully sell others on the dataset and walk you through some ways I’ve found it helpful, I’ve collected some examples below of ways you can use the Strava heatmap data.

Context

For those of you who don’t know, Strava is used around the world to record all kinds of workouts. Strava has moved to using OSM data in their apps and to give back they’ve allowed use of their GPS traces as a source when contributing to OSM!

To get it set up you can reference the OSM wikipage for Strava.

Usecase 1: Misaligned Paths

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Just a quick blog post on some coastline work I was doing.

For the OSMF Shortbread vector tiles I had to identify when coastlines has changed. The solution I came up isn’t specific to Shortbread, but is useful for anyone using the tiled ocean shapefiles.

I’m going to start by assuming that the old ocean data is in water_polygons and the new data is in loading.water_polygons. Other parts of my code already handle this. The shapefiles are loaded into tables that have the columns x int, y int, way geometry.

To start I want to find any geometries that have changed. For geometries in the new data that aren’t in the old data, I can get this with a LEFT JOIN. I want a set of geometries that includes any geometries from the new data that aren’t in the old. This set can be made by excluding any geometries in the old data that have identical x, y, and binary identical geometry to a new geometry. It’s possible this set includes extra geometries, but that’s okay.

A RIGHT JOIN would find geometries in the old data that aren’t in the new. Combining these gives a FULL OUTER JOIN. If I then collect the geometries in each shapefile tile I can compare them to find the geometries

SELECT ST_SymDifference(ST_Collect(old.way), ST_Collect(new.way)) AS dgeom
    FROM water_polygons AS old
    FULL OUTER JOIN loading.water_polygons AS new
        ON old.way = new.way and old.x = new.x and old.y = new.y
    WHERE new.way IS NULL OR old.way IS NULL
    GROUP BY COALESCE(old.x, new.x), COALESCE(old.y, new.y)

This gets me the difference in geometries for the entire world in about two minutes. But I need tiles, which is it’s own complication.

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The world of OpenStreetMap…

One person is sanding down a rusty gate,
Another is painting over the rust,
Yet another is attaching a new handle to the corroded gate,
Some are even building an entirely new gate to replace the old, rusted one…
And a few are wondering, “Why are they doing all this? The gate still works just fine…“

Everyone is doing what they want to do and what they can do,
but since no one is coordinating or adjusting things,
it’s a situation where people are working inconsistently and in a disorganized manner.

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오픈스트리트맵 세계…

어떤 사람은 녹슨 대문을 사포질하고 있고
또 다른 사람은 녹이 슬어 있는 대문에 페인트칠을 하고 있고
또다른 사람은 녹이 슨 대문에 새로운 손잡이를 달고 있고
또 어떤 사람들은 녹이 슬어 낡은 대문을 교체하려고 새 대문을 만들고 있고…
그리고 몇몇 사람은 대문이 아직도 쓸만 한데 왜들 저러고 있나 의아해 하고 있고……

각자 제 하고픈 일을 하고 할 수 있는 일을 하지만,
누구도 조정해 주거나 조율해 주지 않아서
서로 일관성 없고 뒤죽박죽으로 일하고 있는 형국.

EN translation below

PT abaixo

En 2025, il existe encore plein d’endroits dans OSM où les villes sont encore peu cartographiées dans le détail – malheureusement pour l’exhaustivité de la base, mais heureusement pour la motivation des cartographes OSM. Il est possible de changer radicalement la cartographie d’une petite ville en y consacrant quelques heures lors d’un séjour de quelques jours.

Par le passé, lors d’une formation en ligne, j’avais montré comment j’avais cartographié peu à peu quelques centaines de POI sur un quartier très vivant de ma ville de résidence, et cela avait motivé un étudiant pour faire la même chose chez lui (voir ce billet).

À nouveau, je relate mon expérience pour inciter d’autres à l’adapter à leur manière. Mais j’irai cette fois au-delà des aspects techniques et logistiques. En effet, cartographier des POI, c’est bien sûr utile à toutes celles et ceux qui réutiliseront la donnée, c’est un bon moment à passer seul ou à plusieurs, mais cela permet également de découvrir le lieu autrement, de mieux le connaître et le comprendre.

Au-delà des POI, en portant un œil de géographe, on se rend compte comment la localité s’organise et comment elle évolue. Je rajoute donc quelques petites pastilles sur ce que les POI m’ont appris sur le territoire cartographié.

Le contexte

J’ai passé trois jours dans les environs de Mucugê, petite ville de la Chapada Diamantina dans l’intérieure de l’État de Bahia au Brésil, dont l’histoire est justement marquée par la période de ruée vers le diamant, avec avant tout un agenda touristique, mais aussi en tête la possibilité de cartographier en fin de journée, au retour de visites ou de randonnée, ou au contraire tôt le matin. Mais dans les deux cas, seulement si j’avais suffisamment d’énergie pour le faire et sans que cela n’interfère avec les activités prévues ou improvisées avec les personnes qui m’accompagnaient.

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It sometimes feels like OSM is of the West, by the West, for the West.

An OpenStreetMap of the West, by the West, for the West.

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Over the past 20 years, OpenStreetMap has become one of the world’s largest and most impactful crowdsourcing projects. Thousands of communities have formed around collaborative mapping, connecting people and fostering the sharing of geographic knowledge.

Today, OpenStreetMap is an essential source of geographic data, powering a wide range of map services used by thousands of people daily and serving as a vital tool in managing climate and humanitarian crises. Although the main site, OSM.org, is not designed as a direct navigation tool, the experience of new users plays a crucial role in attracting new mappers. Improving usability for the public, therefore, benefits the entire community, alongside the millions of organizations that use OSM data.

In recent years, the OpenStreetMap ecosystem has grown significantly, expanding to every corner of the world and yet, the user interface of OSM.org is much the same as it was when OSM was founded in 2004. Among other challenges, it is not optimized for mobile devices, nor does it meet modern accessibility standards. We believe this is the time to prioritize a more cohesive, intuitive, and enjoyable user experience while making it easier for developers and contributors to create solutions.

To achieve this goal, we are developing a design system, a set of reusable guidelines and components that unify the design and functionality of digital interfaces. This system has been designed to meet the community’s needs, promoting consistency, accessibility, and scalability. It will ensure that interfaces are inclusive, modern, and capable of addressing the needs of a diverse global community.

Discover the Atlas

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