The tag #osmIRL_buildings is a kind of handy brand name our community has developed for our mapping campaign to map all of Ireland’s buildings. The campaign started with a brief test at a single mapathon in Galway in September 2019, and kicked off in earnest in Kilkenny at the end of November the same year. I say “in earnest” because this is when tasks were opened and the tasking manager started to be used every day.

The campaign has a number of effects which merit discussion beyond just the obvious upturn in mapping. But let’s mention that upturn first. The upturn started at the same time as the task manager being opened at the end of 2019. The number of buildings went from 810k to 1.5million in those 15 months, which means 47 thousand buildings were added each month.

picnic images

At the outset there was a big concern that the building=yes tag would be invited by dint of using the hotosm tasking manager source code. However, this was completely unfounded as the building=yes contributions have remained static (in fact it grew by 20k but this is a miniscule increase compared to the surge in building=yes tags being added from 2016..

Finally, tags like building=garage, building=shed and building=farm_auxiliary have started to grow only a few hundred to having approximately 60k instances of each. This shows that contributors, once their mindset is focussed on buildings are very willing (and able) to define and capture what can often be passed off as insignificant.

Long may our success continue!