This diary post is a follow up on the one I did last week here where I was looking at how much, and for what the Ireland OpenStreetMap community uses the StreetComplete(SC) app.

The StreetComplete creator Tobias replied showing an interesting worldwide trend for SC usage. The trend here shows that there has been an upturn in SC usage worldwide in the last couple of years in terms of the users and edits contributed:

In particular Tobias shows that co-incidental with the Covid-19 months that there was a big upturn in the changesets contributed, starting gradually in May 2020 with a doubling on the previous month, but continuing to rise until the changesets remained at about 4 times the normal level for the forthcoming year. Most users are in the Northern hemisphere, so to see the higher level of changesets sustained through the Northern Hemisphere’s winter months is impressive.

In Ireland the changes, as in the big upturn are also reflected in a little bit of analysis done here.

While this does also reflect a rise of an equivalent magnitude given the lower base number of users in Ireland, it was delayed until December 2020, and lasted only for 3 months. The number of changesets being contributed settled down to around 4000 per month.

As I said in the first post we have the summer, our community in Ireland could be making much more of this app. Tagging “depth” is uneven in a lot of places, and StreetComplete is a great leveller. A lot of building=yes tags still exist, and if there was nothing but that to do it would still justify us taking this app seriously. There are missing buildings, (we are no more than 25% complete), and the vast majority of buildings do not have addresses still in Ireland. Loads of potential for usage of SC.