Hi There- Hope you don’t mind a post several years late. Sorry for the years late reply :)

What should you map? We have given more thought to Tourism, what with the routes mostly well done around the country, and with your great work on visitor amenities, the next thing they want to know is places to stay, and amenities. Since Covid has now disrupted which businesses are still open this is the right time to start that. To do that it helps to add the buildings in each town. Look at how we are doing that using a co-ordinated task, this aims to populate the wild atlantic way: https://tasks.openstreetmap.ie/project/84

Let me know if there is anything I can assist with.

Gemerally there are two good things to do - reach out to local people already mapping and organise a party to train new mappers (all said above) > https://hdyc.neis-one.org/?shiftee

Whether run by Dublin Bus, or the smaller operators, each bus stop has a specific number and these cover 5,369 locations. The number is printed on the physical infrastructure, and can be searched for in some of the apps that have been developed*. I guess nomatter what you want to do you need to know the number or name of the stop you want get to, especially if you want to have some sort of alert or GPS track to help you know where to get down. For the stops outside Dublin they do not have numbers (which would be an advantage for apps) but they do have names, and on the Transport for Ireland app you simply put in an address you might be travelling to to discern the correct stop you should use to get down. In either scenario you need a name or a number done in your route research before you go, since the services themselves are unpredictable.

Thinking more about this the attributes of the bus stops are scant, and what you might like to know is if the bus has a shelter from the rain, a waiting seat(s), a litter bin, is safely lit, has an accessible boarding kerb, has a toilet nearby etc. It would be a very great advantage if Dublin Bus published these details in its CCBY 4.0 release for app developers to play with, and of course this to be extended to every transport stop in the country.

Lastly there is a proliferation of Flexibus services in rural Ireland, which are off the beaten track and cover places where commercial carriers will not go. These services are like the shop in the league of gentlemen, a local service for local people, as they are routed by phone calls, and stop wherever the passenger wants to stop, within safe limits hopefully.

*There is open data that cannot be used in osm because of the insufficient licence found here

I realise you raise a wide variety of issues. Forgive me, as I only have sufficient time for one. “People want to find places”, absolutely right they do!

A collective decision to work on things that directly fix that, as a stated priority would help. I don’t mean “tell everyone to map X”, I more mean a consensual and more visible high priority to be set, which acknowledges that everyone might have their pet projects, but the community asks for a more specific effort to be front-loaded.

In my view we should be concentrating on adding buildings, and adding their addresses. In my experience nothing other than this stimulates macro mapping of landuse and micro-mapping of street infrastructure as much as clumps of well defined buildings. This is what consultant-speak usually means by “scalability”, - activities which when completed support and make other activities possible and make them easier or more focussed.

I also think that this is what might convert the 47% who are part of the community into higher levels of contribution activity, and would allow the Foundations, chapters and community meetups to convey a coherent narrative about what we all need to work on. It might even help to stimulate recruitment.

@b-unicycling, you are welcome

@philippec there are no formal rules in Ireland for numbering. Some streets are odds/evens and others are purely sequential. There is no focal point either, numbers can progress east, or west, or both (for an example look at the streets around Oxmantown Road). Yes, I mean Mapillary and I am not a big fan of blurring. It holds OpenStreetMap back a good deal.

@VictorIE I think you are right, the house vendors don’t want any negativity sometimes, and so slip out of #13

Nice work Amanda - you come at it from all sides! Keep it up.

Being the same age, interests and similar experiences to yourself has taught me a few lessons in life, and chief among these is that interpersonal conflicts have a minimum of two versions of what happened, who started it, why it happened and who is the victim. Other than letting off steam I doubt that writing it on your diary is in any way a step closer to a resolution, and for there to be a resolution there has to be a third party intervention which reminds everyone involved of the basic principles.

Unfortunately for you OSM doesn’t have a conflict resolution process when it comes to things going wrong with community activism. It is an organisation, and yet not an organisation, in that the dynamics of what happens between two people, or two groups aren’t part of the anyone’s duties to fix, monitor or intervene. I know there are some surface area codes of conduct coming into place soon, but these won’t be able to deal with what has happened to you.

The only hope I would offer to you is philosophical, and it is that the non-organisation of the osm community gives you infinite space to move you interests away into and meet people with similar and different interests to your own. If organisations like the ones you mentioned are attracted to groups that are temporary in their committments let them both at it, they won’t last and won’t harm you as they fade away.

When you move to Ireland you will see a rich variety of hedgerows and stone walls, spread out like a lattice across the country. In the east the fertile lands taken by the conquest of Cromwell still today has the geometric regularity, whereas the internal displacement of people to the West has smaller, stone clearance based walls and field build up from seaweed as sharecroppers and crofters did their best with a limestone environment.

Like you explain here, much of this remains unmapped. But you might be very interested in how the mappers of Kilkenny and Wexford are adding field names to the map, (yes each field had a non-unique name sometimes describing an event that happened there, the owners, the flora, or the relative position to another field).

Dear ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️‍🌈

Thanks for doing all that work, right now you are involved in every layer of OSM organisation and without free communicators like yourself lots of people wouldn’t know what is going on.

If at all I can help the Ireland possibility let me know. It may have been decided against already due to the charities regulations here.

Also, next month, don’t forget to mention the SC extract you assisted me with!

@westernorst, that’s probably true as a causal factor, but then the usage in Ireland falls off regardless of the improvements(!), and I am trying to make that the focus of the conclusion. It definitely has become easier to use and thanks for doing that.

I think you make an excellent point about addresses, especially with regard to facilitating a low bar of entry and getting new users to contribute their personal knowledge to start populating gaps on the map.

Well done on reaching a benchmark. A great way to make an impact is to add all the buildings bear you, using satellite imagery, then go for a walk with StreetComplete or make a little fieldpapers project and populate the whole block with all of its addresses.

In regards to addresses generally lets call out some facts, until the last 8 years a large number of the original community had a real bias against even adding buildings, which is a hugely self defeating view, but is eroding gradually. My tip (challenge) to you is first add the entire built environment of your area, then add all the addresses, including number ranges for buildings tagged as “residential” or “apartment”.

@westnordost Thank you for you comments here today - I was thrilled to see you enjoyed the analysis. Back when you launched the app I was on the side of the argument that we need to change the hyper-local obsessions of mappers, and facilitate mappers who move around a bit and opportunistically can verify ground truth. Let’s face it, desktop mapping is fine but not the only way to do it.

The iOS point is one that several people in the community in Ireland will regularly raise. I don’t know about the commercial prospect of the app, but if you needed funding I would suggest osmf is asked about it. I do realise that there would be ongoing technical curation of it, much larger than you presently have to do.

Your stats for “Ireland” only show the Republic of Ireland. Our community on this island is unified into one, the only differences we have are slightly variant road signs, but we all know one another’s :). But seriously, Ireland is an osmf chapter encompassing the whole island.

It is awesome to see the growth in usage. I bet Covid-19 did that. I will do another post looking at the time-stamps on the edits and seeing if our trend for Ireland was upwards since last March when these lockdowns started.

Although I don’t think it arises in this case the principle of “latest is greatest” is a good one to adopt when copying GPS traces. You can’t ultimately rely on some GPS data, so I also use Mapillary, since the GPS on those are somewhat superior to what I see on the “early days” GPS traces laying around.

It is good that you did this. Navigators often go into a spin when a locations differ from the route data, you have ensured that the osm based ones will not, at least not in this location.

Hiya There are a few ways to do courtyards and multipolygons. I can show you that if you haven’t cracked it. DeBigC

Dónal this is a brilliant post and well done, well written and thanks for specifying lessons.

My main take-away from this are that I have heard in the established mapping community from contributors who have dashcams and don’t have the time to hack at them to make them mapillary friendly. This should be read by all them, and you could make a video about how you did it step by step.

On the Wild Atlantic Way there are still gaps at Kinsale, where the way officially ends/begins depending on whether you are a clockwise revolutionary, or a member of the chartered royal society of anti-clockwisers.

Thank you for that post, it is good to hear that StreetComplete is a gateway for you entering the wider world of desktop contribution.

Still today many towns in Europe still lack important details about their ways and the buildings in particular. Some of the original contributors had both a logic and a bias against buildings, which is very limiting if you want OSM to be a fully populated relational database of everything from history to architecture. OSM is much more, and will be much more than simply a navigation source. When the buildings are mapped out with a decent level of accuracy and consistency StreetComplete becomes a hungry beast, so I recommend you map all the building outlines and wait about a week, and walk to that place.

Anyway, good luck to you and keep on contributing ;)

Sono d’accordo con te. Sto mappando gli edifici nel nord di Dublino, ovunque siano scomparsi. Trovo che quando qualcuno ha messo l’edificio di base = yes tag StreetComplete è un ottimo strumento per blitz quelli e raccogliere 3-4 altri livelli di informazioni inclusi gli indirizzi.

Hi Are you based in Ireland at the moment? DeBigC

Geoffrey You have my support. Im in contact with some Sudanese doctors working overseas. The northern Sudan, not South Sudan. They asked me to provide a few lessons on mapping, which I am doing.

There is no clear mapping objective, beyond the individual interests. Sudan’s political climate shows it to be difficult to adopt open philosophies that would drive open participation

Having done serious amounts of work in Africa it is evident that Sudan has a lot of missing placenames which could be fixed through out of copyright placename harvesting. This would be the best starting point, rather than diving into an emergency or a health appeal, as this will mean local people see and find their town/city.

Lets talk further.

Ciaran

You had one helluva month Rory! Anyway, to give you full credit you made several useful contributions to #osmIRL_buildings and helped your birth country’s mapping effort.

It is nice to see more chapters coming into effect, when normality eventually returns to this planet and we can meet face to face chapters are the way to go in terms of organizing meetings. I assume everyone is going to be sick of zooms and hangouts soon :)

@VictorIE I absolutely agree - I think that people from deprived neighbourhoods will not have the same opportunities, but my diary post wasn’t about that. I think there is a role for organisations that have access to such communities to ask experienced mappers to visit them. The fewer level 3 tags is also related to the low numbers of POI opportunities. I agree with you, poorer areas can be bland and devoid of street furniture, planting and infrastructure - creating the POI opportunity, and given what we know about tags those are more likely to be the item that attracts tagging depth.

@fpagenk I didn’t brushoff anything off actually, I went to extra lengths to count and write about things within the confines of a diary post - and I gave the tagging depth finding good coverage of the observed differences between deprived and affluent areas. By the way it is strange for you to suggest that I can compare things mapped against things that might exist in greater density when the map of Dublin is generally incomplete. I disagree with you about deprived areas drawing in more nodes due to density, the opposite is true since oftentimes public housing in Ireland is multi-level apartment based, which in most cases isn’t subdivided and mapped as a single building=residential. I wish you posted more because you don’t actually explain what you mean about this being insufficient proof/disproof. It almost sounds like you didn’t like that I did this diary.

@Smef09 I understand, there are many reasons why a mapper will not map what’s right in front of them, and I also think these maxims may have been things to do in the past, but as the map fills up more they become less relevant. I know mappers whose reach is vast within Ireland. You are right, trees are an item that can be vandalised, and oftentimes that is a feature of deprived neighbourhoods. Do you only map trees?