Since I would like to hear more about what goes on at some of the conferences I can't make I thought I would post some of what stuck out the most for me at this one. This is just what stuck out to me. If I miss something or am wrong about something I apologize in advance.

Nama Budhathoki gave a good presentation (over Skype!) on who the contributors to OSM are and why they do what they do. It had breakdowns of how much people contributed verse what their reasons for contributing were. It also had a bit on the backgrounds of OSMers such as age, gender, and traditional GIS experience.

Randal Hale and Leah Keith gave a talk about using OSM as a teaching tool with high school students. Her students seemed to really take to it. It was also very good because it doesn't cost the school any money if they already have computers. The FREE component was really important. They can just make accounts and get started. They used Mapzen because they found it to be the most user friendly. Even after the class project some of the students have continued to contribute useful data to the map.

Jon Nystrom gave a talk about ArcGIS being able to work directly with OSM files. Many attendees were excited about this because many people in attendance came from a GIS background and 'grew up on' ArcGIS. People like to use the tools they know. It will probably help more professionals contribute to OSM because they won't have to learn a new tool set.

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I put together a feature proposal for shoe repair shops today. There are a bunch of them around San Francisco and I've been tagging them as shop=shoe_repair. Since there aren't yet any approved tags for these types of shops I decided to go ahead and propose that one. I tried to make it fairly complete and informative proposal and to that end I plan on taking pictures of a few shops tomorrow to add to the page as well. Thoughts, comments and ideas for improvements are most definitely welcome!

Cheers,
Greg

I just deleted what I think could be one of the most out of date nodes in the entire OSM project. It was a TIGER data import of a train station, the Southern Pacific Terminal, in San Francisco. That station was demolished sometime in the 70s. The location was an RV park for a long time after that and is currently home to a large multi-use retail and residential condo project. That means we had 40 year out of date data in project that hasn't even been around a quarter of that time!

I thought that was funny but even funnier to me was that none of the TIGER mappers noticed that what was once a large, beautiful mission revival train station was no longer there. How does the government get its data for that map, anyhow?

Cheers,
Greg

osm.org/browse/node/368166306/history

I mapped part of Market Street today from about 4th street to Embarcadero. I focus mostly on transit (bus stops, subway entrances, etc.,) banks, ATMs, mailboxes, useful shops like optometrists and shoe repair places, and anything open 24 hours a day. I skip most bars and restaurants simply because there are too many of them and they don't interest me.

Mapping transit on this particular corridor is pretty time consuming because there is so much of it! There are three layers of dual track rail and a ton of bus lines along the corridor; it took me over two hours to map about half a mile of road. Lots of banks and atms along this section, too, and I try to map them well.

On that note, does anyone have an editor they recommend for entering lots of tags? To me, JOSM is a complete nightmare that I can't use and potlatch is rather less than ideal, although better than it used to be.

One other cool thing. A few hours after I entered the data I'd gathered someone had already corrected a mistake I'd made (entering the name of 7-Eleven in as 7-11.) Its good to see people watching out for that sort of thing; it made me smile.

Cheers,
Greg