I love the OSMfocus app. Did you get anywhere with the open source release?

Hi Zayra. You are very welcome. I am glad you enjoyed yourself at State of the Map and in Japan :-)

@Warin61: I think your posts here are very good. I agree, it’s not a speed problem - a ‘fast map’ is better than no map at all (in my view). I think it comes down to who is able to provide the most detailed mapping.

My local community has done an amazing amount of work to take the map from a blank canvas to what it is now. But we know that we are at our limits of detail - we struggle to map buildings as there are just too many of them (i.e. progress is slow) and we struggle to keep up with changes. Big items like road changes are easy, but keeping up to date with changes to shops, bus stops and parking restrictions (3 things all changing quickly where we live) is hard. In places our data had become stale.

To fix this we either need 100x as many mappers or we work with non-craft mappers as they can support the detail that we are unable to (i.e they are best able to provide some of the detail we struggle with). In reality we are trying both approaches - more Craft mappers and more non-Craft mappers is better than just more of one group! I’m delighted to say that the results are looking good - we have reduced the level of stale data via some semi-mechanical edits :-) and there seems to have been a notable increase in new mappers round here recently too (we just need to convert them from occasional mappers to regular mappers).

I’m a proud owner of a Craft Mapper tshirt and it is the group I associate myself with. Have been and always will be due to my lack of technical know-how and love of outdoor mapping :-)

I don’t believe the mailing list is representative in membership (posting or non-posting). I’d go further and say that the visible bit of the mailing list (the posts we read) is less representative than the international SotMs in aggregate (i.e. SotM 2013, 2016 and 2017 combined - those being the 3 I have been to). There are many reasons but this is off-topic here.

As you say, I was lucky to be able to travel to a few events, and I also engage via my support of the scholarship program. From my conversations, I believe that most people are in the category “We need all forms of mapping / they are all equally important” and this post is designed to remind others that may only see a very one-sided argument in some forums.

If you disagree, feel free to offer up some proof. I suspect you don’t disagree, which is why you are twisting the debate into a different topic… :-)

@imagico: You are right: SotM was made up of people from Japan, 15 scholars from all other the world, some people from the business world and some mappers from further afield who made it part of their holiday this year.

But the people who continue to shout the loudest on the Mailing Lists are fewer in number so even less representative.

I encourage you to set your own survey up and get that seen by a wide audience. Perhaps you are worried that it will show a similar result :-)

TL;DR: I don’t understand why Bryan didn’t just go with crossing=yes for the generic tag? Or his 2016 suggestion of:

“My personal preference would be crossing= to support marked / unmarked, and crossing_ref= would be a dropdown of the common types of markings. But I don’t think I would win that argument either.”

An uncontrolled crossing and a (UK) zebra crossing are two different things in my opinion. The UK zebra crossing has black and white stripes on the road and often includes an orange flashing beacon. If a pedestrian is stood on the pavement beside the crossing then vehicles are required to stop and let them pass. Black and white stripes are not used on crossing that are are controlled by traffic lights (as they are in some countries outside of the UK) but I deem the UK zebra crossing to be a controlled (rather than uncontrolled) crossing due to the requirement on vehicles to stop when this particular road marking is used.

To me an uncontrolled crossing has no significant road marking and no traffic lights. It may have a dropped curb but of follow the end of a path leading to the road, but would otherwise be hard to recognise as a crossing at all.

Nice image. Do you have the source file as I would like to make an English version for my local group?

Nice. Although I have never used the ability to automatically georeference scanned-in walking papers for my own mapping, I have seen the scans used at Missing Maps events.

Nice. I like the use of cycle.travel for the images. Didn’t know about that before.

Btw if you are mapping in Warwickshire there is some open data from the council for height restrictions that can be used.

Awesome! Would be great if the osm.org site did this sort of thing (one for the wishlist).

Thanks. I’d neglected to keep the map updated. All sorted now - panic over!

Hi. I’m referring to adding extra tags to existing POI.

This, Maps.Me and the new Kort app are positive steps forward for making OSM editing more mobile.

this PR may not be exactly what you’re looking for.

You’re preaching to the converted!

As for this PR, I’ll let someone else solve the mess. By which I know this translates to “it will fester for ages, go stale and nothing will be done”.

Rob rob.j.nickerson@gmail.com

I don’t get what the fuss is here. The OSM authorisation page is so clean it shows you exactly what will get shared and has simple tick boxes to exclude parts you don’t want to share.

As I understand it, this enables an option that allows users to easily share their email address with third parties who ask for it (easily=via the OSM auth page).

Or am I missing something?

Returning to the original issue (“Tickbox on sign-up page to accept push-notifications”), I’m not sure the PR solves this. I would prefer an option at new-user sign-up stage to select to subscribe to newsletters from the OSMF and from your local community. If you opt to get newsletters from your local community then you are agreeing to your email address being passed on to the Local Chapter that represents you region.

I find it disappointing that OSMF haven’t implemented this as it could really help to grow the sense of local community in OSM. Instead we have some local chapters tracking the changelogs for signs of new users and then sending them messages through the OSM messaging system. Feels like a waste of everyone’s time - a simple tickbox allows those who want to hear from their local community to enable this.

Great write-up. Let’s get this on the OSM blog. :-)

You seem to have inspired a post about the use of these tags: osm.org/user/BushmanK/diary/40093

An alternate proposal is made here: osm.wiki/Talk:Proposed_features/Date_namespace#It_is_awful_from_the_point_of_view_of_querying_and_data_processing

I’m not sure that I’d tag these as “oneway” at all. They are narrow roads that you can travel in both directions on, but due to the narrowness they have a control mechanism (give way/yield, or lights).

The one near me, I can think of has traffic lights and (via sensors) they change to green as you approach assuming no cars are approaching from the other side. As a two-way road I won’t be tagging it as oneway=alternating - it’s just a traffic light controlled junction.

So for the proposed tag how long should “frequently” be? More than 2 minutes, less than 5?? Other?

Thanks. Lots to do though and we (the OSM UK community) are looking at Fixme/Notes as our next quarterly project: osm.wiki/UK_Quarterly_Projects

Thanks for the reminder. Great tool - shame it wasn’t quite ready in time for the UK quarterly project. Are there any other datasets that this process can be applied too?