I have finally gotten around to doing some serious license remapping. Ironically, here in the US I think we're going to get off relatively easily because so much of our data is imported from a PD source. Any contributions from decliners are generally limited to trivial way splitting and/or improving geometry which can be redone easily from Bing or USGS imagery. I am primarily concentrating on the interstate system right now.

I wrote a blog post about my initial efforts which may be of interest to others:
http://ksmapper.blogspot.com/2012/01/license-change-mapping.html

I have started using the ImproveWayAccuracy plugin pretty much every time I fire up JOSM. It makes realigning all the crappy TIGER data around here much more bearable and faster. Anyway, I made a tweak to the code to make it even more useful for myself and thought I'd share it in case others can benefit. Details and download link are in my blog post here:
http://ksmapper.blogspot.com/2011/12/most-interesting-mapper.html

Today I hit the 1 year anniversary since my first OSM edit! I wrote up a blog post to celebrate.

For those who liked my blog post about mapping airports from a couple of weeks ago, here is part 2!

http://ksmapper.blogspot.com/2011/01/airports-part-2.html

I just blogged about my grand adventures while mapping airports in Kansas.

http://ksmapper.blogspot.com/2011/01/airports-part-1.html

And while you're there you can check out my previous posts about TIGER editing statistics!

I attended and now work for Kansas State University so I have a fair amount of personal knowledge about the campus. How do I enter this into OSM? The wiki page for amenity=university might as well not be there for all the information it contains, not to mention the fact that there is also talk of using amenity=education along with education=university.

Should buildings be traced as areas or marked as points of interest? (being new to OSM I'm still kind of fuzzy on buildings in the first place) What about the campus as a whole? KSU is nice in that it has a fairly well defined outline of land that belongs to the university. But it also owns several buildings throughout the city that are not on that land. What about universities in urban areas where there may not be a distinct campus, just buildings sprinkled around in an area? What tags are suggested to identify a university building? Should the tags indicate what specific academic and/or administrative department(s) reside in the building? For example, Hale Library is obviously a library but it also contains a lot of offices occupied by IT staff and it contains the university IT help desk which might be of interest to OSM users. Then there is the Student Union building that contains several fast food joints in the food court.

If there are conventions being used out there, please add them to the wiki page! If not... umm... I guess make some up real quick and THEN add them to the wiki! :)

I am happy to report that OSM now has the most accurate data on the internet for the area just west of me! Google and Yahoo are both missing half the neighborhood. Bing is better but actually has streets listed that aren't completed or even under construction yet.

It's just a small section of the city but hey it's a start.

Is there any way to get the history of a specific POI? My area seems to be pretty dead as far as other contributors go. All I see in the history for the last month is bots fixing things for large sections of the country. But there are just a couple of local business that were just built within the last few months that ARE in OSM. I'm just curious as to how they got there. Is there a way to view the entire history for a given item? I don't see anything like that in POTLATCH. I haven't played with JOSM very much. I may take another look at that tonight.

So it looks like the GPX importer process got stuck about 8 hours ago. Or is there some weekly maintenance window or something? Either way, guess I won't be able to process the trace of the new section of town I mapped on my bike today :(