Do I get any extra credit for having covered the entire state of Kansas? At this point I seriously doubt I'll catch fx99 though. I got slowed down by some horrible, terrible, awful TIGER data that my mapping OCD wouldn't let me ignore. It was truly bad! Most of El Dorado was shifted by 100-200 meters and the geometry was all warped. A couple of neighborhoods were over 300 meters off!

Not sure why people are so confused about nearmap. They gave us explicit permission to relicense existing contributions under ODbL. It doesn't mean they are changing their license or anything else. It was a generous offer and we should all say "thank you" and move on. It is too bad we can no longer use this source but mapping happened before ANY aerial imagery was available and it will continue without nearmap.

Even if you think this is the right thing to do, it is still premature. More people are agreeing every day. I have even seen several people changing their minds. Because people were forced to make a choice, I know some people who were still undecided selected "decline" because that was the only way they could get back to editing the map while they decided. A "decline" is reversible. An "agree" is not.

So you may be destroying historical data and doing extra work for nothing.

I actually used it a little tonight in the spirit of "know thy enemy". Honestly I'm not all that impressed. I guess as a POI adder it is a decent tool. The tagging interface is more refined than anything we have in OSM. There are a lot of presets for most of the fields and the presentation is pretty clean. But editing geometry of roads is just downright painful. Unless I'm missing something in my OSM trained mind, you can either edit intersections as point features or road segments as line features but not both at the same time (like to straighten a road over several blocks) Oh and any object you touch is locked from further editing (including more edits by you) until the edit is reviewed.

"meh"

Unfortunately the sheer name recognition factor of "Google" will probably attract people in droves. If OSM happened to have a few million dollars sitting around I bet we could do an effective PR campaign. Google has stirred the "citizen mapper" pot. If we could now say "yeah... but we're better!" I bet we could attract a bunch of new users. How much does a full page ad in the NY times cost? :)

@olejorgenb: But that's just the thing. It isn't your data. As soon as you hit the "Save" button, it becomes Goolge's data and you have nothing to do with it anymore.

*sigh* it is late. Apparently I forgot to close the link tag at the end of my first paragraph. It should read "it is from this polygon"

There is no "block" polygon. There is the landuse=residential polygon on the very outside that defines the border of the apartment complex. Anywhere you see grey being rendered, it is from .

Next in from the edge is the parking lot that surrounds the complex. Honestly, this may not be the best way of doing it but I used to map it as a single area. This is anything colored yellow in the complex.

Also, I'm curious about these warning messages you are seeing. I don't get any errors when I map areas like this. One multipolygon related error I have run into is when the inner and outer members of the same relation touch each other. That is definitely a problem.

I won't disagree with those saying the license change process seems messy. But like Sanderd17, I just don't care enough about licenses to say no. I like the concept of share-alike and I think attribution is more than fair to ask for from consumers of our data but honestly, I think I would continue contributing if we were going public domain too. All the debate about licensing, copyright assignment, etc makes me go "meh"

Relations are only needed in certain circumstances to describe areas/polygons. If you are mapping a building with a hole in it, you need a relation:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/1530467

If two objects share a border they CAN be mapped as a relation. For example, county boundaries are often mapped as relations. The way that describes the border between two counties is a member of two different relations. Example:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/67976026
is a member of both Riley county and Marshall County.

But you can also just make the two objects share nodes, in effect overlapping the ways on top of each other where they touch. Which way to do it is kind of up to you. There are valid arguments and situations for both ways.

If the boundary of an area is made up of separate mappable things. For example if a grave yard has a fence around part of it and hedges around another part, you could map the fence and hedge separately using ways and then put the fence and hedge ways into a relation that describes the whole grave yard area.

If an object is too big to be a single way. Ways can only have up to 2,000 nodes in them. If something is too big to map in 2,000 nodes (like lakes) then you have to split the way into smaller chunks and add them all to a relation.

Cutting hold into landuse areas seems silly to me. I could see it being appropriate in very specific cases but in general, it is silly.

Here is an apartment complex in my city. If you look at it in edit mode, you will see it has nested polygons.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=39.206869&lon=-96.618048&zoom=18&layers=M

Also, I just noticed that you have both an admin_level=6 and admin_Level=10 on the relation. Tag keys are all lower case and there should of course only be one (6 I believe is the correct one)

And one last comment: don't take the duplicate checker as gospel. It is perfectly fine for administrative boundaries and roads to have nodes on top of each other but not connected. Joined nodes generally indicate that you can route from one way to the other or that the objects are legally or physically defined by each other. The way imports were done here in the US, boundaries and roads often have nodes where they cross even when they really shouldn't have any and rather should just pass over each other without interacting.

Looking at the relation page, it looks like you are missing a segment in the southwest corner: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/1536525

I haven't used Potlatch (1 or 2) to do much relation editing. JOSM has a nice display to let you know if a relation is ordered/closed or not.

Keep it up! I have done county relations in 3 states now. It is hard work! :)

There is a beginner's guide on the wiki that should help get you started. The Map Features page is a very good reference to keep handy to know what kind of objects to map and how to map them.

Here are some video tutorials. Some of them are a little dated so the editors might look a little different but most of the concepts should be similar:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Video_tutorials

Welcome aboard!

Various bits in various posts... to be clear:

For the mapnik layer, add /dirty to the end of the tile image URL to force a re-render. /status will tell you when it was last rendered.

For the osmarender layer you can submit a T@H render request at http://tah.openstreetmap.org/Request/create/ - the tile number needs to be a zoom level 12 tile. All the smaller tiles will be automatically rendered.

Both renderers have been reasonably quick for me recently. A lot of times it takes less than 5 minutes although at peak times it could take 20 or 30 minutes.

Also, you can view the current mapnik render queue here: http://munin.openstreetmap.org/openstreetmap/yevaud.openstreetmap/renderd_queue.html

And yes it seems like the "minutely" diffs have been taking about 5 or 10 minutes to reach mapnik recently.

I have found the TIGER data in my area to vary greatly in accuracy. In my city, things are off by a fair amount (well... they WERE off, before I started mapping!) but for example most of the small roads I've come across out in the country (I'm in Kansas) are dead-on accurate and I'm pretty sure no one else has edited them. I'm not sure how the TIGER data was collected... I'm thinking maybe they used GPS devices and the long, straight roads in the country let the GPS devices achieve high accuracy whereas all the shorty curvy roads (not to mention tree cover) in the city degraded them. Just a wild theory.

Welcome to the club. I started out the same way... Just wanted to add some cycling information to my area using my new GPS bike computer (Garmin Edge 305). Turns out the street positions were so bad I had to correct a good chunk of the city before I could actually add some of the bike/foot paths! Now I'm uploading new traces every few days and intentionally taking detours on my bike to get good traces and map new sections of town!

oops. The server was being slow and I didn't think my first comment got posted!

Yeah I was pretty confused when I first tried to add bicycle information for my city. I started out on opencyclemap "information" page which is clearly geared towards Britain. At first I thought lcn stood for "London Cycle Network" so I wasn't sure about using that for the bike paths here in the US. And relations were poorly explained.

I THINK I finally figured most of it but I'm still not sure on everything. The wiki has good general information and what I would call "abstract knowledge" about mapping but it would be helpful if there were some pages linked in the beginners guide with some concrete examples. There is a "first basic road" page but it is pretty minimal and doesn't really explain how to tag things. I was confused at first by the "highway" tag as I thought this should only be applied to... well.. highways, not residential roads. And it would be nice to see some pages to explain these things for some common tasks - like mapping cycle routs/paths/lanes. I found some disjointed information here and there and had to piece it together myself.

As for opencyclemap, it is apparently experiencing server problems. My area won't even render at certain zoom levels and I'm pretty sure it hasn't updated with new data from OSM in several weeks. Hopefully they can get that sorted out soon.

Yeah I was pretty confused when I first tried to add bicycle information for my city. I started out on opencyclemap "information" page which is clearly geared towards Britain. At first I thought lcn stood for "London Cycle Network" so I wasn't sure about using that for the bike paths here in the US. And relations were initially poorly explained.

I THINK I finally figured most of it out by bouncing around on the wiki looking at tag pages and whatnot but I'm still not sure on everything. The wiki has good general information and what I would call "abstract knowledge" about mapping in general but it would be helpful if there were some pages linked in the beginners guide with some concrete examples. "To map a new road in your neighborhood, follow these steps and use these tags" or "To map a bicycle path, do this"

As for opencyclemap, it is apparently experiencing server problems. My area won't even render at certain zoom levels and I'm pretty sure it hasn't updated with new data from OSM in several weeks. Hopefully they can get that sorted out soon.

That would be thanks to me! And my Garmin. And my bike. I actually signed up on OSM to put in some bike trails in the area. Turns out I had to correct all the roads round my house before I could even do that because they were so far off. But now I've started moving on to other things that need tweaking in the area.

Aha! Thank you sir! Turns out I recognize the user name of the person in question and know them IRL!

Yeah, I have found the satellite imagery to be spot-on compared to all my GPS traces. All the roads in my area of town were shifted pretty significantly to the northwest in OSM. Several hours of tweaking later, they are no longer! Have you tried playing around with the JOSM editor? I'm thinking it is more likely than POTLATCH to have the ability to select multiple ways at a time and do mass corrections like that.