Well, in this talk I argued the same for POI mappers :)

I’m happy you’ve solved the language issue :) Updating opening hours absolutely would solve the corresponding StreetComplete quest.

I don’t have any support channels besides some russian-language, and github. Where should I make one?

Hmm. I’ll add a language switcher to the next release, most likely. Try looking in your phone’s settings → system → languages for the lang order. Adding English somewhere there might help.

Which language does it show for you?

I believe the first this we should think about is how a hypothethic shop owner even learns about OSM and these tools to add their business. Most people don’t know of us.

Aaaaand the data model is more complex than you imagine. For example, many businesses don’t have a name. Different countries have different addressing structures. There are much more contact options and social networks, which differ around the world. And the business classification in OSM is both incomplete and too complex for a single drop-down list.

So yeah, the concept art is pretty, but this has been done twice on the web and e.g. in maps.me, and it doesn’t work for a typical business owner. The problem is not technical, it’s social. How do you get an owner to submit their business?

Simon, I agree that we all want for the map to update itself: for shop owners to add their shops, for road builders to map new roads, for forestry officials to update forests on OpenStreetMap. But, living in Eastern Europe, I see hundreds of shops and amenities that I’m pretty sure won’t bother themselves adding to any map. And if to look at less developed countries, even having time or opportunity to internet there are small. Yeah, I want other people to do my “job”, but I don’t see that happening like ever.

So tools like osmybiz perpetuate this privilege that e.g. Frederic mentioned numerous times: when you, as an owner, have enough time and money, you can get your business much more visible and popular through marketing companies and by doing some things by youself. But we want not only successful businesses on the map, but every shop and every amenity.

Hence we need tools to add these. Maps.me helped with diversity, adding amenities in distant countries. My editor will help with completeness, adding all shops and amenities where there are experienced mappers (mostly USA and Europe, that means). But for a definite solution to this issue — I still don’t know how it could be done.

First suggestion is what I’ve almost finished in my app :) Outlined the idea in this SotM talk.

Maps.Me wasn’t an OSM editor. It was a navigation app that had an “edit” button. Editor engagement, while being considered at some point, have never been done, so people just tested the feature and were satisfied with the result, never coming back. Because they were using the app not for editing, but for navigating.

By the way, it also brought users that have contributed tens of thousands POIs, so dismissing the app because of the long tail is missing the point. I’m pretty sure iD has a similar user distribution.

To me, this focus on long-term relationship feels unnecessary. Like, you can get a life partner only long-term, no one-night stands or one-month flings allowed.

The idea for OSM was, among others, that we get a good map with diversity, not proficiency. More eyes on the ground, not more skill for a few mappers. One POI in Mongolia is more important than a hundred in Switzerland, because we have lots of mappers and lots of business directories in Western Europe, and these hundred would be mapped one way or another.

You want contributors that don’t need hand-holding, that know our tagging model and use proper editors, that adhere to whatever regional standards you have, and that also do not require your time and guidance. I believe we’ve dried out the pool of such technically proficient mappers around 2015. After that, novice mappers are and will be not good enough for you.

I do not understand this need for control. OSM never intended to be perfect. It cannot be perfect by definition. Mistakes are allowed. Broken data is okay. You don’t have to monitor and fix every change. You cannot control hundreds of mappers around you. The only thing you can achieve with such control is driving them away.

Finally, I still don’t understand your problem with maps.me. As I spoke since 2015, POI editing is as low-impact and as low-maintenance as you can get in OSM. There’s been a couple of dedicated websites (like this one) for edits monitoring, where you could focus on your area. Changesets were small, comments good enough, data mostly correct.

What was uncommon and hard to monitor is the enormous quantity of contributors. Nobody and nothing in OSM were prepared to handle tens of thousands edits. And as it often happens, instead of looking at that as a challenge, we decided to fight that. Prevent maps.me from getting anywhere, block mappers, publicly denounce the editor.

But this still stands: maps.me was the best that have happened to OSM from the point of its original vision, and with its demise, we have lost a hope of getting a good POI coverage outside USA and Western Europe. But at least we have experienced mappers armed with Josm to draw all the roads from constantly outdated imagery.

Continuing this weird analogy with newborns, if your only help is saying hello and scolding them for breaking things, that wouldn’t affect their lifespan and wellbeing much.

What difference does it make if a contributor is one-off or long term? OpenStreetMap as a project, as an organization, or as a group of people does not care whether you’ve been here for ten years or one day. It’s what you put on the map that counts. Both old and new contributors’ edits matter the same. When you get a person into OSM and they leave the next day, it does not mean you did worse job than if they stayed.

it’s like saying, children are dying young, so we should focus on grown-up people. Usually that means we should focus on better child support.

Regarding the number of contributions, I’d reply that these 80k editors contributed on-the-ground POI information that not any single mapper could compile. Getting any single of these contributions is far more important than tracing another thousand kilometers of roads and rivers.

I’ve just updated the editor usage stats, and the first thing I noticed was that less people in 2021 edited the map (303k → 292k). I’d look into that — and the general stagnation of numbers in the past five years, instead of singling out any editor. I doubt that is an issue that can be solved technically, like by developing a new editor or redesigning the website.

Buuuuut the best thing maps.me had was not the speed or the design or the greatest mobile editor in history of OSM. It’s their amazing marketing team that pushed the app to millions and millions of users. With all the flaws, what the app did is bring OSM to people, and the chart above displays how general population is out of OSM now. Yes, there are mappers (mostly Missing Maps participants and paid mappers) who use iD and JOSM and make up for the loss, but I’d prefer more eyes on the ground.

Я понимаю, что очень многое в нашей карте вызывает вопрос «зачем». Но большинство из них решаются временем. Попробуй забить на труды остальных, найти то, что тебе интересно, и картировать это с полгода. Кому-то нравится отрисовывать каждый путь на сортировочных станциях, кому-то — люки на дорогах, кому-то не лень обойти каждый подъезд в городе и записать номера квартир. В OpenStreetMap нет итоговой цели и списка задач, всё придумываем сами для себя. Это не работа, это развлечение.

Также, заходи на форум и в телеграм :)

Wow! I love everything about this map: the fonts, the colours, the styles for each trail. One thing I’d improve is that the map feels very empty, except for the trails. I know it’ll make it harder to read, but still.

Это слишком общий вопрос, типа «планирую приобрести сервер для обработки больших данных, подскажите что брать». Зайди в форум и сделай там тему, внутри написав, для чего именно сервер. По опыту, часто оказывается, что денег нужно значительно меньше, чем планировалось.

Awesome, congratulations Amanda!

This feels really complex. Why just not people sort it out themselves? I manage @ruosm with 1200 members, no captcha and no admin bots. The key was to grant admin permissions to 2-4 more people, so that the group is always watched. We also use @mark_spam_bot, so that anybody can notify admins of spam posts.

Классно придумал. Я бы задействовал PostGIS, но здесь понятно, что он неприменим.