So… Had a quick test, and to be honest, the editor doesn’t look like it has couple of years of planning. The core might be good (less hassle in downloading stuff than in Vespucci), but interface-wise and OSM-wise the editor has a very long road ahead of it.

• Presets do not work. Searched for “bench”, searched for “shoes” — no results except for a few branded presets.
• Workflow in iD: create a point → choose a preset. Here it’s reversed: you click on “Point” and then have no idea where to go next.
• Adding a building adds a building node. Why? Why is it a separate item in the list?
• It doesn’t care if I’m on data or on wifi. There’s a big difference: in the former case, I pay money for traffic.
• Entering a changeset comment for every changeset, one for every feature? How many users would do that, what’s your estimation?
• Absolutely no way to use the editor with one hand. How many people hold a phone with both hands?
• Using a mapbox library means there’s no attribution, and after clicking on (i) you suddenly find out there’s telemetry being sent to mapbox servers.
• After switching a layer, map pans to the user’s location. Quite a surprise, if you were editing in a different region.
• Turn phone off then on: a blue point of the current location shifts to a road, but clicking the crosshairs button positions the screen to your exact location. Weird.
• Markers behave erratically: appear and disappear, show as white pins on farther zooms.
• “Zoom in to edit” message is misleading: it does nothing to the UI, you can still edit and add new points.
• When logging in, the app requires every permission available, including “create diary entries” and “modify your user preferences”. Are you sure it needs all these?
• Log in, then edit some, then press “back” — and suddenly you’re on the OSM website, logging in again.
• Notifications do not disappear unless you explicitly close them. Even after you close and open the app again.
• The UI does nothing to simplify entering data or collecting extra data for later processing. Like, for a field surveying, it might suggest taking photos or recording an audio message.

I’ve tested the android version. It crashes occasionally, but technical issues are easy to fix, unlike conceptual flaws. Looks like the developers did next to no prior research before developing another POI editor. I suggest you look at:

• osm.wiki/OSM_Contributor
• osm.wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/2013/OpenSurveyor

And all the other mobile editors, including Vespucci, Go Map, MAPS.ME, and OsmAnd.

One changeset per feature is worrying: I collect 100+ pois per field trip, and if this results in 100 changesets, I doubt people using osmcha would be happy.

From this post I’ve learnt about flask-restful and sourcehut, thanks :)

Are you moving all your future work to sr.ht? Are there downsides?

This is awesome — you should do a twitch or a youtube stream from your map editor, like Dmitry does :)

Turns out folks at maps.me made their own weekly-updated maps: http://opensource-data.mapswithme.com/regular/weekly/

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Welcome back!

Thanks ConsEbt. Our cars rely solely on a GPS signal. Providing each of our thousands of drivers with an OBDII dongle and teaching them to use it would be quite a hassle for almost no visible gain.

Well, that depends on Juno expanding its market. We’re hoping to cover the whole world one day, but for now it’s just New York. Maybe another company would follow the lead.

Yes, I have left maps.me in August, and nobody else in maps.me is interested in maintaining these files.

Yesterday I’ve improved the tiles builder: now it downloads a whole month worth of GPX tracks for areas outside the market boundary. You can see the coverage there has increased substantially. The only downside is that you can’t tell what’s changed few days ago there.

1. I agree, right now I’m experimenting with aggregating tracks for a whole month to fill out-of-market areas.
2. For quality, I filter out segments with HDOP over 40, which reduces noise to a certain degree. I understand that the Financial District and few other areas in Manhattan look rough, but they are quite rare, and I don’t want to sacrifice some raw data for most of the NYC to fix these.
3. Again, I think that filtering by HDOP fixes most of the noise, and installing an OSM database to clear up the image might make a bad job: for example, it might fade out tracks near a recently opened road under construction.

Поясню, что мне в целом пофиг, есть теги addr на объектах или нет. Меня расстраивает тенденция: автор конвертера — бог, а остальные должны корёжить данные, чтобы соответствовать критериям ленивых программистов. Дальше мы будем массово проставлять номера маршрутов на каждой остановке, принадлежность к населённому пункту на улицах, длину на отрезках железных дорог. И дополнительно расстраивает, что когда на это обращают внимание, ответом становится не «я спросил автора, и вот почему это сложно сделать», а «заметил — сам и пиши патч». Без ссылок на исходники, без матчасти, без согласования с Костиком — другими словами, эдакое завуализованное «пошол на».

То есть, кто-то написал конвертер с ошибкой. Вы правите данные, чтобы они не отвечали принятым соглашениям о тегировании, но чтобы избежать ошибки конвертера. Когда участник сообщества просит не ломать данные, а связаться с автором, этот участник оказывается виноват и именно ему нужно править конвертер — тупо потому что Костик страшный и где-то там, а участник уже вот, в комментариях и готов ублажать?

Но… Получается, выбор между убеждением одного человека, чтобы он починил конвертер и использовал принятые в проекте схемы, и переделыванием данных во всём OpenStreetMap и убеждением всех участников, что ставить теги addr на населённые пункты правильно. Я удивлён, что второй способ показался проще.

Так а в чём смысл оставлять addr:? Вся эта информация либо выводится по геометрии из содержащих мультиполигонов, либо неправильная (addr:postcode → postal_code).

1. Your post would hold much better if you abstained from finger-pointing.
2. It is not internationally recognized that Russia has rights to control Crimea. But I don’t think there are any countries that would deny that Russia has control over the territory. Otherwise there would be no sanctions towards Russia.

This is so awesome. Thanks Matthias!

Thanks for this write-up, Christine! It reflects the scope of planning a SotM pretty well, although the actual number of tasks you and other members of the SotMWG team had to do was much higher. Some of these continue even to this day.

Regarding the Code of Conduct, one might think it is not needed because everyone is friendly and people usually don’t do anything out of line. But that is not written, it is just a general assumption. When a crowd becomes too big, these assumptions stop working for everyone. Written rules become better and more attractive than unwritten rules. It feels safer if you can tell an offending person (and you cannot guarantee there won’t be any) that rules prohibit what they are doing, and to know who to contact if something bad happens. CoC basically does that: it lists examples of what is good and what is not, and outlines steps of action if you are offended by anybody.

It is quite a lot like these green “exit” signs: people usually know where exits are, but when something happens, you need to know the safe route, because your mind does not work well under stress.

It’s simple: OSM has got no architects and no coordination. Every developer here is on their own.

Michał, maps.me is a commercial product with a roadmap, tight funding and a very limited pool of developers. There are quite a lot of people or NGOs that try to direct maps.me development in their way under “good will” clause. That would work if maps.me team didn’t have any goals and just worked on anything they’d like. But alas non-venture-funded world does not work like that.

I would also be very grateful if you stopped asking me specifically to improve maps.me. I was swamped with tasks and burnt out before, so even if I still worked at maps.me, I’d be unable to help you. And now that I left maps.me, I have even less power. Please write your suggestions to dev@maps.me.