Another one got ignored today, another road left unmapped, another place erased because it wasn’t profitable enough to exist on a corporate map. No one noticed, because no one was supposed to.

They don’t talk about the missing footpaths, the streets that don’t appear because they aren’t in a government database, the communities left invisible because they don’t generate ad revenue. They don’t talk about how your map—your view of the world—is decided not by truth, but by business interests.

They call us idealists, hobbyists, dreamers. They say the world has already been mapped. But they are wrong.

We are the ones who see the gaps. We are the ones who refuse to let our neighborhoods, our histories, our stories be erased. We are the ones who put the world on the map—not for profit, but for people.

Yes, I am a mapper. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is refusing to accept a world where only what is profitable is visible. My crime is knowing that no company, no government, no algorithm should have the power to decide what exists.

You may ignore us. You may try to replace us with AI, to wall off geography behind paywalls, to tell people that their contributions don’t matter. But you can’t stop us all. Because the world is ours to map.

After all, we are all alike. We are OpenStreetMap.

🤣 with apologies ++The Mentor++ (8 January 1986). “The Conscience of a Hacker”. Phrack, Inc. 1 (7): 3 of 10 - wikipedia

Hi all, I’ve made a website which shows how all the waterways in OSM are topologically connected, or not:

OSM River Basins

More details are there, or on the backing github project. You can also run the programmes for yourself if you want to tweak it, or just show your region.

This tool can help you find possible tagging mistakes in river topology, like change in a name, or find places where 2 rivers aren’t properly connected up.

Data is updated manually by me when I remember.

What do yous think?

You can follow me on fedi/mastodon @amapanda@en.osm.town for news, or read this on the Discourse OSM Community Forum

There’s been an OpenStreetMap presence on Twitter and the Fediverse/Mastodon for years. And in the last few months, the @OpenStreetMap account on Mastodon/Fediverse has gotten much more engagement on Mastodon compared to Twitter.

The OSMF has had a formal policy committment to use open communication channels for 3+ years, but it’s important to also use closed platforms if it helps reach people. So where are the people?

As part of my work for the OSM Communications WG, I maintain some OSM social media channels. For several months, Mastodon engagenment has been much higher than Twitter. Here’s some raw data and examples.

(Here I show the number of retweets/boosts (🔁) and stars/likes (⭐) posts get on Mastodon (🐘) and Twitter (🐦))

The important OSMF post about recent Maxar imagery unavailability got about the same, ( 🐘 4🔁 3⭐ vs 🐦 5🔁 7⭐, but Mastodonians like OSMF internal posts about the 2023 Screen to Screen. 🐘 9🔁 5⭐ vs 🐦 1🔁 1⭐, or the post about the OSMF SSRE’s first year, got 4 times as many boosts/retweets 🐘 23🔁 17⭐) vs 🐦 4🔁 8⭐.

State of the Map is also a popular topic, with Mastodon toots out-performing Twitter tweets. From general “Have you been to SotM?” posts (🐘 12🔁 11⭐ vs 🐦 3🔁 6⭐) to requests for new host bids reach more people on Mastodon (🐘 16🔁 12⭐ vs 🐦 7🔁 23⭐

This analysis is just the tip of the iceburg. Compare the OpenStreetMap mastodon account to the OSM Twitter account to see more examples. Don’t forget: The “number of followers” on Twitter is 10 times higher than the on Mastodon (84K vs 6K), and yet Mastodon is reaching more people, and driving more communications.

Others in OSM have seen this. Pieter Vander Vennet showed how WeeklyOSM was increasingly linking to Mastodon, rather than Twitter. Geomob podcast episode № 171 described the “amazing” difference in engagement they got on Mastodon versus Twitter.

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• Maps & Hacking
  • I did some hacking & made some maps, see:
    • “Very Fast Money Withdrawl. Distance to the nearest bank for every weapon shop.” 🐦 🐘
    • “The worst night club for a durty take away after chucking out time: Distance to the nearest fast food place for every nightclub” 🐦 🐘
    • Made a map of distance from thatch building to nearest fire hydrant. twitter post🐦, 🐘
    • To do this, I “needed” to create a new tool/script. It’s osm-distance-to-nearest and available on GitHub. You can make maps like this. 🐦 🐘
  • Analyzing OSM changeset data, and found weirdly empty changeset tags. 🐦 🐘
• Inspired by a community member, I asked osmose if they want to get on the en.osm.town fediverse.
  • Remember folks, in OSM, no-one is coming to save you, we have to save ourselves.
• I tried to make DALL-E generate some OSM images, 🐦
• OSMF Board
  • Trademarks
    • Emailed several event organisers, to organise trademark licences for their regional State of the Maps.
    • Replied to one organizer, that as a local chapter they don’t need a speical licence (it’s included in the Local Chapters Agreement)
  • Local Chapters minor beurocracy for 2 potential LCs
  • I checked that the same person is OK with doing the questions for the Board AGM

(As I mentioned, I finally caught corona. Combined with a lack of energy, this is a bit shorter)

Previously…

2022

Jan.

Feb.

Mar.

Apr.

May

June

July

Aug.

2021

Jan.

Feb.

Mar.

Apr.

May

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Dec.

2020

Jan.

Feb.

Mar.

Apr.

May

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Dec.

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• Mapping
  • Keep up the regular mapping around the place, and while at SotM
  • I wish people would stop adding new man_made tags. #
• I posted about my State of the Map 2022, which used up most of my mental OSM energy for August.
• OSMF Board
  • Some suggestions for SotM 2023 generated some board ⇄ sotm wg emails. (I tried to do the right thing and CC the right people while communicating. This policy was adopted by the Board last year. The board member who claimed the board supported the CM bid didn’t tell the rest of the board of this).
  • Local Chapters
    • At SotM, apparently 2 groups asked a fellow board member about becoming a local chapter for Nigeria & Eritrea.
    • I got their contact details and started reaching out to them to start the process
  • Board Meeting
    • I attended the Aug 2022 Board meeting
      • I did plan to schedule an AB meeting with corp. memb.
    • also attended the Aug 2022 mid month chat, there was discussion about
      • odbl-only imports
      • prep for SotM 2022 (osmf stand, board AMA)
      • whether monthly reports from pers. comm. were needed (probably not)

(sorry if i’m missing some details, I’m trying to finish this)

Previously…

2022

Jan.

Feb.

Mar.

Apr.

May

June

July

2021

Jan.

Feb.

Mar.

Apr.

May

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Dec.

2020

Jan.

Feb.

Mar.

Apr.

May

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Oct.

Nov.

Dec.

Social Media: 🐦 twitter: @lalonde / 🐘 fediverse/mastodon microblog: @amapanda@en.osm.town (rss feed)

State of the Map 2022 is over, so I’ll join many others in writing how SotM was to me.

The most unique and appeal thing for me about events like this is being able to meet people in person and talk to people I don’t often see. Alas there were so many people I’d like to have spent more time with. There were many people I met in person for the first time having only had online interactions, and many people I’d seen before.

All the talks are online (both on media.ccc and YouTube.com). “What you map is not always what you get”, is a good primer on OSM tagging.

The main social event was fun and in an interesting venue. It was nice how it was spread out, so you could easily mingle and talk to many people. I was affected by the mess up with the cards, but I got a cocktail & ice cream, so was happy 🐘 🐦.

I took part in the OSMF Board Ask Us Anything Q&A session. (video (media.ccc), (yt). It was a good talk. Lots of interesting questions. I hope I & the rest managed to answer enough. I’d like to manually improve the subtitles & translations. Someone asked about board diversity, and I made That Joke™🥚︎ to the lads after 😆︎.

The OSMF didn’t do the paperwork for the OSM Austria Local Chapter application, so we did a signing ceremony then. 🐦

I travelled by train from Karlsruhe to Firenze, took about 8 hrs but is good for the environment and more relaxing than dealing with airports. While I was quietly open at the last SotM, this was my first using my real name. Everyone in OSM were totally cool about it all (bar the usual suspects).

A week after I got back, I tested positive for Corona. 😭 I’ve 3 vaccinations, so I had a headache for a few days. I quarantined, which was a little dull, and missed some events. The vaccinations really work. I didn’t wear a mask as much as others at SotM (or afterwards). I guess I succumed to the social norms of “no mask” 😔.

After you’ve been out dancing 💃 & drinking 🍸 at the club🪩, that take away joint open at 2am 🌆 suddenly looks very appealing 🍔🍟🍕. So for every night club in OSM, I calculated the distance to the nearest fast food take away. Here’s a map of where you have to go >20km for a take away:

🗺️ explore this as a web map here

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Vincent Privat posted on twitter of a gun shop across the road from a bank. WeeklyOSM reported it in №634. So it got me thinking. 🤔 And hacking. 🙂👩🏻‍💻

I built a new tool osm-distance-to-nearest which calculates “how close the nearest X is for every Y?”. When you download the OSM Planet File (~70GiB!), and run this command, you’ll get a CSV file for every shop=weapons in OSM, with how far away the nearest bank or ATM is.

osm-distance-to-nearest -i ~/osm/data/planet.osm.pbf -b amenity=atm,bank -a shop=weapons -o p_guns_bank_

Vincent’s case is a weapons shop Armurerie du Vieux Bourg de Kourou (node 2,992,825,744) which is 60m from an ATM operated by La Banque Postale (node 3,022,885,288). at 5° 9′ 55.134″ N 52° 38′ 28.9788″ W in Kourou.

But there are more than 300 weapon shops within 60 metres of a bank or ATM! There are many weapon sells next door to a bank. This is so practical! 🤣🤣 Full formatted table is in this comments.

(Sorry for the delay in posting. I spent most of July 2022 on holiday in Australia)

• Mapping
  • Livnig in Germany, I’m used to lots being mapped. In Australia there was so much to map!
    • I got to rank #151 in Australia (🐦 🐘) just from my day to day mapping.
    • To my shame, I did use Google Maps. There was so much missing PoIs from OSM.
  • A shop (which I spent a lot of money in) was selling dresses with “he/they” pronoun badge, and I wondered if clothes=women still applied 🐘 🐦. 🤣
• OSMF Board
  • Board Meeting, July 2022 Board Meeting
    • I had just retured from Aus, and the postponed community presentation from Mapbox Workers Union was interesting.
    • It was interesting to find out that the Mapbox management hadn’t put any direct or explicit pressure on employees to vote a certain way at OSMF Board elections
    • Lots of Mapbox based maps don’t show OSM Attribution, and it was interesting to find that the union had tried to change that internally.
  • I didn’t go to the 2022-07 mid month chat because I was away in Australia (timezones!).
  • I started the wiki page for the board AMA at SotM 2022
• Community
  • While in Sydney, I organised a last minute meet up. (annoucement twitter 🐦, fedi 🐘. I had a clever “OSM Surveyor” costume 🐦 🐘 ).
    • It was my first time properly using Every Door, and we all found it quite nice
    • It was nice to meet some of the fellow OpenStreetMap World Discord people, including a fellow mod.
• CWG
  • Freebies / Promotional Material Programme
    • I’ve been so bad with this lately, I’m sorry. I have requests from months ago that haven’t been sent out.
  • Instagram still posting there
  • Pinterest haven’t posted there as much lately.

Previously…

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The OSM community in Ireland is engaged in another multi-year mapping project, to map all the buildings in Ireland.

By March 2022, there were over 2,000,000 buildings. Which caused someone to ask “What was the 2,000,000th building?”. So who added #2,000,000? 🥁 drumroll…

The 2,000,000th Building was added by Boggedy on 1st March 2022, and is in An Bhealtaine Íochtarach, Gort a’ Choirce, Co. Dhún na nGall! Technical OSM details: It’s way 1,036,394,489, added in changeset 117,996,721.

Here’s other milestones:

datetime	rank	changeset_id	changeset_url	osmtype	osmid	object_url
2018-01-08 10:31:43	500000	55260556	osm.org/changeset/55260556	way	551628233	osm.org/way/551628233
2020-02-13 23:54:27	1000000	80979131	osm.org/changeset/80979131	way	772271829	osm.org/way/772271829
2021-02-14 22:04:19	1500000	99268589	osm.org/changeset/99268589	way	907155474	osm.org/way/907155474
2022-03-01 22:14:16	2000000	117996721	osm.org/changeset/117996721	way	1036394489	osm.org/way/1036394489

Installation

If you want to calculate this data yourself:

• Download the latest full OSM history file from Geofabrik for Ireland (ireland-and-northern-ireland-internal.osh.pbf currently 381 MB).
• Create a local PostgreSQL database.
• Install the latest version of osm-tag-csv-history (technically ≥ v0.5).
• Download the code from Github amandasaurus/osm-two-million-buildings-in-ireland
• Run ./calculate.sh. results.csv has the output.

The second 2,000,000th building

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What I did in OpenStreetMap in January 2022

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Recently someone asked how to find OSM users who’ve left a changeset comment, but have not edited themselves. (Technically the initial challenge was for a one line bash script 😉).

Here’s how to do it.

In OpenStreetMap, people can change their username, but OSM data provides an unchanging numeric user id (uid) for users, which we use here.

First download the dump file, from the OpenStreetMap data download serivce (planet.osm.org) ⁽¹⁾.

aria2c --seed-time=0 https://planet.openstreetmap.org/planet/discussions-latest.osm.bz2.torrent

This will download discussions-YYMMDD.osm.bz2⁽²⁾, which is currently about 5 GiB.

I had to write a new tool, anglosaxon to easily parse large XML files like this into a TSV file format⁽³⁾. This programme works on all XML files, maybe it’s useful for other problems you might have. Install that first.

bzcat discussions-220110.osm.bz2 \
  | anglosaxon \
   -S -o changeset_id --tab -o changeset_uid --tab -o comment_uid --nl \
   -s comment -v ../../id --tab -V ../../uid NO_CHANGESET_UID --tab -V uid NO_COMMENT_UID  --nl \
   | gzip > changeset-comments.tsv.gz

This took about 45 minutes to run on my machine, and the output is about 4 MiB (19 MiB uncompressed), and has about 805,000 lines. This step takes the longest.

We create the list of all uids who have opened a changeset:

zcat changeset-comments.tsv.gz | cut -f2 |uniq|sort |uniq > changeset-uids.tsv

Then a list of all uids who have left a changeset comment:

zcat changeset-comments.tsv.gz | cut -f3 |uniq|sort|uniq > comment-uids.tsv

Then we compare, what’s in one but not the other.

comm -13 changeset-uids.tsv comment-uids.tsv |sort -n > uids-comment-without-changeset.tsv

Et voilà! Sin é! And there’s your results. 🙂 The file is 29 KiB, and has ~3,500 entries. I’m surprised it’s so high.⁽⁴⁾

You can find all the changesets that a uid has commented on with this command, (replace UID with the uid)

zcat changeset-comments.tsv.gz | grep -P "\tUID$" | cut -f1

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What I did in OpenStreetMap in December 2021

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