Here’s some of the things I’ve been doing in OpenStreetMap in August 2020.

• Mapping

  • The Irish building mapping project continues to provide ample options for mapping
  • I used to think there was nothing to map in Germany. Then I opened up StreetComplete. So many things to map (e.g. changeset 90126382). I tooted on the fediverse, and made a tweet which spawned some discussion.
  • I made my 10,000th OSM changeset on 10th August. I was updating Irish pubs in Italy (celebratory fediverse post, tempting tweet)
• Hacking
  • Made a small pull request, for babykarte
  • I installed the OSMDE’s name translation functions again, and hit a weird issue where make would change files under version control, but that’s apparently not a problem.
  • Someone’s working on making some OSM software, like mod_tile packaged for Debian/Ubuntu, so I provided advice, since I’ve installed many tileservers. This software might appear dead, but there isn’t much activity because it currently Just Works™.
• OSMF Board
  • I’d like to improve adherance to the OSM’s Organized Editing Guidelines. I suggested, at our S2S meeting in March that the board get more active on this. I confirmed with the Data WG, and they’re fine. I hope we can start a community project on this.
  • Continuing discussion with HOT about a trademark agreement, nothing yet.
  • The OSMF committed to open communication channels for all essential OSMF communication. The osmf-talk@ mailing list post, spawned some long discussion, and I think some people misunderstood this, It would be foolish for OSM to not use popular communication channels (both open & proprietary). No-one should be forced to have their OSM interactions on (e.g.) Facebook. I continued to discuss this with OSMF member(s).
  • The Board’s July 2020 grant of a trademark licence to Cesium continues to cause upset with the great OSM Buildings project, causing a blog post. While the board should have done a request for comment on it first, which would have alerted us to the issue, “OSM Buildings” is such a generic name, that one person cannot own it. I had a call with Jan, and I don’t think there’s much that will change on this topic anymore.
  • We had a vidchat check in on 13th Aug
  • Aug. 2020 OSMF Board meeting on 27th.
  • The OSMF has decided to fund:
    • several core OSM projects, namely Nominatim, Potlatch and osm2pgsql (osmf-talk@ mailing list post)
    • full time iD developer, after their existing funding abruptly ended (osmf-talk@ thread).
    • to hire a sysadmin/Site Reliability Engineer. We have someone in mind, but for the benefit of the candidate, we cannot name names yet.
• Misc
  • Someone claimed that “OSM is 3→4% women”, to imply that OSMF doesn’t have a problem today. But the sources (#1, #2) were weak, and are just some surveys from ~10 years ago (#1, #2).
• Communications WG
  • One of the newst corpoate members of the OSM Foundation, Cesium, took advantage of their joint press release benefit, so we had to write that, the result is this blog post: OpenStreetMap, a map of buildings!
  • Members of the CWG are discussing what, if any, form of “conflict of interest” policy the WG should have.
  • An OSMF member suggested some (more) OSM swag, but no-one has offered to run that yet.

It takes work to write up & assemble these summaries (1½ hour for this) , but keeping track of my achievements is benefitial.

Previously: July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 Mar 2020 Feb 2020 Jan 2020