Yesterday I had the pleasure of participating in the Local Chapters and Communities Congress, where we celebrated and Joost Schouppe ceremoniously countersigned new local chapter agreements. At the beginning of 2020, the OSMF had 8 local chapters, all in Europe. Today we have 14 local chapters, on five continents: Europe, South America, North America, Asia, and as of the last OSMF Board meeting, Africa. Joost as Board secretary has done the lion’s share of the work in processing six applications so far this year and deserves kudos for his efforts.

Among other things we discussed what the role of local chapters should be in OSM governance. Nothing has been set in stone, and indeed the conversation in a breakout session on the topic was free-flowing. Rob Nickerson of OSM UK suggested that the local chapters might be asked to help decide on admission of new corporate members, and also to help the Board prioritize paid work (e.g., to help decide when volunteer contributions of labor are not keeping up and OSM needs to pay somebody to fix broken software). I think these are ideas worth considering.

The conversation yielded a suggestion that the OSMF Board assist local chapters and communities with fundraising and perhaps help coordinate fundraising.

I have my own thoughts on this–I don’t think the Board itself should be a source of funds for local chapters and communities, because that could lead to dependency relationships that would undermine the decentralized nature of the OSM community, one of its strengths. That said, there is perhaps a role for the Board in cooperating with the LCCWG to assist local chapters in raising their own funds and to ensure that we don’t interfere with each other in the process.

I’m in Iowa on a political campaign, but took last Sunday off to tour the six surviving covered bridges of Madison County. If you are interested in a virtual tour, check out the images I uploaded to Mapillary. I used a GoPro Hero 7 Black, newly acquired after the GPS function of the GoPro Hero 5 Black refused to work.

I have finally bitten the bullet and acquired a GoPro Hero 5 Black as well as a windshield mount for it, and tomorrow will test it out for collection of Mapillary imagery. Until now I have used smartphones and the Mapillary app exclusively, but that only works if someone else is driving and I can restart the video when the app invariably either crashes or locks up at some point. Since retiring from the ambassadorship, I am now my own chauffeur and no longer enjoy the luxury of being a passenger who can serve as the photographer. Mrs. Mustard kindly granted permission to splurge on a dedicated camera for collecting ground-level imagery.

The OSMF Board decided in August to bite another bullet and resolved to finance a full-time developer of iD, the OSM default editor, plus a full-time system reliability engineer position to ensure maximum reliability of the hardware. The Potlatch maintainer also received a grant for porting Potlatch, since Flash is soon to be deprecated, and some mappers are still using Potlatch very heavily. The Board expressed a strong desire to maintain diversity in the editor ecosystem despite the dominance of JOSM and iD. JOSM maintainers were pinged but indicated that financial support for JOSM is not needed. These decisions were not taken lightly, were discussed with the community, debated within the Board itself, and in the end adopted unanimously because maintenance and support of core infrastructure are crucial to the OSM project, and demands on that infrastructure are only growing.

Today as the remnants of Hurricane Laura dumped rain on my house, I chose to stay indoors and resume reading “Land of the Turkomans”, an anthology of reports delivered in the 1800s to the Royal Geographic Society of expeditions and explorations of what is today Turkmenistan. As I delved into the reports, I realized that I had been in many of the places described, and if not, at least knew where they were. Out came the Soviet military maps, and I began trying to plot the routes of the explorers.

One noted the names of water wells as he crossed the Karakum Desert led by a local guide. It struck me. Of course, a semi-nomadic people like the 19th-century Turkmen tended not to reside in villages out in the middle of the desert, but to move their flocks of sheep and herds of camels from pasture to pasture, always bearing in mind the locations of wells for watering themselves as well as their animals. Thus the wells have names! A review of the Soviet military maps revealed that some of those wells existed at least as late as the 1980s (and probably still do). I’d never thought of that…where there are few to no villages, names are assigned to water wells.

A trip from Gokdepe to Khiva, which today might take perhaps 10- to 12 hours by automobile (including up to two hours to clear Customs at the border), back then involved a minimum of two weeks’ “march” across the desert, including one five-day stretch without water, and was only possible in practice during spring and fall, when temperate weather was somewhat assured.

(Guillaume and Allan wrote this together, and will therefore share the verbal abuse it will generate)

In its first seven months, the ‘new’ (well, no longer all that new) OSM Foundation Board of Directors has made progress on issues facing OSM and the OSM community:

… See full entry

I have completed an overhaul of Turkmenistan’s municipalities in the OpenStreetMap database. All cities are identified, plus all but four towns (those pesky four are still hiding), and 256 out of 481 “village councils” are now on the map, as well as 504 out of 1,717 “villages” known to exist. If anybody knows offhand where the four missing towns (şäherçeler) are located, please drop me a line.

Each geolocated village now also has addr:city tags so we know to which municipality it is subordinate (this is important because so many village names are used over and over again), as well as addr:district tags to aid in identification.

Misnamed municipalities or those with obsolete names have been corrected or updated, and old_name tags have been added where appropriate. Mapillary key numbers for images of signs have been added in several cases to assure positive identification.

On the wiki, the “Turkmenistan Geoname Changes” page features a list of cities and towns with hyperlinks to their respective nodes and ways on osm.org, and “Districts in Turkmenistan” features a list of villages with the same for them, wherever a village has been geolocated. This will ease finding specific municipalities by province and district.

I spent a bit more than four years mapping Turkmenistan en situ and did not want the accumulated knowledge to go unused, hence this effort to get everything I learned into the database..There is still more to do: 1,213 villages remain unidentified, and those four towns are out there somewhere. But this is a good start, and the map is in much better shape than it was in 2015.

As of this morning I hit 15,000 edits. I am methodically plowing through the wiki’s “Districts in Turkmenistan” list of villages, identifying them on the map wherever they are, and adding a link to the node or way of the village on OSM. That will make it easier for me to identify which villages remain to be mapped as I seek to complete the map of Turkmenistan from my armchair.

Last evening I created for the first time a multilingual (Russian, in this case) version of a wiki page. I pulled up the instructions and drew on some experience editing Wikipedia to create a RU: version, then used DeepL to create a rough draft translation in a word processor. Next I plowed through the machine translation and edited it as best my command of the Russian language could permit. Along the way I discovered I do not know certain terms of art, such as how to say “ground truth” in Russian. At some point I will have to ask a native speaker of Russian to take a look at it and do some cleanup.

You can find the interim result of this work here. I surely do hope I followed the instructions correctly!

Given the COVID-19 pandemic, even though Turkmenistan has reported no cases, I spent part of this week checking the tags of hospitals and clinics in that country to make sure anyone using OSM data could find the nearest hospital or clinic, if it is in the OSM database. Overpass Turbo came in very handy for this exercise.

After completing that task, I started tinkering with Overpass Turbo and pulled up the hotels in Turkmenistan. In Mary I discovered four different locations had been entered in the OSM database for the Soviet-era Sanjar Hotel. Only one could be correct. Fortunately I found a ground-level photo of both the hotel and its associated cafe among the Mapillary images I had collected in years past, and so was able to identify the correct buildings for hotel and cafe, and delete incorrect tags from the others (one of them is the Mary province tax office–hardly a good place to spend the night).

Background

Shortly after the new year began, the OSM Foundation chair started contacting members of the OSM community writ large to collect information on the state of the community and project, and to assess attitudes toward the Board’s work. Most conversations were confidential in order to ensure that respondents would speak openly, frankly, and honestly (and it is the chair’s sense that virtually all of them did, and in fact some of them were quite brutally frank about the Board’s perceived shortcomings). Thus, this report will not detail “who said what”. It will, rather, tend more to aggregate viewpoints expressed during the conversations, with illustrative but unattributed quotes.

The chair began by polling members of the Board of Directors of the Foundation, and expanded to members of the Advisory Board, including both corporate members and local chapters. The latter tended to be conference calls with multiple members of those chapters. These calls generated recommendations that the chair talk to pillars of the OSM community or representative members of a tribe (e.g., software developers), so the chair reached out to those individuals as well. Another result was outreach to local communities not formally affiliated with the OSMF, and those conversations proved to be among the most fruitful. The chair held one conversation with a local community and two with corporate representatives face to face due to the happy coincidences of parties being in the same geographic location.

This effort is not over. If anything, the conversations revealed a desire for better communication between the Board and the community’s various tribes (including working groups), which can only be satiated by making the effort to reach out, to schedule calls, then just to call. Geographic coverage of the current outreach effort remains a work in progress; to date the chair has made no calls to Latin America, for example.

The Top Lines

… See full entry

Due to the corona virus pandemic the annual face-to-face meeting of the OSMF board of directors shifted to what we wryly termed a “screen-to-screen” meeting using the Zoom video conferencing account of our facilitator, Allen “Gunner” Gunn. To our collective surprise, the video conference went fairly well. It was not as good as meeting face to face, but was far better than audio only, and so much so that the board plans to experiment with shifting from using Mumble (audio only) for monthly board meetings to a video conferencing platform.

In keeping with the FOSS philosophy of OSMF, we will try BigBlueButton, an open-source videoconferencing platform. Thus, if OSMF members want to tune in to the next board meeting, watch for announcements that we will meet in a video conference. We will ask that non-members of the board keep their cameras and microphones off, and that only board members have their cameras and microphones on.

Minutes of the “screen-to-screen” meeting remain in process. Bottom line up front: the board has taken on board much of the information in the SWOT analysis, last year’s survey, and the 40+ conference calls I have made to community members, local communities and chapters, and members of our advisory board. We accept all criticism that has come our way and are working on how to address the problems you have identified to us.

In March I flew to Riga for what will likely be the last in-person regional SOTM for a while due to the pandemic, State of the Map Baltics (many thanks and kudos to Rihards Olups for pulling it together and being my host in Riga). My presentation on “Winds of Change in OSM” was well received. I plan to deliver an updated version of that presentation during the virtual SOTM in July, so if you are interested in a synopsis of what I have been hearing from across the community, and my take on it all, be sure to tune in.

… See full entry

Johns Hopkins University in collaboration with ESRI and others has posted a coronavirus tracking dashboard here that includes an interactive map. The base map comes from a mix of sources including OpenStreetMap. If you click on the icon consisting of four squares in the upper right corner of the map, you get a list of basemap sources, and If you zoom in to a particular country, the source of the geodata automatically appears in the lower right corner of the map along with the other virus-related data sources. It is nice to know that OSM is helping in the effort to contain and reduce the impact of coronavirus.

Last week I visited Baku for only the second time, and managed to see the new seaport at Alat. The Mapillary images I collected are now on line so perhaps I can update the map at some point.

Mapping these days is taking a back seat to OSM Foundation business, unfortunately. Chairing the OSM Foundation board has turned into at least a half-time job. In the last two months I have held 32 conference calls with various OSM stakeholders: mappers, users of data, corporate members of the Foundation, old-timers, software developers, and local communities in ranging from Ireland to Japan and the Philippines. That effort will continue as I reach out to members of the OSM community and hear what advice they have, what they perceive as OSM’s needs, and their thoughts on what the board should be doing to support OSM. I am boiling down everything and will present some preliminary assessments–my personal take on what it all means, not the board’s–at SOTM Baltics on March 6.

The organizers of SOTM Baltics have kindly invited me to speak so I will travel to Riga in early March to attend that conference as well as to visit the famous map stores there. This will be my first regional SOTM but I hope far from my last!

Putting on my hat as chairman of the board of the OSM Foundation, I have created a wiki page at osm.wiki/OSM_SWOT to collect the OSM community’s thoughts on OSM’s strengths and weaknesses, and opportunities and threats OSM faces. I respectfully ask that OSM community members share their perspectives on that wiki page.

Since returning to the United States from Turkmenistan last June, I have been plowing through the mass of information collected, but which I did not have time to study thoroughly. Yesterday, while (Turkmen-English dictionary in hand) I was deciphering Parliamentary Resolution No. 111-IV of 10 May 2010, I found reference to one of the six towns (‘‘şäherçeler’’ in Turkmen) not yet on the OSM map. That resolution ‘‘inter alia’’ renamed the village around the Danew rail station to Bahar (which means “spring” in Turkmen) and upgraded it to town status. Fortunately user jaimemd had mapped that rail station and its surrounding village five years earlier, so I was able to retag Bahar.

One town down, five more to go. The detective work continues. When done, all current “towns” in Turkmenistan will be on the map, along with all “cities” as defined under Turkmen law.

As I mapped Turkmenistan a couple of years ago, I noted that two locations were marked as the town of Darganata. Only one could be correct, and in my explorations I determined which one was Darganata, then pursued the correct name of the other, which turned out to be a village named Çarwadar. I made the correction, but filed away a question in the back of my mind: why would a mapper insert such an obvious error in OSM?

The answer came to light yesterday as I examined a Soviet military map of the area. In Soviet times, Çarwadar was a state farm named Sovkhoz Dargan-Ata, or in Russian совхоз “Дарган-Ата”(the contraction “sovkhoz” means “state farm”). Not a town, not even a village in Soviet terms, but a state farm community named in honor of its big brother a few kilometers away. Mystery solved! Today Çarwadar is a full fledged village, not just a farm community, and enjoys its own name, which means “herdsman”. The old state farm focused on sheep raising, and presumably the residents of Çarwadar still do.

My review of “The Red Atlas” has been posted online by Cartographic Perspectives. You may find it here: https://cartographicperspectives.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1589/1815

I’ve been scanning Soviet military maps for information relevant to the OSM map of Turkmenistan, coupled with data collected between 2015 and 2019, and among other things have identified yet another numbered highway, the P-28. It connects the A-388 highway south of Yoloten to Tagtabazar and a few villages to the east and southeast, all the way to the Afghanistan border. Bit by bit, the OSM map of Turkmenistan is becoming ever richer.

At some point I intend to do a fulsome correction of Turkmenistan’s borders. The existing ones were largely drawn from CIA maps to get something in place but are not as accurate as the lines on the Soviet military maps. Bear with me, this will be a time-consuming project! But as winter sets in, when it is cold outside and the rain is coming down, doing this will be more attractive than chopping firewood or pruning dead limbs, and I will get to it.

The following is copied from the Indiana University website:

“The bulk of Indiana University’s Russian Military Topographic Map Collection is made up of the Soviet Red Army topographic maps, which were produced for defense and economic planning. This collection came to Indiana University from the duplicate map room of the Library of Congress Map Collection in the early 1990s. These maps cover not only parts of Russia and Eastern Europe, but extend as far north as Scandinavia, as far west as Germany and the Netherlands, and as far south as Iran.

“An interactive index map of the collection is located here: https://iu.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=098c42997ca441029b69f0597ff92ea6

“For more information, visit the Cyrillic Maps Collection.”

There are very few maps of Central Asia, but coverage of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltics, Poland, and eastern Germany is pretty good. The maps of former Soviet states are uncopyrighted, but odds are good that coverage outside the USSR was taken in violation of local copyrights and so may not be used in OSM.