So, about 6 weeks ago, I met someone who teaches at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa at a conference here in Ireland. This made me curious about Indianola, and I went to check it out on OSM. Anything could trigger that in me.

I found the campus fairly well mapped with most of the buildings and most of the highway=sidewalk and some trees mapped, but there was more to be done. So, I started off easy with some footpaths, trees and missing buildings, but then I got competitive and wanted to see how long it would take be to get into the list of mappers for the US of A in the OSM stats.

That took me much longer than expected, because I’m used to get onto those lists fairly easy having mapped in much smaller countries with far fewer active mappers. But after about two weeks (I don’t remember exactly), I was in the Top 500. Yee-haw!

As of this morning, I was #160 which is not so bad, considering I “had to” hold my #1 in Ireland and stay in the Top 20 in the UK.

I ended up mapping just over 5,000 buildings. I had gotten tired of it and wanted to quit, but I thought I should at least reach the 5,000.

I also mapped a couple of (well, 775) trees. I was actually surprised how many trees there were and how many seemingly mature ones at that.

I hadn’t mapped (much) in the USA before, but what struck me most was probably the number of church buildings, partly because that conference which started it had to do with religion and religious persecution. Some of their locations need to be fixed, by the way. I found nodes for churches in the middle of nowhere which need to be moved to the actual building.

But now I’m kinda tired of grid like street systems and will again focus solely on the Emerald Isle.