This weekend was OSM workshops again, this time we were at a sort of a travellers get-together / summit / festival thing in Boruszyn, Poland. This is a tiny village where Kazimierz Nowak set out for his 40000km bicycle trip across Africa in 1931. The village was mostly unmapped before the festival and there was no usable imagery better than Landsat, so we got to use the pool of GPSes that the OSM Poland association received from Mio Technology Ltd. They are some of the cheapest loggers available, Holux M-1000C, but they worked almost fine for us. The main downside for me was lack of Linux support for downloading the tracks or setting receiver configuration. The BT747 project as well as gpsbabel and mtkbabel all claim to support the M-1000C model but apparently the download protocol is different across different revisions of this model, other people’s comments on the web reflect this too. We had to use a Windows laptop with the ezTour program that ships with the receiver but is tricky to get working too. It also has the annoying default setting of logging GPS points every 5s instead of every second, which gets written to the device whenever it’s connected to the laptop.

We had some bikes and managed to add a lot of detail in nearby villages in OSM. Some teens of the local scouts team that was helping in the festival organisation also joined the workshop and I could pick their brains about more things in the area to add to the map.

We managed to snap some kite imagery on the last day. Technically we only made some slight errors but the timing was unfortunate because a bunch of attendees had already left before then, and the previous two days saw no wind.

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One week ago OSM was one of the projects present at the “Freedom Tent” at the Woodstock Festival. The festival was attended by about half a million people, and we had an incredible number of interesting people come over to talk about free software or free technologies, and take part in the workshops. Some got very excited about OpenStreetMap, in fact we had two fresh new mappers who after the first day’s workshop came on the next days to help us organise the same workshop again.

We only had four computers for the workshop use and we used one machine as a sort of terminal with a monitor and a keyboard facing out of the tent. It ran a small web application I made which shows the kite imagery of the festival that we made a year ago, georectified, as an OpenLayers slippymap. You could click the map and draw the outline of your tent if you remembered where you stayed, then describe it and leave your e-mail address if you liked. We had about 70 festival goers mark their tents on it in the last two days, the app can be seen at http://osm.trail.pl/woodstock.xhtml.

The workshops were a little chaotic but successful, almost everyone registered on OSM right away and added a couple of features. I was surprised to see at least half the participants actually read the full contributor terms before registering. Then there were also two who didn’t remember their e-mail passwords so we ended up using my gmail address. We also handed out lots of business card sized OSM leaflets, and we’ve got three new members in the OSM Poland association

Then on the day after the festival ended I was packing up my things among lots of people with heavy back packs leaving the camp and I saw two girls carrying, in addition to their backpacks, and a big 50cm globe with a political map from the 80s. They explained that the globe was their long time travel companion that they use to show people where they’re going when hitch hiking. I wish I had snapped a picture of it.

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If you’re coming to the Przystanek Woodstock festival this week near the Polish / German border, you can join us at the “Freedom tent” briefly mentioned here and you can set up your own tent at the OpenStreetMap Village.

The Freedom tent is a stand in the NGOs alley we’ve been preparing together with the Free/Opensource Software Foundation, Wikimedia local chapter, The Warsaw Hackerspace and The FreeLab sustainable living project.

No mapping party this year as the area has been mapped in detail last year, but we’ll have workshops and we’ll be snapping Kite Aerial Pics like we did last year

Last year I posted something on what’s happening around the OSM Poland association and haven’t posted any updates in English since then. Now SOSM (sosm.ch) has been registered by Swiss mappers (congrats!) with a similar purpose of functioning as a local chapter and it reminded me to give people an update on what’s happening with OSM Poland. We had our second AGM the last weekend of March and got around to summarise what we had been up to in the first year of the association’s work. I think we were all surprised at how many things the association had been involved with even though not much of that had been visible from outside. Activities involved 6 or so mapping parties organised around the country, presenting the OSM project at conferences of all kinds, workshops, acting as the contact point for a couple of local companies (at least three publishing companies, some taxi operators and a fleet monitoring company), setting up a locally hosted tileserver in one of Europe’s top data centers in Poznań (very futuristic inside!) with one new stylesheet and one borrowed form hikebikemap.de. We also responded to some government requests for comments on new proposed acts of law that we thought were relevant to the openness of geodata. At the time of the AGM we had over 40 individual members, one “honorary” member and one other NGO as a supporting member: the “Wspinka” mountain climbers association. Financially we barely had enough money to print some leaflets, but this hasn’t been an issue so far.

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to You (hereinafter "Wishee(s)")
as copied from various well-known blogs (hereinafter "Blogs")

1. Please accept without obligation, express or implied, these best wishes for a fruitful in the creation of online maps ("Maps"), environmentally safe, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, and gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday as practiced within the traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice but with respect for the religious or secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or for their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all, and further for a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated onset of the generally accepted calendar year including, but not limited to, the Christian calendar, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures.

2. The preceding wishes expressed in Part 1 are granted, without regard to the race, creed, age, physical ability, religious faith or lack thereof, choice of geodata editor application ("Editor") or lack thereof, licensing preference or sexual preference of the wishee(s), on the following terms:

a) they are to be considered extended to all members of your family or other social unit, including but not limited to:
i) other persons directly or indirectly related to you by blood or otherwise and any such persons to whom you consider yourself to be related regardless of biological, legal, religious or other process,
ii) any person or persons not included in paragraph 2a)i) hereof with whom you enjoy regular (or otherwise) consensual sexual activities regardless of gender, race, age or sexual orientation with or without the possibility for procreation,
iii) other animal and/or vegetable organisms (or inanimate objects) you or anyone else may consider part of your family or other social unit;

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I think this is curious enough to be posted somewhere.

We're running an OpenStreetMap tileserver at osm.trail.pl with a very nice mapnik style designed by my friend. We have been rendering only a single country area until recently and decided to expand to the full planet. After a couple of weeks of occasionally wrestling with the amount of data in postgres after the planet import, we now have it running the first update from hourly diffs. It has about three weeks worth of diffs to catch up with but it's on the right track. It's still going to take three or four days.

In the meantime I decided to create a new database and reimport the geofabrik country extract that we had been using before, because people started complaining about lack of updates. The import only takes some 20 minutes. Now this database has only some 8 hours of diffs to catch up with OSM, but osm2pgsql was crawling when I launched it, and it looked like this tiny update was going to take about a week. I tried to find the query which was taking so long by SELECTing from pg_stat_activity. The culpable query seems to have been UPDATE planet_osm_ways .. WHERE nodes && ARRAY[$1] ..; I ran the query with \timing on and it showed about 10s to execute on the country extract. I ran the same query on the planet database and it took 0.4s. EXPLAIN showed that on the country extract database it was using a sequential scan instead of using the planet_osm_ways_nodes index. I learnt about disabling sequential scans with SET enable_seqscan = 0; but it kept using sequential scan anyway. When strange things happen with postgresql there's usually one person in #postgresql who can explain it, his nick is RhodiumToads. And he did explain, and the explanation is this:

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Zapraszamy na warsztaty OpenStreetMap w ten weekend w Warszawie! Będzie to głównie wprowadzenie do mapowania od podstaw ale również weterani OSM nam się przydadzą więc zapraszamy wszystkich. Mamy już zapisaną pewną grupę uczestników ale przyjdźcie nawet jeśli zdecydujecie się dopiero dziś (możecie puścić mi informacje aby pomóc w organizacji). Jutro jest dniem terenowym i spotykamy się o 11 rano przed wejściem do Sadyba Best Mall, a niedziela wstępnie przeznaczona jest na wprowadzanie danych i teorię.

Możliwe, że będziemy też wykonywać fotografie z powietrza jutro po południu, więc szykują się ciekawe zajęcia.

Just a quick note that we're organising a two day OSM workshop to introduce people to mapping, this weekend in Warsaw, Poland. So if you're close, feel free to come whether you're a newbie or an experienced mapper. Tomorrow is the surveying day and Sunday is theory and uploading data. If you decide just now, feel free to come over, we'll be starting out of the Sadyba Best Mall entrance 11am tomorrow. You can drop me a note to help accounting.

Additionally we are likely to try kite photography tomorrow and balloon mapping on Sunday if the weather forecasts don't change. On Sunday food is provided too :)

I decided to learn about the current state of the OpenAerialMap revival, read the docs and managed to register the bit of imagery we made during the Koluszki OSM Mapping Party in Poland last week. It's not really difficult although you need a little digging to get around the current API. Most information you need to submit your imagery is found at http://docs.oam.osgeo.org/storage/creating.html (Note there's currently some inconsistency in the docs in the way the term Archived Imagery is used)

Slippymap using leaflet-js: http://openstreetmap.pl/balrog/koluszki-kap/
OpenAerialMap imagery URL: http://oam.osgeo.org/image/118400/
JOSM imagery URL: tms:http://wms.openstreetmap.pl/balrog/koluszki-kap/

Note the rectification is of very bad quality, I didn't have much time to do it all correctly, and since there's no other usable imagery of Koluszki available to us, I have only used the GPS traces collected at the mapping party as the georeference. I guess it's better than nothing although it's of much lower standards than most imagery in OpenAerialMap, but it can be a good stress test too, with the high resolution in some spots. I have much more rectified kite imagery from 2011 and 2010, but it's on my crashed harddisk which is at a data recovery place right now.

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I don't really want to contribute to the license debates, but this is a funny analogy someone came up with on IRC, slightly coloured. :)

Imagine a village with a big, active group of people caring for a pet together, let's say it's a dog, one of those purebred dogs you see in dog show competitions, who is the village's mascot and who gets its hair cut every now and then. There's a community of villagers who maintain a fund for food and other services for the doggie and they all enjoy it and they enjoy seeing their pet grow bigger and win competitions.

Now the doggie has grown up a lot and the project has come a long way since the dog was a puppy and some people started calling for a change of the dog's haircut. They think the old look is inappropriate for a dog of this size and that it looked a little silly from the start. Some people have the opposite opinion though, but both groups are a minority, most villagers don't really care. However, it happens that the owners of the kennel are pro-new-haircut. A lot of people support them because they have taken good care of the dog's place and they became an authority in the village. A process was outlined whereby once there is enough support for the new haircut, the dog hairdresser will visit the village and give the dog a new look. The process has been taking quite long however and there isn't enough support for the change yet. Many people have accepted the change because they like the new planned haircut better, but even more accepted because they support the kennel owners and some did because the process was dragging on for so long, or because they didn't want to upset others.

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Just a short note that a friend of mine in Ecuador told other teachers at her university about OSM and now they have used it to make the map of Salinas (see the map link) and will use it for some sort of exposition of their map project at the Salinas campus of Universidad Tecnológica Equinoccial (UTE). I don't know anything about the project but you can probably visit if you're in the Salinas area.

Just thought I'd dump them here..

* Last weekend, March 5, in Łódź, Poland we celebrated the first meeting of Polish openstreetmappers bigger than 5 people (yes, we're a little bheind but we're getting there) and at the same time we have formally incorporated the local OpenStreetMap Association which may become a OSMF local chapter at some point in the future but in the first place will help us in contacting local institutions, funding local projects, being a point of contact for local companies etc. The association will become fully legally registered in a month or two. We talked to the press, held a wanna-be mapping party and had a couple of interesting presentations including one by a commercial osm-based navigation vendor. User:tomianek has been selected as the board chairman among other reasons due to his good relations with some local institutions. I was elected the treasurer. Personally I'm a little disappointed with all the stress on promotion, formal contacts and funding, and lack of stress on actual mapping projects.

* Schuyler Erle announced on the OpenAerialMap oam-talk mailing list that he and Chris Schmidt joined MapQuest with the specific goal of working on rebooting OAM and that initial results can be expected as soon as in a couple of weeks. Yay!

* Also, Jeffrey Warren started a series of interviews with grassrootsmappers at the Grassrootsmapping.org/PublicLaboratory blogs, see http://publiclaboratory.org/report/mapper-interview-dawn-mckinney

* Also, Spanish mappers imported Corine Land Cover forests polygons and Slovakia mappers are in the process of importing CLC / Urban Atlas data.

If anyone's interested, DLT and Autodesk have a free short e-book on the basics of LIDAR. It seems quite hands-on and practical, not just dry theory:

http://www.dlt.com/library/whitepaper/lidar-for-dummies-book

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See The Pottery Club for context

Imagine a small town with a very active club of cardboard box makers. The club members make and supply cardboard boxes for the town's people and the people are mostly happy with that. There are some other box suppliers, but their boxes are not recyclable and are actually closed, so you can't put your Garmin GPS in one of those boxes. You need an open box to do that and the Cardboard Box Club makes such boxes.

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I posted some information about the MediaLab Chrzelice (Culture 2.0 Camp) here but now that I think of it, it was also a sort of a Mapping Party, even if very chaotic because I'm a poor organizer and because of the rush. (also most likely the first osm mapping party in Poland)

So here are some thoughts about it as a mapping party and some of my impressions, in case they're useful to anyone else making a similar event.

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The Culture 2.0 Camp in Chrzelice, Poland finished yesterday. It was a MediaLab-style experiment in form of a four-day camp filled with workshops. Chrzelice is a (now) tiny village with a rich 700 years-long history. One of the workshops was concentrated on digitising this history and preserving the local cultural heritage. One of our aims was to digitise and archive some fragments of that heritage but in the first place it was to come up with good and sustainable tools and methods of doing that. People with a range of different backgrounds took part in that workshop: historians, sociologists, ethnologists, librarians, programmers and many more. As a result the range of tools that we used was also varied:
* recording social interviews with members of local community, some of whom remember the good days of Chrzelice castle in early 20th century (today ruined)
* scanning and photographing old documents and objects of historical significance, with engagement of a few employees of the Silesian Digital Library and the Warmian-Masurian Digital Library
* 3D scanning,
* building a map of the area in OSM.

In addition to the basic map features we put some stress on the monuments of the past and important historical objects, as well as local (even colloquial) place names that are in common use by the ~600 inhabitants, but which never appeared on an official map. It's worth noting that most of the other online map services lack 90% of the village streets in this region.

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I posted some pictures from our first step in BAP at http://unadventure.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/bap-test-flight-1/

I hope to perfect the tools and techniques enough until Wednesday so I can produce some simple, but usable ortho imagery of Chrzelice, Poland during the Culture 2.0 Camp this week, specifically to aid the mapping that will potentially be done during the digitalisation workshop.

So I posted a little summary in English of the buildings and trees tracing and importing in Szczecin on my blog: http://unadventure.wordpress.com/2010/06/20/mostly-done-with-szczecin/

Posted it there because it's more from a personal point of view than a technical summary. You can find another summary, in Polish, but including some nice screenshots at the OSM blog at blog.openstreetmap.pl/2010/szczecin-najbardziej-kompletnym-miastem/

Now I need to catch up with all the things I noted down while surveying in my own city, and had no time to input into JOSM till now.

As documented at osm.wiki/WikiProject_Poland/Warszawa#Linie_kolejowe_i_tramwaje (Polish) I have now assigned the tags tactile_paving=yes/no and (if yes), tactile_paving:slab_size=35x35 or 40x40 (cm square) according to the data from the Warsaw tram operator that arrived in my mailbox in December, which I requested in August -- nevertheless kudos to them. The names of nearly 500 tram stops equipped with tactile paving was printed on 16 pages of paper (yes, those rectangular white sheets).

Next thing, now that I know we have all or nearly all stops in the city, is to script creation of tram route relations and keeping them up to date using the schedule data availabel through the operator's web api. Hopefully the script will be reusable for other cities and for bus / train routes too.

My current idea is to store (outside of OSM database) the fragments of routes between each two adjacent stops and combine them to form a full tram / bus line route when updating. Where there's no connection between two stops stored yet, just use shortest path in a graph to find a route, later when a human editor fixes the relation, the new route fragments will be stored on next update.