Well, three full months since last update to my diary, my contribution rate to OSM has dropped sharply to almost zero (I don't have that much well known areas with below than average mapping left), and my attempts to make more people in the Spain MTB and outdoor/GPS afficionado groups be involved and contribute to OSM have gone...as expected, that is not saying a lot. At least, I haven't received much feedback from the people I have been addressing, and this usually means very little involvement and contributions took place.

The first wave of "join OSM propaganda" (just a joke ;-) ) I put on the Internet got some people interested in the project, but don't know so far the amount of direct contributions it caused in the first place. Anyways, OSM as a whole and the means of contributing back (as well as the "what can OSM do for me if I spent my time contributing" usual questions) should be well answered, and no one reading my messages in forums should have any problem getting involved. The biggest problem so far has been the availabity of an up to date, extreme quality and perfect coverage Garmin IMG vector map of Spain (TopoHispania 2.0x), free of cost, including contourlines, and made from official and high quality survey data, that makes a lot of people go along the easy route, and use pre-made maps, instead of contributing to OSM thinking long-term. But this was announced, and to be expected.

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It has taken me three full months to review all my old GPS traces from the last years, and improve OSM data from them. In this time amount of data and its quality in the places where I have personal GPS traces and local knowledge of has improved a lot, for example, a big part of Madrid side of "Sierra de Guadarrama" is now in quite a good shape, there are few tracks/paths missing, and the ones that are already mapped are very precise (thank to GPS traces and legally useable aerial imaginery available in Spain).

There are lots of things left to do, though. Once you go outside of big cities data quality has to be improved (a lot), and even places with high population densities and aerial imaginery available are missing some basic road, features or lack adequate precision (coarsely drawn roads, roads shifted some meters away, data imports in the desperate need of manual improvents, rivers that go uphill and off course, etc.).

So it's now time to try and gather more people, and make them join the project. I know it's going to be very hard to do so, but will try some easy approaches to it. First, the "target market" is clear, people in the roadbike and mountain bike worlds. Specially for the MTB guys, GPS devices and personal trainers including GPS receivers are commonplace now, and the amount of GPS traces that get recorded every week is very important...but most of them end up on the user's local hard drive, erased, or at most, uploaded to Wikiloc or the like, where little use can be made of them. But people need some incentive to make an extra effort and deal with the tracks to, at least, upload them raw to OSM.

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It's been more than a month since I last made an entry to my diary. I have been contributing during all this time, but somewhat less than in December, when Christmas season gave some additional free time to use for mapping. I continue uploading changes and modifications to areas where I have both personal GPS tracks and personal field experience with, and I can always find tracks or paths that are either missing of in the need of huge precision (and accuracy) improvements. Hopefully all this effort will pay in the future, in the end, tracks and paths don't change that often (although the hideous housing bubble in Spain has destroyed some of the countryside near to towns and villages all over the place).

What I have also noted in the last few weeks is the usual problem we all have with respect to licensing, fair (and authorized) use of public data, license infringements (third party use of OSM data without even giving credit, etc.). All of us would want a full coverage and full precision OSM database for our country, but we shouldn't try to speed things up importing data into OSM for which we don't have explicit and very clear authorization. We could end up resorting to third party data imported into OSM, that would move people to map other regions, just to later (months, years) realize those data have to be removed, and be in a worse situation than before the import.

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I have yet to investigate the local Spain user community in depth, buth is very disappointing to see that every user around my location has never contributed anything to the project, or did some three or so years ago, and only with minimal amounts of date. I'm not the most adequate one to tell other what to to or where to spend their (scarce) free time, but the situation unfortunately seems no better than other community-based projects out there. It seems in Spain we don't have a tradition, culture, whatever, of giving back to the community. There seems to be no sense of community at all, but, anyways, it's better to lead by example than to complain about the situation and be quiet crying.

And leading by example, a recent "OSM friend", walo, needs special credit and praise. I have only had a slight view at his (or her?) work, but seems outstanding, in volume and in quality. That's the kind of attitude that makes projects big and people willing to collaborate. Big thanks to him.

On a more personal side, I have been adding some information to OSM for the last few days: "drinking_water" and "spring" all over the place (Casa de Campo and sierra de Madrid), very useful for bikers, hikers and outdoors sports in general. Casa de Campo is much improved, more tracks and paths mapped than before, better polygon resolution and accuracy, but still some work to do here (it's a big city "park", with so many paths and tracks close to each other, that maybe and for the sake of clarity, some of the least interesting ones should not be mapped at all).

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And has gone unnoticed to me for a long time. In the past, you had to resort to highly-priced commercial GPS maps, or resort to get them via lower priced means, but now a whole new world of amateur (but quality) GPS mapping opens to me. Back then, when you saw a missing track, path or feature on the map (talking about Garmin ones), you had to try convoluted and complex processes (most of the Windows only) to incorporate your GPS data to the map. And, at most, and after a painful process, you would have your own, improved / modified map... but no one else would get it, at least, easily and in an scalable way.

There are people around, expert MTB riders and explorers, that have literally hundreds of kilometers of yet unmapped trails, (single)tracks and features waiting for some easy way to share them with the world. Wikiloc sort of fits the bill, and for GPS track sharing, is ok, but being able to community-create a map that includes all that information, is something better than great.

And as a thankful user of the mapping data, I _have_ to contribute back, so I'm in the process of adding lots of tracks, paths and features around home (Madrid, Spain) from my own tracklog archive. Once I get comfortable enough with OSM, JOSM, better practices and the like, I'm willing to initiate a "marketing campaing" trying to make people in the local MTB world aware of OSM, and encouraging them to take part in it, contribute information, and improve the current information available for Spain.

Wow, not bad for a first post, next ones will be shorter. Promise :-)

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