My most recent surveying and OpenStreetMap edits both took place in the town of Badger, Iowa. A road based on imported data was wrongly shown to cut through a city park. I fixed that and added some of what I learned from a stroll around town.

My first edit to the OpenStreetMap was to mark that a restaurant had gone out of business. I think about obsolescence a lot. When we add features to a map, how long do we expect them to last? It’s exciting adding features to a map, turning a white void into something more defined. Do people get as enthused about removing things that are no more? Buildings catch fire, monuments are wrecked by a freak storm, shops close up for good. When starting a business, there’s motivation to get on a map: you want people to find you. If business someday dries up, however, getting off the map is probably the least of your concerns - even if that means people will be making a trip in vain.

Badger is a small town, 561 people in the 2010 census according to the Wikipedia. On a Friday afternoon, the post office, a gas pump/convenience store, and an insurance agency were the only buildings on the small main street that were clearly open for business. A little further down the street, and not where OpenStreetMap says it should be, the public library is also closed for the day. I was told residents get their groceries and most everything else from Fort Dodge (10 miles away) or Humboldt (12 miles away). Unless you live in Badger, there’s not many reasons to be there.

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I reached another milestone today: for the first time since I started mapping, I got a funny look. Why today? I attribute this to my mapping location. When I do mapping in urban environments, I look like just another person using a phone, or maybe a crazy person who should be avoided. In rural environments, there is nobody around to receive a funny look from. Just me!

This time I was using OSMTracker-Android to capture a photograph that contained the essential details of the gas station: that it was 24 hours, a telephone number, the name of the place, etc. When I walked into the convenience store to see what their coffee, food, and beer offerings were – they had coffee and a grill with hamburgers, and Blue Moon, not bad for such a small town – is when I got the funny look. They said I’d appeared confused and asked if I was okay.

Driving across the country from Oregon to Iowa, one realizes something: OpenStreetMap has lots of room for improvement in its gas station coverage. As a driver, it’s good to know how far away you are from the next gas station so you don’t get stranded. I discovered the MapQuest app for Android works pretty nicely, showing nearby gas stations and sometimes even prices, but data coverage is pretty spotty in parts of I-80 and not something I like to depend on.

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It’s been a few months since my first humble OpenStreetMap edit. I wrote a diary post for that occasion, and was pleased to have received a nice welcome as well as some tips. After that, I didn’t do any edits for quite a while. Just recently, I’ve been adding details to the area near where I grew up.

Why was there such a gap? Largely, it was was my hesitation to use the editing tools. Reading diaries and user pages and what-have-you on the OSM site, I see a lot of suggestions for others to JOSM. It’s “powerful,” the “best way,” etc. I could tell by looking that JOSM is loaded with functionality, but I felt overwhelmed. The screen just showed me too much I wasn’t ready for. I did use it for my very first edit – I changed some tags on a local business. But adding something new was, and still is, something I feel I’ll have to work up to.

Time passed, and I decided to try Potlatch 2. It looked much friendlier to a beginning like myself, but I had problems with it. I didn’t find the editing mode that would have let me add tags that weren’t built into the interface. Potlatch’s suggestion to “Add new points by dragging them onto the map” sounds clear enough, but I must not have noticed that at the time. My instinct wanted me to click the icons and then click the map where I wanted to add that feature. Oops. I also had trouble with how the mouse worked: I kept accidentally drawing red lines all over the place, which would make the panel icons disappear. I think I discovered that escape or enter worked, but then I’d have to delete the way I accidentally created. This was frustrating.

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I’ve just made my first edit to OpenStreetMap! I marked a restaurant in my neighborhood in Portland, Oregon as closed. It’s been closed for several weeks. I did that by removing the tags “name” and “restaurant” and “cuisine”. Hopefully that’s the right way to go about it!

Viewing the history of the area, it looks like either my comment got clipped, or I spaced out and forgot to type the whole thing. Maybe trackpad caused me to highlight and type over. Oops. Not sure how to edit the comment, if that’s possible. If I could have done anything else better, I’d love for somebody to let me know.