I haven’t written anything in this diary yet, so I decided to just do that.

I have no idea any more when I first heard of OpenStreetMap. What I do still remember is the time where I didn’t know how to make changes myself. I noticed this mostly back around 2015 when I was using a GPS navigator based on OSM data, and often it didn’t bring me to the precise location because of missing house numbers. This wasn’t too bad, I was in the general vicinity, and I could mostly figure out where to go from there, but it was annoying, and I do remember two occasions where the same street was actually separate parts, making it hard to find out where I needed to be. I was thinking that it would be nice if I’d knew how to add those house numbers. Some I encounter along the way wouldn’t be much, but if everyone does a bit, a lot can be done was my idea.

Somewhere in 2021, I met Pieter who is very active in the Belgian OSM community, and he was nice enough to give me a deep explanation of how it all works and what tools there are and what I can do to contribute. I decided to write this explanation down in a blog post, and from that moment on, I started to contribute to OSM. I was also pleased to hear that the house number problem I was having, was mostly a problem of the past, as the government released the needed data under a compatible open license, and people of the community are making sure the data is put to good use.

… See full entry