I saw quite a few of these floating roads in Peru and Bolivia too. The problem is the high res pic suddenly ends (or gets cloudy) and it is sometimes hard to even approximate its course. These days they are often fixable with Mapbox Sat - or an educated guess.

SomeoneElse gave me some more info, and I can conclude that I wouldn’t consider setting up Leaflet+Mapnik “quick and dirty” :) It is something I might be looking into though, looks interesting enough.

This isn’t just cool, it’s also super easy. For the project you commented on at my diary, I just created this query. Absolutely impressive stuff. Overpass-Turbo is probably THE coolest tool in the OSM toolbox.

OK, so you can only use lists on the new version (or the dev for now).

But I was in fact referring on how to get a list of uid’s of a group of people who worked on a given project. What kind of query gets you that list here? You started with usernames? Or people working on a given area at a given time?

The short-list option you mentioned is something I’ll definitely be using after this. Great!

I had no idea that was possible. How did you get the transparent big nodes to disappear on the screenshot? When I run your query, they still do appear.

Now if you were to query the data with relation[“type”=”route”][“route”=”subway”] , do you think you could feed the MapCSS with the colour tag?

How did you get the list of uid’s for that overpass query?

Thanks for that, while we wait for someone to add this functionality to osm.org

@Warin61 I’m more of a smartphone guy myself, and yes, Osmand does work, at least kind-of (as mentioned somewhere in the wall of text).

An adapted Garmin style might be a good solution for some people - not exactly for what I want to tackle, but it would definitely be something nice to have. To me it’s rather painful that the two projects you mention are both non-OSM. You see this so often: if you want to do something specialist, you start a separate project. That way, OSM is destined to be not much more than a pretty basemap - and not get used as a global geographic database.

I always get a feeling of false dichotomy in these discussions. Sure, it is -possible- for a separate OSM and MM community to arise, but I don’t think that is the reality.

Traditionally, OSM has grown from the nerdy circles of open source enthusiasts and geography fanatics. As these people mostly know OSM already by now, I’ve heard people say that the community can’t grow much more. The lack of imagination is impressive. I see MM/HOT as a way to get people interested from a completely different background. My introduction about OSM at MM events is always something like “OSM is this crazy idea that makes unexpected things possible. It started with some people wanting some open data for England, and now you can drive from Alaska to Ushuaia with it. We also discovered that it’s the best way to get geodata to NGOs”. You cannot explain that MM is a crazy but possible idea without showing how the whole concept of OSM is completely outrageous - and working.

I also don’t see the work we do at a Mapathon as the most important. We’re just showing people what they can do with a few clicks of their mouse. So next time they use OSM and spot a mistake, they’ll be more likely to fix it. So at the next disaster, more experience mappers will be available for a fast response.

Letting your thinking about the (real) issues be guided by the idea of a dichotomy which is not real, makes the problems seem larger than they are.

to identify the best and brightest to receive additional training and mentoring to become local champions and event hosts

Why should the best mappers be the best event hosts? I’ll take myself as an example. I’ll be hosting my third MM mapathon soon, but I have hardly mapped with Missing Maps myself. To host, you need to be able to explain the project (both OSM in general and MM), to motivate and to get people started. But my own mapping is guided by what I feel like doing that day, not the tasking manager.

QGIS will give you a lot more options for prettier visualization.

How easy is it to get this data in JOSM? (I would love to see my own map, but I have about a 1000 tracks)

I did not know you could copy-paste in iD, good to know!

In the old fashioned Web editor Potlatch, it is possible to select more than one thing, and add tags to all of them at once. But for simple things Iike benches, I map these directly on the phone, using Osmand. For better geometry, it helps to have a satellite overlay.

But if you like OSMtracker, I believe you’ll find your data easier to process in JOSM.

On language : the Belgian community often uses English to bridge our language devide. As said above, translating documentation is certainly possible and a good idea.

(the diary does not send me a message if there’s a new comment, so send me a direct message if you want to get in tocuh)

Hi Mikel, a good introduction to my little project is [this diary post] (osm.org/user/joost%20schouppe/diary/26259) (but I’ve been writing about it for quite some time, [1] (osm.org/user/joost%20schouppe/diary/21826), 2, 3, 4).

In short : the kind of questions you ask are exactly the kind of questions I would like to answer, but for the whole world. I think I’m about ready to scale it up, however that remains to be seen. I would love to invest more time in this, but that would mean working less on things that earn money :)

Basic setup: take a full history dump, use a poly file to split the area you want with Mazdermind’s history splitter, then import it to Postgres with his history importer. Some basics I do within Postgres, but as I’m not strong on SQL I do most of the heavier analysis with SPSS.

I’ve always been more interested in the very basics (like evolution if number of active mappers, of road lengths, of road edits), but I did try things like identify people who work on bicycle infrastructure. That works, with some limitations. Lists of people could definitely be generated as a by-product of the yearly analysis I would like to do for all regions worldwide. It will probably take someone else to turn that into a service, however I would love to collaborate with more people on this project.

When you do try to make a statistical comparison between people who did and did not get the message, be sure to use an appropriate statistical technique. Most simple would be to just compare something like number of people with a changeset between six months and a year after their first changeset (making sure this amount of time has passed for all cases studied). That way, you obviously lose a lot of cases that are still too young. The alternative is to use survival analysis. There even is a Kaplan Meier toolkit for Excel.

Re the surveying idea: could be very interesting, but the response rate will likely be very very small. Response is often a function of interest in the subject, and our study group are people with proven desinterest.

In the Belgian new contributor welcoming thing, we also register what their first edit was. Might be interesting over time to see if that has any predictive value.

I don’t know if we should automate this kind of thing too much. I believe the value of a message like this has much to do with how personal it is. What would be nice over time is to have a central way to register who is getting welcoming messages and who isn’t. So as to avoid that people watching their area of interest send duplicate messages to someone watching a larger area. And it would be a nice tool to highlight areas that - aren’t - getting messages.

In Belgium, we send a message to every new mapper, as picked up by Pascal Neis CSS feed, archived in a Google Doc. We do check the changesets, and sometimes personalise the welcome message based on that. There is no call to answer us, just an open invitation to join the community. With about 400 messages sent, we had a response in 11% of the cases.

I do have the feeling that personalisation increases chance of feedback, but then again feedback isn’t the goal. Maybe it would be more interesting to track link clicking from the message (but that might be off putting tonsome)

BTW our welcome message is available here for copying and improving. (scroll down for Dutch, French and English versions)

Conifer=forestry is actually entirely logical in the UK. There are few examples of where a coniferous forest was not planted for forestry use, as this does not occur naturally in our climate (or most people don’t realize if it doesn’t),

So thus is exactly the kind of example you need: people think they know what words mean, but they don’t. The same with kiosk : maybe in England kiosks are either newsagents or ice-cream shops, but in other countries they might sell a range of items, and maybe evens specialize in both ice-cream and newspapers.

So both of these examples actually strengthen your point of describing aspects of a thing, not the thing itself. While I would agree that doing this radically might in fact discourage mappers, we will probably have to evolve more and more in this direction, just as we did with woodland tagging.

This will be a gradual evolution though, and not a revolution. That way tools can develop that put a layer of presets over things, in much the way that iD shows a description and JOSM the tags. And that way this necessary complexity is only introduced where it is really necessary.

The most useful thing to do, IMHO, is getting involved in specific discussions about tagging. The theoretical argument may add just the little weight there to tip the scale. But the “simple tagging model” has its worth too, and will not be abandoned just because it’s not logically elegant.

On the friture example, as a Belgian this is important to me :) I’m entirely satisfied with the fast food + cuisine=friture that is common practice. It might have the disadvantages of both tagging styles, but it is queriable - and no subset of tags could ever do a friture justice.

I checked one or two hundred newbie changesets in our Belgian simple setup using the neis-one service with a Google spreadsheet. All of them got a welcome message.

I can certainly agree that to speak of newbies as a simple concept isn’t useful. The diversity in what they do is enormous : from changing one way streets to remapping entire universities. There is the occasional untagged way and other mistakes, though I haven’t got the statistic at hand.

Our little mapper-of-the-month team is planning a series of short interviews, which I hope to extend with some statistics derived from the welcoming project.

Maybe we can think of some kind of survey, I’d be happy to help (setting up surveys is part of my day job and education). The thing is, I don’t think it will be possible to get a high enough response rate to be representative. I only have anecdotal evidence of this (insert smiley), such as the 10% response rate to our welcome message (which doesn’t actually asks for response ) and the 0% response rate to our “questions for new mappers” after our last Missing Maps mapathon.

When I explain OSM to newbies, or when I see other people explain it, they always say something like “you might know Openstreetmap as the map on osm.org, but it is many many more things than that”. So the fact that it is a database is basically the second thing you say. I don’t see how that can be controversial, and why anyone would want to hide that from newbies. If you want to avoid the word “database”, you could say something like “OSM collects map data”.

Agree with Davor and Vincent. There should not be a special procedure for special people. They’re not special, it’s just that their money is worth less when converted to pounds. Membership fee weighted by GDP/capita would be great. Of course, there can still be membership waiver program on top of that.

Phillippe, in OSM, data is denser in Flanders too. Most of the above is about community size.

It might just be that in a couple of years Mapillary will have a larger community in Wallonia too, even if the data density stays higher in Wallonia.

And did you just call OSM old technology? I suddenly feel old now, too. :)