Do you happen to know if it is possible to clone a map and start from there? E.g. I like this one and would like to make an English language clone without starting from scratch…

Cool, thanks for sharing.

Just included it in my little map to check max speeds too. If you happen to be in Flanders, you can pick an official speed limits dataset too.

I’m a little surprised by how little attention there has been to these very very cool tools.

One thing I wondered about though: it looks like a single edit to a country outline can colour every tile within that outline. I don’t know exactly how vector tiles work, but would it not be an idea to exclude polygons which have no nodes within the tile?

Would it be hard to implement permalinking to the charts one makes?

You don’t just give thumbs up, but even mark your questions as “answered”! It’s a small minority that does both, so that’s really nice of you.

I enjoy the Help site a lot too, both for asking and answering. There are some power users out there who give you extra credits for giving good answers. Collecting useless internet points is always fun, but it is really nice to get a nod of appreciation from them too.

I’ve edited the text to explain a bit on the legal stuff.

Hi Stereo, This is a usecase I’ve seen several times before, and no-one in the OSM-community I talked about things before ever thought it controversial. But uhm, now I’m a bit worried. The Road Registry “is open data”, and that was always enough. It is licensed under the same Flemish Open Data Licence (of which I couldn’t find an official English translation) that has been found compatible with re-use in OpenStreetMap. But I’m not sure if the movement in the other direction was ever investigated.

The analysis above is more of an “experimental” thing, and we only used OSM to spot mistakes - we didn’t just copy OSM. But we’ll have to put it on hold, I suppose, until we can clarify these legal issues.

Great to read all these opinions here.

Mikel is focusing more on formal organization. He will lead a session on what local chapters can mean for communities, and how OSMF can use those as an agent for local community building.

In the State of the Local Map, we will be talking with local community builders, about what works and what doesn’t. Your opinion on that is extremely welcome. You were if course already invited to shape that discussion by responding to this thread: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2016-September/076845.html

Well, this is what the wider OSM community should do IMHO: make a feed like Pascal Neis’s new contributor where you can filter by editor. Write these to a little website (eg fork our Belgian effort) where people can share their analysis of those changesets. For example, generate a list of all first edits with maps.me. Build in a data dumping tool, so we can make stats to count the number of “crappy edits”.

There are two things I think we can all agree upon that maps.me should do:

• explain more clearly what you are doing: “Looks like you want to share these points of interest with the rest of the world! That’s great. Just make sure they’re useful to the rest of the world. “My momma lives here” is not useful. “There is something of tourist interest here” is not specific enough. If you’re not sure how best to map something, just write a Note for other mappers to solve. Want to know more about the database you’re feeding? Head to learnosm.org”.

• integrate OSM messaging into their app. Yes, response rate is always low when you contact other mappers (even very experienced ones), but several people have mentioned how low it is for maps.me users. I think something is going wrong there, from a technical point of view. If a maps.me OSM contributor receives a message on OSM, that should pop up within the app until they read it. It might make sense to introduce this a bit. “Remember you uploaded some points of interest to the internet? Well, the internet has a question to you about that”.

I’m not really using maps.me myself, so maybe some steps in that direction are already there.

I’d like to point out that every “ooh this is all crap” comment makes it easier for the map.me developers to dismiss any criticism of their app.

It is just as obvious that maps.me introduces a whole lot of new problems, as that it is probably the biggest community expansion thing to happen recently.

Unless you want OSM to become your private garden, this is a wave of the future. Unless you want to start your own POI dump, you’re going to have to listen to the old guard, whether they are friendly or fierce.

Nicely done. For the “Influential writing” award I happily voted for yourself too :)

The comet tails: maybe a viewer popular in Russia that “flies” to your search query; similar to what Google Earth does.

Also: very very very cool.

Marc, Badita, both sound very interesting. I proposed a birds of a feather session (maybe at the hackday) on the subject. Please come :)

Hi Erick, the recent layer is weird. I tried it in iD and it worked, but direct tile access (e.g. in a leaflet map or manipulating the url you get from the images in labs.strava.com/heatmap/2014-2015.html ) does not seem to work.

I believe there is some sort of access restriction in place. Maybe they don’t want us to use it, I don’t know.

@marc but you can! For Strava, there’s this map. It looks like simply adding ?year=2015 should give you filtered data, though I can’t seem to be able to get it to work.

Some thoughts from a fellow welcomer in Belgium.

• No first changeset should be left unchecked. In Belgium, we have someone checking the clearly wrong changes, but often things are just “slightly wrong” or “could be better”. Pointing out how the new mapper could expand on something that was interesting enough for them to do a first edit might have more impact than just welcoming them

• Regional messages upon joining should definitely be re-introduced. It really is a burden to send these messages manually (I don’t manage to keep it up myself). It isn’t so much about trying to teach people stuff, rather an opportunity to include them in the community. For many new people, OSM is a database (or worse, a map). It isn’t. It’s a community.

• There is little point in improving user retention with this message. We only need a few dozen addicted mappers more for a lot of improvement. I think a welcome message might help there, but it will never be possible to prove this statistically as the numbers are so small. At the other end of the spectrum, I do believe we can expand the many slightly-interested people. Maps.me is an excellent tool for that, but there are some real issues I hope get fixed soon. On the one hand, some measures are necessary to reduce nonsense edits (better explaining of what they are doing, moving more stuff to Notes in stead of POIs, etc). On the other hand, I’m convinced the majority does not get messages sent through the OSM system. Considering the volume of maps.me edits, I think that warrants integrating our messaging system into the app.

Yes, yes, keep up the pseudophilosophy!

Exactly this simplification of reality is what makes a map useful. So maybe there’s a point where adding more detail to the map decreases its usability. We’re not quite there yet I think :)

Also, I do like your fractal analogy (even if it’s technically wrong). What is missing in it, is that the fractalisation is asymmetrical: in some places the detail level keeps going deeper, in other places it’s still a rough outline.

You could consider using Mapillary when out collecting data. That way you generate a cc streetview of you city, and others without local knowledge might be able to help you a bit more. Also, it allows you to collect data (often by chance) that you will only be interested in later. So you avoid having to go back to that same street because you didn’t collect the fire hydrants.

That’s in theory. In practice, you need a very good and focused set of pictures to be able to really do that.

I recently tried the inverse of this same problem: trying to measure the width of a polygon. Problem is that it only works decently if your polygons are long (as opposed to square). Same would apply here. If for some reason, the mapper has cut the riverbank up into short and wide bits, then I would guess your process breaks down.

Thanks for this elaboration, it does make your point much clearer. I especially like your point of not adding detail you’re not sure about. It’s something we often say in statistics: “it’s better to be about right than exactly wrong”.