Because I love it.

Open data is changing the world. OpenStreetMap, as a true open data project of the commons, is proving its viability with continuously growing contributor numbers and expanding adoption. We’re well under way to replace what has been historically the realm of governments and proprietary-data companies with amazing open data that is not better because it’s cheaper, but actually provides fresher and more detailed data because it’s open and community driven. It’s exciting to be a part of this in my job as data lead at MapBox, as an individual contributor and as a board member of the OpenStreetMap US chapter.

This last year on the board of OpenStreetMap US has been amazing. Working together with Jim, John, Randy and Martijn on the board and with the great support of community members like Kathleen Danielson, Bonnie Bogle and Ian Dees, we’ve brought the organization to a new level. We’re honing in on our goal to not only promote OpenStreetMap in the United States, but to make it bigger, stronger and more diverse. Here are some of the things we’ve accomplished:

• Ran the biggest OpenStreetMap conference to date, bringing together almost 400 members of the US and international community in San Francisco.
• Ran quarterly editathons promoting OpenStreetMap on a local level. Twelve cities are participating in the October editathon, and more than 1,000 edits came out of the last one.
• Relaunched OpenStreetmap US to do a better job introducing OpenStreetMap to the world.
• Connected with government agencies to promote the use of OpenStreetMap and explore areas of cooperation.

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There has been lots of talk about groups on OpenStreetMap.org lately. In early 2013 Mikel called for better social tools, including groups on OpenStreetMap, and lately more often groups have been mentioned as a replacement for our ailing mailing lists. Saman had a version of groups in his blue sky mockups for OpenStreetMap.org. Tom’s posted a sketch for groups as pull request.

I’d like to add a dose of skepticism in this discussion: I don’t think we should implement groups on OpenStreetMap.org right now, there are better alternatives to get started with if our goal is to make OpenStreetMap more social and let mappers connect better.

Here’s why:

1. Most conversations ideally don’t require groups.
2. It’s hard to do social software right, groups in particular.
3. Social media platforms are distributing.

(1) Most conversations ideally don’t require groups

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Finding out fast who’s modified the map is hugely valuable to review changes in areas you care about, to connect to new mappers or to just show how fresh the map is.

Unfortunately, the part of OpenStreetMap.org that’s supposed to provide this functionality - the history tab - is functionally broken. I’d like to suggest here a straightforward way to fix it, punting on some of the hard engineering problems that fast browsing of historic changes bring with them.

Background

To recap if you’re new to the issue, here’s why the history tab doesn’t work today: virtually anywhere in the world you’d like to see the latest changes of a particular area on OpenStreetMap, what you’ll actually get is large-scale changes whose bounding box happens to intersect with with the area on the map you’re viewing while not actually impacting any data in the area you’re viewing.

This is a well known problem in OpenStreetMap and people like Matt Amos, Ian Dees and more recently Paweł Paprota have worked on coming up with a solution for this issue.

The underlying engineering problem is Hard: changes to OpenStreetMap are organized in changesets, each one of which can contain up to 50,000 edits and whose modifications can be geographically huge. Querying all changesets that actually modified data in an arbitrary bounding box of the world and displaying them in reverse chronological order is computationally expensive while at the same time it should happen in milliseconds to satisfy a web request and allow for fast browsing.

Fixing the history tab

At the Chicago hack weekend Tom and I created a prototype that completely punts on the expensive problem of fast browsing for the entire changeset history. The approach we’ve taken is essentially to present you with a map and a list of the latest changes on visible elements first, then only reveal the history of an element when you click on it.

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We just relaunched LearnOSM - the step by step resource for learning OpenStreetMap. LearnOSM was launched in 2011 by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team for the workshops they are giving world wide. It has grown into a resource used by OpenStreetMap newcomers and trainers well beyond its roots in humanitarian aid and disaster risk management.

Read up on the new LearnOSM and learn how to contribute to translations and other improvements by Jue Yang, the designer and developer behind the new face of LearnOSM:

http://mapbox.com/blog/learnosm-with-new-design/

Andy Allan recently ported the OpenStreetMap standard style from pure Mapnik XML to CartoCSS and TileMill. This is exciting as it’s a huge step towards making contributing to the style more accessible. The port is nearly perfect and kinks are being worked out right now. I took a minute to spot check and pull together a couple of screenshots showing just how close this awesome piece of work is. I hope to see this go up soon on OpenStreetMap.org. Andy’s port wouldn’t change anything about how tiles are being rendered on OpenStreetMap, all that changes is how the style for those styles would be created: In the future, we’d use TileMill and generate the Mapnik XML from user friendly Carto CSS.

Here is San Francisco in the new OSM-carto port, just looks like the existing map:

Setup

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Stoked about test driving the great work of Tom, Richard, John, Saman and others on the new iD editor. Here’s a quick screenshot. You can get started yourself with iD fast, just clone the repo, point your browser to the index.html file in it and get started editing. Note that if you’d like to upload your changes to the test server, you’ll need an account on it. Report any bugs you’re finding on the issue queue.

We had good turnout for the OpenStreetMap and MapBox workshops in preparation for Desarrollando America Latina.

The videos of the webcasts are up now, all in Spanish:

• Introducción a OpenStreetMap
• Extraer OSM datos, convertir a shape files, diseñarlos en TileMill
• Crear aplicaciones HTML+Javascript con MapBox.js

We’re on the bus now heading back from New York City to Washington DC after an eventful week (read about the $575k Knight awarded Development Seed for OpenStreetMap work on the MapBox blog).

Here are some pictures of the OpenStreetMap intro workshop Ian and I held yesterday at foursquare’s headquarter’s. Thanks to the NYC OSM community leads Liz, Serge and Eric for the initiative and promotion.

Thanks to David Blackman of foursquare for kindly offering foursquare’s great digs in Manhattan for this workshop. Join the OSM NYC Meetup Group if you’d like to stay in the loop on all things mapping NYC.

A great crowd of about 30 people turned out for the workshop.

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kkaefer, ajashton and myself will head to Tokyo for State of the Map.

We’ll arrive on Wednesday afternoon and head out on Monday afternoon. Hotel TBD. On Saturday, I’ll give a talk about how we’re improving OpenStreetMap with Foursquare.

I’m looking forward to meeting / seeing many great people. Drop me a line if you’d like to get in touch ahead of time.

Calle Tokio in Mexico City

Come out to the OSM introductory workshop in New York City on September 22nd 2012.

We’ll start form square one, with an intro to OSM and its data, learning JOSM, using OSM resources and more. This clearly targets new comers to OSM mapping, but if you’re a seasoned mapper, you should come out too. The NYC community is just reviving and there are lots of priorities to discuss and new people to meet. Of course, we should have drinks after (where TBD).

Find out all the details and sign up on the NYC OSM Meetup group.

Thanks to Liz Barry for organizing the event.

I am looking forward to see you there!

For documentation’s sake: a couple of pictures from OSM workshops in Rio de Janeiro’s Cidade de Deus and Complexo do Alemão with Ônibus Hacker, around the Rio+20 Conference for Sustainable Development in June.

Cidade de Deus - street signs

Cidade de Deus - jotting down location and name of points of interest

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The American Red Cross and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team called on Volunteers to Map the Ugandan Cities Gulu and Lira on World Humanitarian Day

Mapping at the American Red Cross Headquarters yesterday. On the screen a video message from the team in Uganda.

A good two dozen mappers followed HOT’s and ARC’s call to help map Gulu and Lira as an effort to improve maps for fire fighters and rescue teams.

GeoEye has provided improved satellite imagery that State Department helped process and host for the event. About two dozen volunteers helped trace roads, tracks, buildings and huts from imagery. As a next step the American Red Cross will send a team of trainers to Uganda to initiate necessary ground surveys verifying tracing work and to teach Quantum GIS skills for using OSM data.

You can still join the effort by picking up tasks from one of the two HOT OSM Tasking manager jobs:

• Gulu
• Lira

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(English further down)

Gracias a todos por atender al taller de OpenStreetMap Mexico DF el viernes y el sabado pasado. Huracán Ernesto hizo que nos quedamos adentro, pero de hecho eso fue excelente, como así pudimos enfocarnos de manera muy profunda en las herramientas de OpenStreetMap.

Ahora, mantengamos el impulso! Como resultado del evento Vitor George abrió una lista de correo para México: talk-mx, suscríbete aquí para mantenerte en contacto! Planificamos unos talleres parecidos alrededor de Desarrollando Latinoamerica que tendrá lugar en varios ciudades Latinoamericanos el 1 y 2 de Diciembre. Mandame un mensaje si estás interesado en ayudar a organizar, impartir, programar o diseñar.

Muchas gracias a Telmex Hub por equipo, lugar y promoción el evento. Tanto a nuestros amigos del Citivox, SocialTic y Fundar que hicieron posible este evento.

Aquí algunas fotos, una lista de enlaces y temas de los cuales hablamos y algunos usuarios que atendieron. También veanse estas fotos de fotografía aerea del domingo en el Chapultepec.

Hasta muy pronto!

English

Thanks everyone for coming out to the Mexico City OpenStreetMap workshops on Friday and Saturday. The fact that Hurricane Ernesto kept us inside I think was a good thing as it allowed us to do a great deep dive into doing OpenStreetMap work.

Let’s keep the momentum going now, as a result of the event, Vitor George has initiated the talk-mx list, I encourage you to sign up! We’re planning on similar OpenStreetMap workshops around Desarrollando Latinoamerica on December 1st and 2nd, please get in touch if you are interested in organizing, teaching, promoting, designing or programming for this event.

A big thanks goes to Telmex Hub for hosting the workshop and promotion and to our friends and partners at Citivox, SocialTic and Fundar for promoting this event.

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Este domingo salimos al Bosque de Chapultepec para volar un globo del excelente Balloon Mapping Kit del Public Laboratory. Encuentra aquí una pequeña historia de fotos de este día. La idea era de sacar fotos aereas, no fue tan exitoso como nos hubiera gustado…

Haz click en las fotos para ver más información.

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This Sunday we went to Chapultepec park to fly a balloon (using the excellent [Balloon Mapping Kit of Public Laboratory. See here a pictures of the day. The idea was to create areal imagery, it didn’t quite work out that way…

Click on pictures for more info.

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Eric and myself will be leading a MapBox training and OpenStreetMap mapping party in Mexico City tomorrow, Friday (10) and Saturday (11). On both days we will meet at the Telmex Hub in the center of Mexico City. You can find all the details on our blog.

In preparation, I’ve done some research in areas of Mexico DF we could be focussing on. The weather might not be cooperating, scroll to the bottom to see our plan for if we’re stuck with rain.

Ground surveys

Here are a lot of areas in Mexico DF that we could survey with Walking Papers and GPS. I’ve pulled a bunch of them together based on what I see missing on the DF map, not knowing these areas myself. Let’s pick ones that are busy and safe enough. Please add more where you see fit.

We should also figure out whether we can/should get bikes or cars for the survey.

(Click to go to see map on openstreetmap.org)

Around La Raza

Around Camarones station

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I’ll be in Rio for Rio+20 and launching InfoAmazonia. I’d love to do some OSM work there, I’m thinking walking papers. Please get in touch if you’re interested.

I’m working with Rub21 right now on improving Lima. We’re finding a lot of disconnected streets there. What’s the story behind these? I’m seeing that at least some of the remaining streets are by user Telecom IP - I’ll be sending him a message. Not sure whether this is license change related, I remember seen these disconnected roads in Lima well before the bots kicked in.

Right now our plan of action is to repair the streets that match nicely with Bing satellite imagery and not touch those that don’t. I’d like to eventually repair or remove the ones that appear to be garbage, too.

I just posted a quick report on walking papers work in Brasilia on our blog, check it out:

http://mapbox.com/blog/surveying-brasilia/

Take aways:

• Brasilia block system was tricky to figure out…
• … and is now tricky to enter. Please join the discussion for a solution

Debriefing with Lima

If you’re in Brasilia, join us on Sunday for some Walking Papers action, here are the details: http://mapbox.com/blog/osm-mapping-brasilia/

I will be in Sarajevo from Wednesday (Feb 15) to Sunday (Feb 19) for POINT conference:

- Thursday 7PM: Geo Data workshop, OSM, TileMill, QGis, etc. - would love to connect with OSM'ers!
- Friday 3.15PM: Talk about Fast and Beautiful Maps made of Open Data

http://mapbox.com/blog/2012/feb/13/point-sarajevo-open-data-mapping/

Poke me on Twitter http://twitter.com/lxbarth if you're interested in joining in for the workshop or just catching up.