curious experience, being locked out because of etiquette misbehaviour.

I heard about the procedure against me only after the procedure had been closed with a condemnation, 4 votes approving, 1 abstaining. not only no space to present my point of view with the people who were to decide, even no notice of the pending procedure. speak about openness.

what were —concretely— my abuses? I may guess, but I was not —concretely— notified of what was the violation. maybe the same as my previous block. I had to review my own behaviour myself, perform a radical self-criticism, purge myself of all evil, then came back once purified.

I’m happy I renounced my membership of such a Foundation.

---

a clarification apparently needed, seeing the first two comments to this entry: I obviously do know that I have a continuous latent conflict with YouthMappers and HOT. I did not know that steps were being taken against me. then I received the following email:

… See full entry

A note to myself

This is a note I’m writing to myself, but sharing it to the wider OSM community. I’m a great fan of OSM as a close-to-perfect means for producing this beautiful free geographic database we have, and I like Telegram as an informal platform. I’ve been using Telegram while discussing OSM changesets with fellow mappers, switching from changeset comments that were slowing down the communication, being less interactive and not letting us share images.

me on Telegram

On Telegram I founded the Comunidad OSM Panamá (let’s call it COP here), to which I’ve been inviting mappers who start contributing OSM data in Panama. I have also been made owner of the OpenStreetMap Off Topic (OOT) group, a quite diversified community of mappers who sometimes want to talk about anything else but mapping. In both groups I implement a very simple set of rules: 1) introduce yourself when you enter; 2) assume and practice good faith; 3) try to be nice to each other.

the CoC

In particular in the OOT group we have discussed some meta-issues, like when the OSMF was discussing the need for a formal Code of Conduct. From those discussions, I distilled my personal reasons for decidedly contrasting the formalization of “norms”, on top of what should be shared “values”: if we don’t agree on values, there’s no set of norms that will keep us together. Also, should we once agreed on a set of norms, we would need a group of enforcers, and while on the OSM platforms we have the OSM Foundation to perform that role, on Telegram we are outside the Foundation’s jurisdiction. Cutting it short, in my opinion, if we need the protection offered by the OSM Code of Conduct, we must stay on OSM services.

an event on official channels

… See full entry

(I’m publishing it now, I will review, and might add screenshots.)

rationale

Here in Panama I’ve occasionally noticed bursts of name contributions by foreigners who do not know the language, or by local people who copy from official information where the accents have been purged, or contributed long ago when non-ASCII character became a question point.

Whatever the case, we have textual mistakes in the database, so that when from time to time I browse the database, I still stumble on “Simon Bolivar”, “San Jose”, “Canaveral”, “la Compania”, and the commonplace terms Panaderia, Pasteleria, Fruteria, etc.

If you’re not familiar with Spanish, you haven’t noticed anything wrong, or have you?

Those familiar with the language and/or fixated on formal correctness like linguists, philologists, and mathematicians, have felt pain, because the correct Spanish form of the above words is “Simón Bolívar”, “San José”, “Cañaveral”, “la Compañía”, “Panadería”, “Pastelería”, “Frutería”, etc.

Just for reference, at the time of writing, “Simon Bolivar” in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela returns 32 objects, while “Simón Bolívar” gives 200, possibly giving a measure of some national pride. Colombian “Fruterías” however score 56 vs. 64 against “Fruteria” without the accent.

the task

Here I only focus on what are obvious orthographic mistakes, skipping any data that might look wrong only because it’s in a different language, and I want to fix the mistakes only looking at the textual information, not to the geographic or geometric characteristics of the object.

This spares me downloading object coordinates, and the base map, but still I will advise checking every single instance we’re fixing, no automatic blanket fix.

the tools

I suggest using overpass-turbo, level0, the standard unix stream editor sed. Then correct the data in the level0 html interface.

the procedure by example

… See full entry

what is this about?

this entry describes a possible workflow for identifying missing road segments, thanks to the standard low-res Strava heat map. you may also use it to reclassify all those ‘highway=track’ that so many remote mappers keep creating for our ‘surface=unpaved’ unclassified and tertiary roads.

the mapping practice here described is totally manual, and quite obviously its speed will be inversely proportional to the precision you want to achieve.

preparation steps

• install JOSM
• in JOSM, activate the low resolution Strava heat layer
  • do that by editing the Imagery Preferences settings,
  • look for Strava among the available default entries,
  • select the cycling and running heat map,
  • activate it.
  • you will need to restart JOSM after activating the new imagery layer source.

typical editing session

prepare for mapping

• add the OpenStreetMap (Carto) Standard layer,
• roughly choose an area of interest,
• add the Strava heatmap layer, but do change its transparency to 50%,
• add your favourite Aerial photography layer (here I will be using Bing because I will show screenshots and the Bing license allows didactic and instructional use. in mapping I tend to prefer Maxar.)
• order the layers so that:
  3: is Strava, on top of both:
  2: your favourite aerial photography layer,
  1: the Carto standard map,

identify a missing road

… See full entry

This is a follow-up to a pedrito1414 diary entry on Silvester 2020, which itself, at least from my point of view, was a follow-up to a IRC chat the two of us held on 2020-12-15.

From our chat Pete distilled a short list of nine more or less urgent “issues to address / aspects to improve”. We’re 8 months later and a few days ago I downloaded the online HOT projects summaries, to choose some statistics that might let us measure the process and how it has been improving. Of these 9 points I think that the easiest to measure are #6: “TM projects don’t always get closed out” and #2: “Tasking manager transparency - project creators”.

Let’s start from #6 about non closed projects.

The one thing that HOT is not doing, they are not systematically setting a limit to the projects they host nor directly run: of the 3009 still active projects, 2848 (94%) does not have a due date. for the 587 projects that have been created this year 2021, 460 (78%) does not have a due date. it is a small improvement. limiting this to directly HOT owned projects, it’s a total of 315, of which 297 (94%) do not have a due date. This year it’s 111 projects directly owned by HOT, 94 (85%) of which without due date.

I’ll mention the two top outliers, which did set a due date goal for all their projects: osm-libya (37 projects) and unique-mappers-network-nigeria (5 projects).

Without a due date, it’s easy to let things slip through your fingers, so no surprise there’s still 2 open projects from 2012, 24 from 2013, 27 from 2014, and a total of 1378 unclosed projects published before 2020.

The other issue, #2 about project creators, in my opinion it has to do with local involvement, or lack thereof.

… See full entry

the person writing this piece of diary is by now a middle aged man, in his 50s, still passionate about all that he does, or he simply won’t do it. for reasons which might be clear to a psychologist, but not to a mathematician like the person in question, he assumes the same passion and intellectual correctness in his colleagues, even in the face of proof to the contrary.

since 1989 he left his home town, never settled for longer than 8 years, now since October 2016 living in Panamá, speaking the language as any native latin speaker, that is with a decent linguistic awareness, and with an accent making him sound a mix of French, Colombian and obviously Southern Italian. but language is not the whole story, and regardless his “permanent resident” status, he doubts how not to feel as an alien here in Panamá.

I’ll now switch to writing in first person.

when it had become clear I would stay here for a longer spell, that was around the end of 2018, I looked for ways to collect people around the common OSM interest, I found the very sleepy Panama forum and I founded a Telegram group, and started monitoring new mappers coming to contribute to the map, inviting them to come to the group, and form a local community.

… See full entry

Every week we get an alert from the very dedicated OSMBC group, that a new issue is ready on the site. I’m in a country where internet connectivity is expensive, and slow, and unreliable, all at the same time, so I wish to avoid opening the web site with all of its javascript and css files, and only get the information without the site software.

I’ve not been able to make the above situation considered, or understood, but I could use one of the hints I received, namely to check the RSS feed for the newsletter. This feed contains one item per week, and the latest item is the one I want to receive in my mailbox. I first simply added the feed to my Android RSS client, but since every item contains links to pictures, refreshing the feed would again clog my slow limited connection.

What I did was to write a bash one-liner which will run every Sunday on a server hosted in Europe, to which I have access. The script grabs the RSS feed, extracts the first item, and sends it to me by email. Which is what I wanted, so I’m fine now.

Should anybody want to be included in the mail, I have no problem sending them any of the OSMWeekly translations. the only limitation is I can’t send email to google.com.

the script is more or less this:

wget -qO- "https://weeklyosm.eu/feed" | sed -n -e '1,/^\]\]><\/content:encoded>/p' | sed -n -e '/<content:encoded>/,/^\]\]/p' | sed -e 's/.*CDATA.//' -e 's/^\]\]><\/content:encoded>//' | grep -v '^<p class="wp-caption-text"><img loading="lazy" src=".*alt="lead picture"' | grep -v '<p><!-- place picture here --></p>' | mail -a "Content-Type: text/html" -s "OSM Weekly" email@example.com

Speaking of inclusion and participation, I do have an idea why nobody from rural Panama participates to OSM. Mind you, I’m not saying “almost nobody”, but “absolutely nobody” . . . the point is, as most Third World countries, Panama has a failing . . .

I hear voices calling to order, you say that calling Panama a “Third World country” is offensive? Oh, the very use of the concept? I should say “Developing Country”, right, nice, very politically correct. But calling it as you suggest, that’s not political correctness, it’s a lie, in my opinion it’s a lie needed when we don’t want to accept the fact, and to deal with it. So please let me insist:

. . . in this Third World economy, infrastructure suffers from low or absent public investment. We have here a long lasting rain season, from May to November, and in the rural area power fails generally a couple of days per week, may last a couple of hours, or more often until the next morning. In such condition, I still assumed I would be able to follow if not participate to the venueless SotM-2021, as I did last year from a hammock, on a 10 years old tablet, using solar power and a couple of batteries.

We are at this hotel, a beautiful place, in the middle of their own land recovery project, and because of the cloud cover their “high speed” link disappeared (one of the towers must have a power failure, not compensated by solar power), so we went to a different location within the recovery project, a higher located building where you put the phone on the roof, in a waterproof bag, and have “3.5G” from an antenna at 10km. With high humidity and low hanging clouds it may drop to 2.5G, “waiting for network” half of the time. This was less convenient than last year, mostly because I could not use my hammock.

… See full entry

why this page

I’ve found myself presenting my schema for scan/spam containment on Telegram to different people, writing more or less each time the same stuff. this page summarizes the policy I developed.

why a Telegram group?

it was the path of least resistance, I started simultaneously exploring the official Wiki pages, and the official forum for Panamá, and we missed a mailing list. after a fruitless attempt at creating one, I made a “temporary” Telegram group, which is still there while I don’t think a mailing list would be of any extra value, in particular considering the activity on the talk-latam mailing list, kept alive by the weekly link to the newsletter.

where do I use this?

the Comunidad OSM Panamá and the OpenStreetMapOffTopic are the two groups I manage thanks to a @MissRose_bot administrator, with similar settings.

what is the user experience?

a new user is offered a text telling them what is the group, where they need to click on a button within a short period of time, and inviting them to provide a short message for the people already in the group. in my experience, scammers tend to join several groups at the same time, and will not care to read this invitation, so they can be kicked from the group before they come back to it.

welcome text will disappear after they have been acknowledged by the new user, or when the new user is kicked from the group. the idea is not to clutter the group with technical messages. the bot will also delete all joining and leaving notifications, which I also consider cluttering.

join and leave notifications will be logged to a parallel channel, meant for administrators or for anybody wondering about how much work it is, to administer a Telegram group.

any administrative action like banning users will be taken in a parallel group, only meant to receive commands to the bot, again reducing clutter in the group.

what tasks for the administrator?

… See full entry

Andy Townsend wrote to me “we’d ask you to step back from your self-appointed role as “OSM gatekeeper” in Panama”

now, I have no idea how to stop caring for quality.

only option I see is to stop even looking at what is being added to the database.

someone please shows some support in public, or as said I am short of options.

https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=72158

une révision des éditions autour du carrefour Node: 6866858324.

c’est quoi, ce texte?

il s’agit de R.Q. qui je ne connais pas, qui à travers de la plateforme anonymisant Telegram m’a demandé mon avis autour de la zone du carrefour là. Le but n’est pas seul de améliorer les éditions indiquées, mais d’aider d’autres cartographes de la même zone.

quelles characteristiques a la zone la ?

la zone est rurale, avec construction récente, les bâtiments groupé et la terre agricole comprend des vergers.

les maisons ont une cour intérieur ou arrière, peut être un espace pour les animaux.

la photo Maxar est plus à jour que la photo Bing, mais la qualité Bing est superieure.

il y avait des routes, tracées par AI/Apple, basées peut être sur Maxar.

comment commencer ?

Tout d’abord, il faut aligner les deux sources, je vais le faire en dessinant un objet arbitraire, qui repose à plat sur le sol, bien visible sur le deux photos.

Faisant confiance au choix d’Apple pour Maxar, j’aligne Bing sur Maxar, c’est a dire je dessine l’objet sur Maxar puis je déplace Bing.

Ensuite, je sélectionne tous les points pas alignées avec les rues, (en JOSM: Ctrl-f, puis la sélection type:node user:XXXYYY), et les déplace pour qu’ils correspondent à la position des objets dans les deux images. Ça me solutionne presque tous les conflits entre rues et bâtiments.

qu’est ce que c’est notre tâche ?

À mon avis, l’extension des bâtiments a été systématiquement surestimé, la tâche est donc de répéter la sélection de l’un d’entre eux et de le réduire. nous pouvons le faire avec JOSM «Améliorer le mode de précision» (w).

là où les bâtiments partagent un nœud, je sépare le nœud de l’un des bâtiments, en sélectionnant bâtiment (clic) et nœud (Ctrl-clic) et en appuyant sur Alt-j.

comment le faire, ça ?

… See full entry

YMUP

In Panamá there’s a YouthMappers chapter, at the Universidad de Panamá. This YMUP Chapter started quite late working at its visibility here on OSM, so their first activities went mostly unnoticed. They do produce quite a bit of action and boast a remarkable access to various types of resources.

My goal in this diary page is to document the groups initial organized activities, and I’m writing in English because I hope this will help reach a wider public.

who’s who

Member composition is dynamic, but a few members are sort of “resident”, definitely the two mentors María Adames de Newbill and Humberto Smith, professors at the University of Panamá. The support by Esri is also a constant, through Manuel Quintero and Jean Felix Guevara. fanny16 is possibly also part of the Chapter through Esri, I don’t know. Two other mappers closely tied to the YMUP are Karen Martínez and Martitza Rodríguez, who have been president of the chapter respectively from October 2018 to October 2019 and from October 2019 to October 2020, confirmed for one more year.

Further membership can only be inferred based on early participation to the mapathons and HOT projects. Given the logs, few of their mappers participated to mapathons in more than one calendar year. As of January 2021, according to their mentor, it’s 12 people in the group. Here an incomplete and possibly incorrect list: fanny16, Marianne_pty, Tinago, Yarilpa, Nwalachosky18, Brenda Soto, Mafe96, Angel Ortega…

blog entries

The YouthMappers International web portal has a blog link, and I’ve collected the entries related to YMUP:

• camino de esperiencias
• Gis Day 2019
• smart campus

the projects

It’s mostly buildings that they map, and I’m focusing on that only.

2018 - Chiriquí

This was project 4917 on HOT, and this is JOSM with the buildings edited 2018-07-01/2018-07-31:

… See full entry

(work in progress)

“cosas que pasan”

he escrito estas notas pensando en las cosas que pasan, cuando un mapero principiante se encuentra con unas fotos aéreas y no tiene la preparación o el apoyo para interpretarla correctamente. los ejemplos que siguen son reales, y las soluciones son lo que haría yo. todo está basado en JOSM. espero que les sirva, o que me dejen algún comentario.

a veces es muy sencillo

hay áreas con edificaciones recientes, donde las calles son ortogonales, las casas todas paralelas a las calles, los árboles están poco desarrollados o quedan lejos de las casas, y todo es bien visible, como en Villa Belén al sur de Santiago de Veraguas, en Panamá:

pero las casas no son todas iguales, así que seguramente es más rápido dibuarlas una por una. sólo debes seleccionar dos puntos en la calles con que alinearse, activar el plugin “buildings_toos”, dibujar los elementos rectángulares, y unificarlos.

… See full entry

This is a review of a IRC meeting with the local Panamanian YouthMappers chapter at the Universidad de Panamá (YM-UP), where I have been trying to represent the interests of the OSM mapping community, with a specific focus on the quality of data in Panama.

The meeting was suggested by me, since I considered necessary to reach some understanding with the YM-UP chapter, and the date called by professor María Adames de Newbill, who, together with Prof. Humberto Smith, is formally an external support of the chapter. I had suggested using IRC, while the chapter and the university both use Zoom and meet in audio and video. My limited internet allowance in combination with the high local fees do not allow for that, but I also wanted to keep a log of the meeting, and review it with more time.

The meeting was on September 17th, more than two weeks have gone by, and as it seems, the meeting hasn’t served the purpose of establishing a stable communication. My other intention was to understand the dynamics of the chapter, and here is what I observed. The reader is invited to form their own idea, and comments will be welcome.

Youthmappers International, in the person of its director Patricia Solís says

[09:39]  DrPatriciaSolis: please encourage and support them - they are the future of OSM 
[09:39]  DrPatriciaSolis: I believe in these young people so much .... 
[09:39]  DrPatriciaSolis: we need to stay positive and encouraging 
[09:39]  DrPatriciaSolis: and help them not only technically but gain experience and leadership

I’ve never even been able to get a list of chapter members. I have commented on several changesets, and never got a reply (not even a “what do you mean by that?”), nor seen the comments processed and the mapping mistakes addressed.

… See full entry

this isn’t really about OSM, it’s about how to protect our privacy while on a OSM-centered Telegram group. I manage the Comunidad OSM Panamá Telegram group, and since the Covid-19 struck worldwide, also our group started to be targeted by several types of scammers and spammers, so I looked for options to contrast the events and shield the users of the group from the nuisance.

Initially, I participated in the osmallgroups Rose federation, but I came in disagreement with the most active admins in the federation, as to how aggressively ban potential scammers. My point of view was that, at the first hint of suspicion the person has nothing to do with OSM, with the area, with geography, and is only looking for sources of Telegram user contact details, the correct action is to ban immediately, possibly contacting them with the invitation to tell me that they are legitimate OSM mappers. This was not the shared opinion in that Rose federation, so I left and developed the following protocol.

Each new member gets a message inviting them to mention their OSM user name, and are warned this is an anti-spam measure. Failure to comply results in ban within the first few hours. I then privately write to check the intentions of the user. Up to now I have not had a single false positive. In at least two occasions I saw the person joining and immediately leaving the group.

To reduce the impact of my instructions to Rose in the group, I use a “federation” and a parallel group, where I issue the /fban command to Rose. Rose reacts to that and removes the user from all other federated groups, that includes the Comunidad OSM Panamá. All that people in the real group will see is “Rose removed user Xxx”, something that happens without the Rose avatar. Soon after, this becomes “Rose removed DELETED”.

The other detail that needs to be mentioned, that’s Rose’s ability to log events to a channel. I need that in order to have the necessary user details to invoke the /fban command.

… See full entry

En el grupo LatAm estaban hablando de varias amenazas al proyecto, y por mi parte lo que me parece un riesgo real, es la falta de sentido de comunidad, y las contribuciones por maperos que no respetan la propiedad intelectual ajena. A mi manera de ver, son dos aspectos distintos que cuando se junten en la misma persona, pueden causar un daño real a la comunidad OSM.

Me pregunto, sin tener respuesta, cómo prevenir el mapeo de fuente con licencia no compatible con OSM? Digo y subrayo, prevenir en el sentido de evitar que el hecho se concretice.

No tengo respuesta pues si es cierto que he desarrollado una práctica, finalizada a la formación de comunidad y al monitoreo de mapeo “copia ilegal”, igual no creo que mi práctica sea suficiente ni para la primera ni para la segunda cosa.

Lo que por mi parte tengo, es un pequeño script que corre cada lunes y que me envía una alerta si hay actividad en Panamá por maperos con menos de 7 días de experiencia. Reviso sus ediciones, entro en el sistema openstreetmap.org y envío un correo interno a los nuevos maperos, en forma de saludo e invito a unirse al grupo Telegram Panamá.

Esto, por supuesto, con el objetivo “formación de comunidad”, y claro, de las 10 invitaciones quizás 2 sean aceptadas, si es mucho. Pero es que muchos de los nuevos maperos no vuelven a mapear, así que este 20% quizás sea un porcentaje muy alto.

Otro monitoreo lo hago sin ninguna garantía de regularidad, o sea, de vez en cuando si tengo tiempo y ganas, miro en el historial osm buscando cambios por agradecer o por comentar. Pero ya estamos entrando en la sección “corrección”, dejando la sección “prevención”.

… See full entry

Cape Town

“Gracias” a la crisis global causada por el SARS-CoV-2, la reunión “State of the Map 2020” no se ha podido desarrollar en forma presencial, sino fue convertida en reunión virtual.

Me gusta empezar resumiendo unos comentarios en la página de retroalimentación: la conferencia online ha permitido la participación a personas que normalmente no hubieran podido acudir; es una gran manera para ampliar el acceso y deberíamos repetir la experiencia; por cuanto siempre deberíamos intentar encontrarnos en persona, el acudir virtualmente debería volverse costumbre. También me gusta hacer referencia a un artículo en lemonde.fr, que describe el desafío de realizar virtualmente todos aspectos de una conferencia científica en persona.

No tengo a la mano las estadísticas para comparar la participación este año con la de los años pasados, pero por cuanto me concierne, la forma virtual me ha permitido participar a la conferencia, a costo prácticamente cero, cuando la forma presencial me lo hacía ni más ni menos, pues … entre imposible e impensable. He aprovechado mucho de las charlas, he podido poner preguntas que han sido consideradas, y he tenido la oportunidad de comentar sobre detalles conectados con las charlas, a través de los canales digitales puestos a disposición, todo desde una ubicación rural en Panamá, con una conexión internet de 128kbit/s.

desafíos técnicos

Mi conexión internet me puso en condición de no poder seguir sino las charlas en audio. Esto ha funcionado perfectamente, exceptuado por pocos puntos que se podrían mejorar.

… See full entry

Como comunidad OSM le exigimos a organizaciones externas a OSM que sigan unas líneas guía (osm.wiki/Organised_Editing_Guidelines). Bueno, quizás exigir es un poco excesiva como palabra, pero sí se han puesto unas líneas guía y se sugiere conocerlas, considerarlas, y luego respetarlas y si acaso mejorarlas.

Lo que me deja “basito” (es palabra toscana, y no sé en castellano como se diga, algo entre aturdido/encantado/perplejo) es que de cuantas organizaciones se apoyan a OSM, justamente HOT, quizás por llevar en su nombre la ‘O’ de OpenStreetMap, parece desconocer las otra ‘O’ de Organised Editing Guidelines, o por lo menos parece sentirse, HOT, en derecho de ignorarlas. Mi impresión es que también del lado de la comunidad OSM haya la percepción como si HOT fuera parte de OSM, y no una NGO externa capaz de influir sobre el funcionamiento interno.

… See full entry