It is a long time I have written a diary. One of the most important aspects of opendata/opensource project is building a community. In order to build a community, we have to reach out to new volunteers contributing to the project.

Post State of the Map Asia 2018, the important communication channel of Openstreetmap India community has been telegram. Personally, I have installed telegram on my mobile for Openstreetmap communication.

Both India and Kerala communities have been using the telegram group for all the discussions. One of the advantages I have seen with telegram conversations are:

1. More people are involved. (Unlike mailing list or forum.)
2. Getting a reply is faster.
3. Frequency of discussions has increased a lot.

On the disadvantage side, indexing or looking for a previous discussion is not easy.

After knowing about the telegram group, I used to send personal messages to OSM contributors to join OSM India or Kerala telegram communication channels. But this was a very small scale. In order to notify new users about the OSM community, another effort was to list all the OSM India/Kerala entities to the OSM community index. But, it was not much helpful. It was not catching eyeballs. I have tried RSS feeds too, but the area of selection can’t be India.

In order to build community, I have been looking for a welcoming tool for the past couple of years. Few options were to use the tools built by Belgium and the Italian OpenStreetMap community. Even OSMF local community is trying out to build something similar. What I was looking for was something similar to Twinkle in Wikimedia projects. I have used twinkle to build a good community in English Wikipedia.

1.Indian Roads
2.Indian Railways
3.Education in India

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This was my first SOTM conference. Thanks, OSMF which selected me for a full scholarship.

Visa was process was simple. Since it was well documented by Dorothea(Thank you so much for all the support). I had my flight from Bangalore in 19th early morning. I have reached on 19th noon in the guest house.

HOT Summit

That afternoon and the next day I could attend HOT Summit. On Thursday, I could attend Youthmapper talk, HOT Voting member’s forum. On Friday morning, I attended a talk from Mikel, talk on HDX, healthsites and Inaware. On Friday afternoon, I could attend Impact initiatives,letsgirlsmap talk, Mapping Indigenous Communities talk etc.

I had met many staffs from HOT to tell thank you for the help they have done for India disaster response mapping. Russel, Geoffery Jeesica, Rebecca, Ramya and Tyler. From HOT Board, I could meet and had a small chat with Trudy Hope. I am happy that people like Hope is there in the board. Ramya helped me to get stats required for my presentation. Thank you Ramya.
I had also chance to meet Youthmappers team. I met Patricia and Marcela to understand how youthmappers works.

Key takeaway from HOT Summit is that

1. In India, we need to start a few youthmappers chapters.
2. From India community, we need few people HOT working groups.

State of the Map 2019

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Mapping Efforts

Road improvement Coverage

As on today in Openstreetmap, 16 lakhs km of road length mapped out of 56 lakhs km of roads in India.In 2018, we crossed Japan and Canada in total kilometres of roads by country in Openstreetmap. Starting of the year OSM had 13.66 lakhs kms or road length in India. Roads are mapped manually at the rate of 2 lakhs kilometer per year. OSM India would take 20 years to completely map full road network in India (if it is done manually).

National Highway and State Highway Mapping

Every month egazette notifications are monitored by Openstreetmap community. For every new NH announced it will be mapped in OSM. We re-use national highway mapping in Wikipedia and Wikimedia maps are powered by OpenStreetMap. Community has started mapping of state highways in all states. One of main problem community is that lack of data. Out of 36 States/UT we have data only for 22 . For other states, state highway data is not even available in a list format. About 1.5 lakh people die on Indian roads every year. We need better road data to plan, monitor, and manage infrastructure more effectively. In India a death occurs every 3.5 minutes due to road accidents

Disaster Response Mapping

OSM community was part of disaster response mapping. Community worked with an organisation called Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOTOSM) to map disaster affected areas. Floods in Kerala, Cyclone Gaja in Tamil Nadu, Landslides in Coorg, Karnataka and flash floods in Nagaland, all were devastating. More than 3000 volunteers from across the world were part of 2018 India disaster response mapping. About 25,000 kms and 5,00,000 buildings were remotely mapped through disaster response mapping. Please try mapping here

Indic Language Maps status

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India has a road network of over 56,03,293 kilometres(56 lakhs kilometres) as on 31 March 2016, the second largest road network in the world. Openstreetmap has about 15 lakhs of road length mapped in India.

What percentage of the population can reach the nearest hospital in 20 minutes?

What percentage of the population can be rescued by fire and rescue department in case of emergency in 30 minutes ?

We should place our hospitals and fire and rescue stations with the support of spatial data analysis.

For that, we need data, Open Data !!!

Data from https://metrics.improveosm.org/

• Q3 2016 - 11,71,820 Kms
• Q3 2017 - 13,02,207 Kms
• Q3 2018 - 15,05,239 Kms

Last one year OSM has mapped about 2,03,032 Kms (from Q3 2017 to Q3 2018). Previous one year OSM has mapped about 1,30,387 Kms (from Q3 2016 to Q3 2017).

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As of today, interactive (Kartographer) maps no longer display in the language of the territory mapped; instead, you’ll read them in the content language of the wiki where they appear—or in the language their authors specify (subject to availability of multilingual data). In addition, mapframe, the feature that automatically embeds dynamic maps right on a wiki page, is now live on most Wikipedias that lacked the feature. (Not included in the mapframe launch are nine Wikipedias [1] that use the stricter version of Flagged Revisions).

If you you’re new to mapframe, this Kartographer help page [2] shows how to get started putting dynamic maps on your pages. If you’d like to read more about map internationalization: this Special Update [3] explains the feature and its limiations; this post [4] and this one [5] describe the uses of the new parameter, lang=”xx”, which lets you specify a map’s language. And here are some example maps [6] to illustrate the new capabilities.

These features could not have been created without the generous programming contributions and advice of our many map-loving volunteers, including Yurik, Framawiki, Naveenpf, TheDJ, Milu92, Astirlin, Evad37, Pigsonthewing, Mike Peel, Eran Roz, Gareth and Abbe98. My apologies to anyone I’ve missed.

The Map Improvements 2018 [7] project wraps up at the end of June, so please give internationalized maps and mapframe a try soon and give us your feedback on the project talk page [8]. We’re listening.

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Thank you OSM for powering Indic maps on Wikimedia.

https://test2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indic_Maps

A lot of name tags to be added now in OSM for better language maps.

Beta version of multilingual Wikimedia maps

1.Kannada:- https://maps-beta.wmflabs.org/?lang=kn#8/46.830/8.152

2.Hindi :- https://maps-beta.wmflabs.org/?lang=hi#8/46.830/8.152

3.Tamil:- https://maps-beta.wmflabs.org/?lang=ta#8/46.830/8.152

4.Bengali :- https://maps-beta.wmflabs.org/?lang=bn#8/46.830/8.152

5.Malayalam :- https://maps-beta.wmflabs.org/?lang=ml#8/46.830/8.152 [As usual has rendering issue]

1. Go to overpass link :- http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/mRF
2. Click Export and take level0 editor [About 20mb]
3. Browse and add each wikidata qid and upload wikidata = Q25203056
4. QIDs of districts can be found in this link :- http://tinyurl.com/jbkfn6p

District Map in English Wikipedia:- here

District Map in Malayalam Wikipedia:- here

Guide

This something which we have been talking for years ;). Feels so happy that it is ready now.

Maps can be displayed in Wikipedia from OSM relation. Just done it for NH1

Wikipedia —> Wikidata —> OSM

How often OSM updates Wikidata id with Wikipedia tag ?

Much awaited National Waterway bill has been passed in both houses on Indian parliament. National Waterways Act,2016 has been published in gazette. It time to map all 111 National Waterways across India.

Source:Wikimedia Commons.

Mapping

1. National Waterways wiki page :- osm.wiki/Waterways_(India)
2. Overpass relation :- http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/fm6

English Wikipedia Article created @ List of National Waterways in India

Maritime India Summit 2016, first of its kind is going happen in Mumbai from April 14-16,2016. There is lot focus on inland waterways

Opendata #OSM Feels so happy… we have almost done with mapping State Highways in Kerala. Lot of learning how our PWD department calculates the length of the Road. Got to know how much State Highway is on paper and how much is actually present. This effort started 20 January 2011‎, almost 5 years. Thanks a ton Manu Varkey for joining SH mapping.

Why it started ? When creating an article in Wikipedia “List of State Highways in Kerala” we wanted map to show up the State Highway. We have tried contacting Kerala PWD. That effort was fruit less.

Link for state highways. osm.wiki/State_Highways_%28Kerala%29

If you want download gpx traces Kerala SH. http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/9Ck

If you like mapping Kerala in Openstreet Map you can sign up here. osm.wiki/Kerala