This is a cross-post of https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2014-May/069772.html

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We have more and more organizations and businesses mapping in OSM. Multiple organizations have been conducting paid editing in Europe and the US. This generally comes to light after complaints are made - with the company usually not identifying who they are, what their goals are, and what they want, beforehand. There have also been difficulties determining what has been mapped on behalf of an organization.

We will likely see more of this type of editing in the future, and while not necessarily bad, there are differences between it and normal editing. Recent events in a project similar to OpenStreetMap - Wikipedia - have demonstrated that the participation of organizations in data editing can occasionally lead to misunderstandings or disharmony in the project, particularly where a lack of transparency is involved.

For this reason the DWG is considering if it is necessary to issue guidelines for organizational editing. Some previous discussion is at http://lists.osm.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2013-November/002344.html

There are some activities we do not want to cover in the guidelines

• Unorganized editing by employees, e.g. a shop owner adding their shop or nearby details to the map

• Editors mapping in response to a contest or similar where the contest organizer does not have the power to require them to edit

• Individuals who, on their own accord, decide to participate in an organised effort or challenge, like local mapping parties, Mapathons, HOT projects, etc

Some possible guideline requirements could involve

… See full entry

On the schedule for the Friday and on Saturday morning was the kick off party, registration, let’s map!/OpenStreetMap in your organization sessions, and coffee break.

Kick off party

Thanks to a delayed flight I ended up going to the Mapbox Garage. The entrance is on the rear, so the taxi driver was confused getting there. Since I was there early, I helped with the setup, and schlepping the alcohol over from the store nearby.

The party got too loud, but I was able to catch up with a few people. We ended up running out of bottled water, and the taps were inconvenient. I walked back with a few others staying at the Washington Plaza hotel.

Saturday morning

Registration

Registration went smoothly. Conference t-shirt just said State of the Map, not State of the Map US, which seemed odd. I think most of the conference people handling registration were paid staff, which was a difference.

Welcome

There was a welcome talk which I thought was rather good at the time, but seems it wasn’t very memorable, because I can’t actually remember much of what was said!

The conference had over 500 people check in at registration, a big growth from the 2009 SOTM-US which had about 50 people.

First session, coffee break

I ended up talking with the people from Amazon for all of this session, so missed the talks. I’m hopeful that they’ll be able to commit some EC2 credits to do some dev work and performance testing. Of course, I was the same way after previous conferences and nothing came of it.

It doesn’t sound like they’re willing to commit to helping any osm.org infrastructure with resources in any ongoing manner.

Right now the main OpenStreetMap.org stylesheet uses Unifont as a fallback font to render Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) characters, as well as any other characters not present in the DejaVu font. Unifont is mainly designed to support all characters, and is not designed to look good.

I’m looking at Droid Sans Fallback, a free font developed for Android, and evaluating if it would be a better fallback font than Unifont. Because I don’t read Chinese, Japanese or Korean, I could use help.

I have prepared a demo at http://tile.paulnorman.ca/demo/fonts.html with three layers: conventional OSM.org, tiles without any fallback font, and tiles using Droid Fallback as a fallback font.

What I would like is for people to look at the difference between the conventional OSM.org and Droid Fallback tiles and see which is easier to read for the CJK glyphs. The tiles without any fallback font can be used to find areas where DejaVu doesn’t have glyphs and the fallback font is being used.

Some examples

Japanese cities: http://tile.paulnorman.ca/demo/fonts.html#9/35.443/138.247

Japanese train stations: http://tile.paulnorman.ca/demo/fonts.html#16/36.415/139.325

Korean cities: http://tile.paulnorman.ca/demo/fonts.html#9/37.25/127.22

Chinese tourist attraction: http://tile.paulnorman.ca/demo/fonts.html#15/39.94/116.48

Please keep in mind that

• My server is not nearly as powerful as tile.osm.org, so renders slower and has less cached data
• Only Asia is loaded on my server
• The data is a couple of days old and isn’t being updated

I would like some feedback on if Unifont or Droid Sans Fallback looks better. Please keep in mind that I don’t read the languages being rendered.

I had to write some osm2pgsql command lines for benchmarking recently. This is how it feels

Just a preview of what I’m working on right now

Today I surveyed both the new Westbound Port Mann Bridge and the north portion of the SFPR. Either of these would of been a lengthy trip in itself, combined they took two hours of driving to get traces and I still didn’t get everything surveyed.

I used my camera to take photos with an interval of 8 seconds and my eTrex 20 sampling at 1 Hz, then correlated everything in JOSM.

I got off at 152 Street and went along 104 Avenue to cross over at 160th. I drove around the south side of the forest on the slope before heading over to join up with the SFPR, 104 Avenue and 176 Street Extension intersection. Little did I know how many times I would be going through here.

I then headed south to Highway 15, 96 Avenue and Golden Ears Way, heading down Golden Ears to do a U-turn in a side street. I then went straight on to the SFPR through the 104 Avenue intersection. From here it was an easy drive on new quiet pavement with no chance to turn off or turn around until King Road and 138 Street. I was struck by how few cars there were on the road. There were occasional trucks but I didn’t see another car going my direction. The view was rather nice in parts

… See full entry

After some technical and legal work, I now have a number of imagery layers hosted on a rented server.

These layers cover from Vancouver to Hope in 20cm or better and Lions Bay to Pemberton as 40cm or better. 10cm imagery is available for Vancouver, Richmond, Ladner, West Delta, the North Shore, Whistler and Surrey.

Most of the imagery was taken in 2009, but Surrey is from 2011.

I’ve prepared a page with links to the imagery and Potlatch2 and JOSM URLs at http://imagery.paulnorman.ca/tiles/about.html

Some layers may be slow initially loading at high zooms as they may need to fetch from a remote server.

An example of two layers from there and Bing is http://imagery.paulnorman.ca/tiles/surreyexample.png. Starting in the top left going clockwise the layers are Surrey2011, DataBC bc_gvrd_east_2009 and Bing.

Note: This post is a duplicate of a talk-ca mailing list post

After nearly a month on a 4-drive RAID0 array…

time ~/osm/osmosis-0.40.1/bin/osmosis --rb planet-120401.osm.pbf --lp interval=60 --wd database=osm user=openstreetmap password=openstreetmap allowIncorrectSchemaVersion=yes 2>&1 | tee apidb.log
5-May-2012 4:27:02 PM org.openstreetmap.osmosis.core.Osmosis run
INFO: Osmosis Version 0.40.1
5-May-2012 4:27:02 PM org.openstreetmap.osmosis.core.Osmosis run
INFO: Preparing pipeline.
5-May-2012 4:27:02 PM org.openstreetmap.osmosis.core.Osmosis run
INFO: Launching pipeline execution.

...

1-Jun-2012 8:36:48 PM org.openstreetmap.osmosis.core.Osmosis run
INFO: Pipeline complete.
1-Jun-2012 8:36:48 PM org.openstreetmap.osmosis.core.Osmosis run
INFO: Total execution time: 2347785558 milliseconds.

real    39129m46.249s
user    1418m52.368s
sys     415m9.705s

Surrey, BC is holding an Open Data Hackathon on Sunday November 20th. More
details are at http://www.surrey.ca/city-services/10036.aspx

I will be attending and looking at writing some new conversion scripts.

Does anyone have suggestions for any printed OSM materials to bring?