The L.A. County import team has brought in 1.3 million buildings and counting. The effort has been a large undertaking. It couldn’t have been done without help from Mapbox, the Los Angeles Times graphics/data teams, government cooperation and the 100+ contributor/volunteers. You should vote for our effort in the OpenStreetMap Awards. You can hop into the import by following this guide and picking a task from here.

Anyway, time to showcase the weird screenshots I’ve saved through the import.

Batman landing

This is near LAX. It appeared sometime in the last four years.

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Part of our series of diaries sharing experiences on the ongoing LA Building Import into OpenStreetMap. Last month, we talked about the tools. Two weeks ago it was about the data. Today it’s about the local community.

Omar Ureta and I presented the L.A. County building import to the US State of the Map last weekend. We’ve imported more than 1 million buildings. And we’ve done that with the help of Mapbox, my employer the Los Angeles Times and the local community.

Organizing the community has been very time consuming. But it’s also been very important.

Before starting the import we got a list of local mappers with a lot of edits in L.A. County. Then we messaged users asking for feedback and involvement. This took a while, because the OSM website only allows us to send one message to one user at a time. I’ve spent many hours copying/pasting markdown files to users in the hope that they’d get involved or reach out with feedback.

Not everyone wrote back, but those that did offered helpful advice and interest.

It’s been weird to hold all these profiles in my head. A local gentleman who’s interested in fixing rural roads before the import. A woman in the Bay Area who’s a Dodgers fan. A retired tech journalist from Santa Monica who has come to every meetup. A lawyer-turned GIS student. A German programmer two hours to L.A.’s north. And many, many more.

We post new events on MaptimeLA’s meetup page. I message folks through the OSM website. We email. The county’s GIS blog has promoted a few of our events.

Here are the import-related events we’ve hosted so far:

• March 31 - JOSM training at Arup in Downtown L.A.
• April 2 - Import party at the L.A. Times downtown
• April 14 - Import party at Arup
• May 21 - Import party at the Times
• June 5 - Import party at Angel City Brewery in Little Tokyo/Arts District
• June 25 - Import party at the Times
• July 7 - 3D modeling training session using OSM data from the import

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Just a quick post here:

Maning Sambale already posted about the meta data added by Los Angeles Building Import. We’ve imported more than 1.2 million buildings and we were flattered to talk about our work at last weekend’s State of the Map. You can see our slides here.

But what I find particularly interesting is how this building data stacks up against other city imports. These maps show any polygon tagged as building=value. Feedback welcome.

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Hello, OpenStreetMap!

I’m about to write a post covering the community-building effort behind the Great L.A. County Building Import.

But first, an introduction is due.

My name is Jon Schleuss and I’m a reporter and graphic artist at the Los Angeles Times. I spend a lot of time making maps and analyzing data to find better ways to tell new and different stories.

I’ve been at the Times for about three years now. I’ve built maps showing where L.A. County’s homeless live, where L.A. City’s soft-story buildings are, where you can afford to rent or own based on your income and where the dirtiest streets are.

Before moving to the big city I lived briefly in Seattle working at the Seattle Times there. I’m from Arkansas and put in time at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and KUAF 91.3 FM, an NPR-affiliated station in Fayetteville.

techlady and Data411 introduced me to editing OpenStreetMap in 2015 and I’ve been a fiend every since.

My hope is to strengthen the southern California community, using the Times as a labratory and promoter of open-source work.

When I’m not mapping or at work I’m making pies and reading, programming or at the racetrack.

More to come soon!