It’s been a while since I last wrote about iD’s development and thought it would be a nice idea to make this a more regular thing in addition to the regular online community chats.

Recently, there have been some new features implemented that are worth showcasing, including several great ways that community members are stepping up to contribute to iD.

iD v2.30 release

In his Google Summer of Code project, Mattia Pezzotti has implemented support for street level imagery from Panoramax. Panoramax is a relatively new completely free and open-source alternative to other street level imagery providers such as Mapillary, KartaView or Bing Streetside. It even includes features like a federated system architecture and the possibility to self-host the server software if you need to. Check the project out on panoramax.fr to read more and how to contribute your own pictures.

You can read more about the Google Summer of Code project’s progress in Mattia’s personal blog. It’s been excellent to mentor Mattia through his project, and I think he is well set up to make more contributions in the future.

Other than that, the latest release also includes the ability to directly start iD with a note selected (e.g. #id=note/1234), and a bunch of bug fixes. Head over to the full changelog to read more about the details.

id-tagging-schema: new contributing guidelines

The tagging schema has also seen a lot of updates (see latest changelog if you’re interested), but the biggest change there is that we now have new documentation for how the tagging schema is maintained. The guidelines explain how the repository is managed from a content point of view; for example about what requirements a tag must fulfil to be included as a preset. The second new document is about how to contribute and support the project. We already have two volunteers who help in the co-maintainer role: Tobias and Kyle. There is still space for a few more people helping out. If you’re interested to helping moderating issues or being a co-maintainer of the repository, please contact me.

Coming Up

The next times to meet are the community chat on September 3, 15:00 UTC online, as well as at the State of the Map where I’m going to hold a talk about the bigger picture of the future of iD. There will also be the possibility to chat about these ideas in a bit more detail in a BoF session at the conference, as well as in one of the upcoming online community chats.

Another thing I’m planning of starting to work on in the coming weeks is the long anticipated building mapping mode in iD, with the goal to make this common mapping task more efficient and enjoyable.