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Organizing OpenStreetMap mapping parties

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Re: Organizing OpenStreetMap mapping parties

#51

Post by sp8962 »

nakedrobot2 wrote: post #43

I went to a State of the Map conference in Antwerp last year. For me it was fascinating, and not my normal type of crowd. A couple of things stuck out to me though. It reminded me of the saying about libertarians: "Libertarians are like house cats. Completely dependent on a system they neither understand nor appreciate and fiercely confident of their own independence." I love everything about openstreetmap, but it is…

First OSM existed and was already quite good many years before we got access to Bing imagery (2010). Undoubtedly there was a big boost in some types of mapping due to a reasonable quality global imagery source being available, mainly buildings, but it isn't as if we couldn't have continued without it.

Since then a lot of things have changed and the global imagery layers (currently Bing, ESRI and mapbox, all three using Maxar for a significant part) are, in developed parts of the world, mainly just used as a lesser quality fallback. As an example where I'm making right now, I'm using state level, a federal and a global (non-Bing) imagery.

Re: Organizing OpenStreetMap mapping parties

#52

Post by aendruk »

sp8962 wrote: post #49

I need to quote myself on this thread https://twitter.com/sp8962/status/1534079141640904705 Steve hasn't been a relevant force in OSM for more than a decade and if you want to do OSM a favour, point people to the editor on openstreetmap.org, not any of the mobile or "simplified" editing apps.

What do you recommend to beginners for mapping in the field? Walk around with a laptop? Or just notes on paper for later data entry?

In the mapping events I’ve attended a clear goal was to onboard people into contributing casually and frequently as they go about their everyday lives.

(For context I can’t see the linked Twitter thread and have no idea why you’re talking about Steve)

Re: Organizing OpenStreetMap mapping parties

#53

Post by mistrial9 »

aendruk wrote: post #52
sp8962 wrote: post #49

I need to quote myself on this thread https://twitter.com/sp8962/status/1534079141640904705 Steve hasn't been a relevant force in OSM for more than a decade and if you want to do OSM a favour, point people to the editor on openstreetmap.org, not any of the mobile or "simplified" editing apps.

What do you recommend to beginners for mapping in the field? Walk around with a laptop? Or just notes on paper for later data entry? In the mapping events I’ve attended a clear goal was to onboard people into contributing casually and frequently as they go about their everyday lives. (For context I can’t see the linked Twitter thread and have no idea why you’re talking about Steve)

the iD editor https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ID

Re: Organizing OpenStreetMap mapping parties

#54

Post by sp8962 »

aendruk wrote: post #52
sp8962 wrote: post #49

I need to quote myself on this thread https://twitter.com/sp8962/status/1534079141640904705 Steve hasn't been a relevant force in OSM for more than a decade and if you want to do OSM a favour, point people to the editor on openstreetmap.org, not any of the mobile or "simplified" editing apps.

What do you recommend to beginners for mapping in the field? Walk around with a laptop? Or just notes on paper for later data entry? In the mapping events I’ve attended a clear goal was to onboard people into contributing casually and frequently as they go about their everyday lives. (For context I can’t see the linked Twitter thread and have no idea why you’re talking about Steve)

The easiest thing people can do these days is to take georeferenced photographs with their phones, best with a photo app that will record the direction the phone was pointing, for example OpenCamera on Android. Then take their time and then add the information either with iD (the javascript based editor on openstreetmap.org) on a desktop (or JOSM if they are savy enough), or on either of the mobile editors, but most importantly sitting down in peace and quiet.

While direct entry (on the phone) is what I would do and would recommend for anybody that already knows the ropes, it is going to be overwhelming for a beginner.

PS: I was commenting on the whole thread, and if you look through it you will see Steve mentioned as the OSM savant.

Re: Organizing OpenStreetMap mapping parties

#55

Post by aendruk »

mistrial9 wrote: post #53
aendruk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you recommend to beginners for mapping in the field? Walk around with a laptop? Or just notes on paper for later data entry? In the mapping events I’ve attended a clear goal was to onboard people into contributing casually and frequently as they go about their everyday lives. (For context I can’t see the linked Twitter thread and have no idea why you’re talking about Steve)

the iD editor https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ID

That’s great to hear. The OSM website hides the Edit link on my phone and I’d inferred that iD must therefore not be sufficiently usable on mobile.

Re: Organizing OpenStreetMap mapping parties

#56

Post by orblivion »

I'm trying my hand at organizing mapping events. In fact I'm doing one tomorrow by coincidence. The first few, I agonized over making sure everything was prepared, I have an agenda for how I think things will go.

It's pointless. People are doing their own thing. One guy came with a phone without an Internet connection so we couldn't even edit the same area without saving over each other. He had to upload later and deal with the conflicts.

At least, it's pointless for me. I guess I need a firmer hand or something. Or maybe it's because I'm not in a heavy population center (it's questionable that I could even start an OSM community here) and I'm at the mercy of whoever I can even get to show up. In Delhi I'm sure it's different.

At this point I'm just going to aim for regular events, minimal planning on my part, less stress and more energy for more events. We'll figure it out as we go, as we end up doing anyway. Tomorrow is my first event with that approach, we'll see how it goes. I only have two other people showing up, so it should be simple.

Re: Organizing OpenStreetMap mapping parties

#57

Post by thfuran »

thriftwy wrote: post #48
komali2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> including how he doesn't think OSM will be relevant for much longer once someone manages to develop a mapping project into their self-driving cars As someone who intends to never drive again, this is very funny to me. Cars are very obviously not the future of human transport, self driving or otherwise. They take up an absurd amount of space.

Self driving car can drive itself to a remote garage when not needed, and return back to your doorstep when needed - just press a button in your smartphone app five minutes prior. So they will stop taking space as soon they FSD.

That seems like it'd do little to decrease the amount of space cars take up: It doesn't decrease the amount of traffic (actually, empty cars driving around when they would've been parked before increases traffic), so it doesn't decrease the amount of roads. It doesn't decrease the amount of people driving to businesses, so it doesn't decrease the need for non-residential parking. It probably slightly decreases the footprint of residential parking by making it higher density, though it still must exist nearby and many people are probably still going to want garage space.

Re: Organizing OpenStreetMap mapping parties

#58

Post by ilaksh »

I wonder if it would be possible to use a fine-tuned LLaVA 1.6 along with the GPS/phone orientation and reference tape measure etc. in images collected via app. I think if you can cover from multiple directions and aggregate the data effectively it could be pretty efficient.

Not saying it's easy but I want to believe that a fine tuned open vision model can do a lot.

Or just use Claude or GPT 4 vision.

Re: Organizing OpenStreetMap mapping parties

#59

Post by contrapunctus »

komali2 wrote: post #4

I'm really curious how this person got codeberg pages working, I still haven't managed to get a codeberg page deployed. I thought it required a 3rd party server, like their actions seem to. Also: > It's easy to pick a proprietary network like Telegram or an unsustainable one like Matrix, What's unsustainable about Matrix? I've really enjoyed running our community on Matrix.

> I'm really curious how this person got codeberg pages working, I still haven't managed to get a codeberg page deployed. I thought it required a 3rd party server, like their actions seem to.

Hi, author here. It doesn't need a 3rd party server - it's all hosted in Codeberg Git repos. Here's a guide - https://codeberg.page/

> What's unsustainable about Matrix? I've really enjoyed running our community on Matrix.

Many of us in the Delhi OpenStreetMap community are associated with projects like the Free Software Community of India, and run public instances of federated services, including Matrix and XMPP.

It has been our experience that XMPP has a dramatically lower server resource footprint than Matrix. We've actually had to close down a public Matrix service because it was economically unsustainable in this sense.

Re: Organizing OpenStreetMap mapping parties

#60

Post by ikawe »

sp8962 wrote: post #49

I need to quote myself on this thread https://twitter.com/sp8962/status/1534079141640904705 Steve hasn't been a relevant force in OSM for more than a decade and if you want to do OSM a favour, point people to the editor on openstreetmap.org, not any of the mobile or "simplified" editing apps.

> if you want to do OSM a favour, point people to the editor on openstreetmap.org, not any of the mobile or "simplified" editing apps.

If you want to make the time to take photos and take notes, and sit down later and enter them on your computer, go for it. Likely that's a faster way to do a larger entry. In particular, I haven't seen a mobile app that does a great job of polygon geometry editing — a mouse really helps.

But I don't think it's a problem to do simple POI entry or attribute updates from a simpler mobile app like "Go Mapp!!". I think like many things, the best mapping tool is "the one that you have with you".

Am I missing something?

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