[HN Gopher] Organizing OpenStreetMap mapping parties
___________________________________________________________________
Organizing OpenStreetMap mapping parties
Author : pabs3
Score : 168 points
Date : 2024-04-12 06:46 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (contrapunctus.codeberg.page)
(TXT) w3m dump (contrapunctus.codeberg.page)
| globular-toast wrote:
| This is a great effort. People just doing something good for the
| community. No expectation of reward or seeking rent on the
| output. Just doing the right thing.
|
| Compare with Google who use their monopoly position to keep
| amassing data which they keep for themselves. Imagine all the
| effort that's gone into working for Google for free that could
| have been put into OSM. If you work on tools for allowing people
| to do that you should be ashamed.
|
| On a different note it's funny to think back to the start of OSM.
| It was created in the UK because all the data from our beloved
| national mapping department, all paid for by us, the public, of
| course, was not available for use in any way by emerging digital
| technology like GPS etc. After waiting for too long people
| decided we'll just build our own. Now we have one of the richest
| datasets in existence and it's free. There's still a ton of stuff
| locked up in Ordnance Survey, though, and can't be released
| because reasons.
|
| It's also fun to think how much fun OSM was back then. We were
| literally walking round neighbourhoods collecting GPS data in
| completely blank parts of the map. Satellite imagery came later
| but can't help thinking it's a way things becoming "better" made
| them less fun.
| kleene_op wrote:
| This. OSM is a gold mine.
|
| It deserves all the praises it gets.
| cjk2 wrote:
| I wouldn't call Ordinance Survey beloved. Their leisure maps
| have been a rotting liability for the last decade at least.
| Totally untrustworthy for hikers/walkers.
|
| I only discovered OSM after getting shafted on a public
| footpath which was completely destroyed and had been for years
| with a river running through it and a mud bank.
| wcedmisten wrote:
| I'm mostly an "armchair mapper", but I actually find adding
| details from satellite imagery to be really fun. It's kind of
| like a nerdy version of paint-by-number.
| Hrnrurj wrote:
| It would be handy to give street mappers some sort of defense
| tool from dogs. Like air horn, sticks or maybe peper spray. India
| has a huge problem with packs of wild street dogs, that regularly
| attack and kill people. It is dangerous to roam on streets you do
| not know very well.
| jraph wrote:
| Seems horrible. That would not be specific to street mappers
| though, would it?
| Hrnrurj wrote:
| They mostly attack small kids, so sadly no.
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop creating accounts for every few
| comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in
| the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be
| a community, users need some identity for other users to
| relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and
| no community, and that would be a different kind of forum.
| https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comm
| e...
| schubart wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > All surveyors should carry pepper spray for emergencies,
| whether they involve human or non-human animals. India is not
| for beginners, as the meme goes.
| pugworthy wrote:
| This kind of applies to following existing OSM maps. I did a
| "walk every street in my city" thing a year ago, and some of
| the "streets" are very much private property and not public
| pathways.
|
| I was using Citystrides FYI.
| komali2 wrote:
| 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.
| progval wrote:
| Matrix.org (and Element) is running out of money and hosts a
| large number of free users. The rest of the community probably
| won't be able to handle the influx of users the day the
| Matrix.org homeserver needs to close.
| komali2 wrote:
| That's the usecase of Matrix As IRC I guess you mean? I've
| never participated in any matrix.org rooms outside of the
| matrix / synapse / element support rooms (I believe they're
| on matrix.org). For our community it's kind of moot if
| matrix.org closes, the only downside is of course support
| will drop off precipitously. But other than that, we self
| host.
| progval wrote:
| I don't see what this has to do with IRC. But if all your
| users use your homeserver, then yes you should be fine.
| Arathorn wrote:
| It seems like the original post may be just a little biased
| against Matrix in favour of XMPP ;)
|
| Matrix has been going strong for 10 years, and while it's true
| that the Matrix.org Foundation (and Element) need funding (c.f.
| https://matrix.org/blog/2024/01/2024-roadmap-and-fundraiser/
| and https://matrix.org/blog/2024/04/open-source-publicly-
| funded-...) it's clear that elsewhere in the Matrix ecosystem
| there's loads of $ flying around:
| https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/wordpress-com-owner-automa...
| etc.
|
| So I think it's a little ridiculous to call Matrix
| "unsustainable" (at least any more than any other FOSS
| project).
|
| > I've really enjoyed running our community on Matrix.
|
| I'm glad, thank you for using it.
| komali2 wrote:
| > I'm glad, thank you for using it.
|
| Of course! We love how easy it is to get bots up and running,
| and the ecosystem of bridges made it really easy to
| incentivize people to onboard, because we can basically offer
| "for free" the ability for people to answer their instagram
| messages without opening instagram, etc.
|
| Our only issue has been onboarding flow. We get that there's
| an "identity server" but when we use vector.im and generate
| invite links from for example Element, they usually get sent
| into a flow where they, confusingly, are making an account on
| some big home server instead of ours (I think like matrix.org
| or something). We were going to deploy our own identity
| server after someone on iirc matrix community chat somewhere
| mentioned that the email flow is implemented per identity
| server, but all the FOSS identity servers we could find were
| deprecated. Anyway now we just give people tokens that we
| generate in synapse and screenshot instructions lol. The one
| thing I miss from slack is being able to just right click a
| Room, click "invite," enter someone's email address, and it's
| all handled from there.
| pgeorgi wrote:
| Matrix only recently started adopting an (as of now)
| experimental protocol that allows purging older parts of the
| append-only data set that constitutes a channel.
| Arathorn wrote:
| What are you thinking of here? Synapse has supported purging
| room history since 2016: https://github.com/matrix-
| org/synapse/pull/911, and configurable data retention since
| 2019: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/5815.
|
| Meanwhile, Matrix has _never_ needed the full room history to
| be synchronised - when a server joins a room, it typically
| only grabs the last 20 messages (with other history pulled in
| demand when the client scrolls up). (It does needs to grab
| all the key-value state about the room, although these days
| that happens gradually in the background).
|
| If you're wondering why Matrix implementations are often
| greedy on disk space, it's because they typically cache the
| key-value state aggressively (storing a snapshot of it for
| the room on a regular basis). However, that's just an
| implementation quirk; folks could absolutely come up with
| fancier datastructures to store it more efficiently; it's
| just not got to the top of anyone's todo list yet - things
| like performance and UX are considered much more important
| than disk usage right now.
| philsnow wrote:
| That sentence was right after this paragraph:
|
| > Talking over phone is the most reliable way to announce the
| party, send reminders and confirmations, and to coordinate
| during the party. That way, there's no question of "didn't
| check my messages/email".
|
| Maybe it's different in India but here in the states, when you
| tell most people that you're not coordinating with imessage/sms
| (or fb messenger or whatsapp), you'll get blank stares. I'm
| reminded of this: http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/nosql/fault-
| tolerance.png
| contrapunctus wrote:
| Author here, and it's quite similar in India. Everyone
| expects me to WhatsApp them the details, and the ubiquity of
| proprietary platforms is infuriating. Thankfully we've been
| able to use cell calls and SMS/email until we can onboard
| them to XMPP. (Many of us in the Delhi OSM community are free
| software and XMPP advocates.)
| zaik wrote:
| It's a custom protocol of a VC funded startup which now seems
| to be struggling financially. XMPP is the existing internet
| standard for IM.
| contrapunctus wrote:
| > 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.
| david-gpu wrote:
| OpenStreetMap is great and I only wish more people using apps
| like Strava, RideWithGPS, Komoot or OSMAnd realized that they can
| contribute, benefitting everybody else using those apps.
|
| In Toronto I only see a very small number of people contributing
| to OSM's cycling infrastructure, which results in the map not as
| up-to-date, which in turn means that the aforementioned apps will
| not propose routes through the nicest, most recently built
| bicycle tracks we have in the city. The situation is not terrible
| by any means, but it could be better.
| taude wrote:
| If i'm using ridewithgps, how do I contribute? is there an easy
| tool, or maybe it's something these tools could integrate? I
| know I ride trails thatdon't always show up on OSM views.
| jraph wrote:
| I don't know the app, but a generic way to do it would be to
| import your GPX trace on osm.org and add paths that are
| missing.
| taude wrote:
| Cool, that sounds easy enough. I was thinking it'd be great
| if the app itself I used supported a feature to make it
| easy to add trails.
| david-gpu wrote:
| Contributing is simple:
|
| 1. When you see a trail or any other feature that doesn't
| appear on the map, take a picture.
|
| 2. When you get home, visit https://www.openstreetmap.org and
| start drawing.
|
| The website has satellite images overlayed wirh map data, so
| it's easy to see what you are doing.
|
| You can look at your pictures to remind yourself of what was
| missing.
|
| If you have recorded your ride,you can also upload your GPX
| trace to OpenStreetMap to make it easier to trace features
| that don't show up clearly on satellite images.
|
| Don't be afraid of making mistakes. Look around and start
| small. Good luck!
| zikduruqe wrote:
| This. I have added trails, removed trails, added water
| fountains, etc... from all my bike rides trying to
| contribute where I can.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think it's a good sign that OpenStreetMap has gotten so
| complete, at least in most USA cities, that we're
| starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel for things
| that can be added/edited. Water fountains?!?! Wow. I know
| that for every place where I've physically lived (and
| have local knowledge of the streets), OSM's roads are
| basically perfect, and there's no need anymore to edit
| them. Sometimes, I'll drive past a new suburban
| neighborhood being developed and they are spreading the
| asphalt for new streets, and I think to myself "AHA! Now
| is my chance to finally add a road to OSM!" I race back
| to my computer and lo and behold the new streets have
| already been added some time ago.
| zilti wrote:
| StreetComplete is really nice
| pietervdvn wrote:
| Shameless plug for my project where one can easily see data from
| and add data to OpenStreetMap: https://MapComplete.org
| ikesau wrote:
| Similarly, as recommended in the article, StreetComplete[1],
| which shows incomplete areas on your map and marks them as
| quests to add to :)
|
| Also recommended, Organic Maps[2], which is an OSM client
| that's good enough to use as my main map app (in my city, at
| least)
|
| _Final_ recommendation, this interview[3] with the founder of
| OpenStreetMap Steve Coast. 3 hours of fascinating insight into
| the history and future of the project, 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
|
| [1] https://streetcomplete.app/?lang=en [2]
| https://organicmaps.app/ [3]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB9NxbnE1i0
| komali2 wrote:
| > 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.
| thfuran wrote:
| They're very obviously the near to mid term future of
| transportation for a huge number of people.
| KiranRao0 wrote:
| > Cars are very obviously not the future of human transport
|
| I wish this were true. However, I'm seeing the trend
| pointing in the opposite direction almost everywhere. For
| example, almost every European country has seen a rise in
| the motorization rate. [1] China is also firmly on the
| rise, and America remains 80-90% [2]
|
| Given this, I don't expect that OSM has the
| ability/authority to make a dent in motor vehicle usage
| rates. I do, however, believe they can take advantage of
| the way the world exists today to improve open source
| mapping.
|
| [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-
| news/w/D...
|
| [2] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/car-
| ownership-s...
|
| [Not cited, but neet]:
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/27503807
| pietervdvn wrote:
| It's more complicated then that. For the U.S.: the urban
| sprawl and urban planning makes it impossible to not use
| a car for many people.
|
| The old, European cities have a bigger chance to go
| carfree. Some are actively working to it (e.g. Paris or
| Ghent), some are trying (Brussels), others are not even
| trying (Antwerp).
|
| In the long run, I hope car use will decline (so that
| only emergency services, nuts services, ...) need one -
| for the climate, for our health but mostly of all: a
| carfree city is a pleasant city.
|
| Have a look at
| https://social.notjustbikes.com/@notjustbikes , who does
| great videos about it.
| ikesau wrote:
| i don't like cars at all and think it's a terrible shame
| how they've influenced the design of cities, but i think we
| might still disagree on what future trends will be :)
|
| if you can entertain the idea that in 10 years there will
| be far more cars with lidar+cameras+gps around (plus the
| compute to process it all), steve's point is that this data
| will be very useful for generating real time road maps such
| that we won't need to rely on a network of pedestrian
| volunteers to manually update a database whenever a road
| gets closed for repair or a new condo is built.
| thriftwy wrote:
| 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.
| thfuran wrote:
| 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.
| thriftwy wrote:
| It would absolutely decrease the amount of non-
| residential parking. You will be obliged to direct your
| car to off-site parking when driving to businesses in
| urban core. That's the main point.
|
| It will be somewhere in the vicinity so it will only
| congest local roads, which would be much emptier now that
| they're not used for parking.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| Street Complete sounds very interesting to me, but it seems
| like there is no iOS version?
| lucgommans wrote:
| I guess the OSM community is more defaulting to developing
| for other open platforms because that's what we mostly use
| ourselves and can test/run the code on, but iOS is in the
| making:
|
| Pinned ticket "iOS - Planning": https://github.com/streetco
| mplete/StreetComplete/issues/5421
|
| See also the project board:
| https://github.com/orgs/streetcomplete/projects/1/views/1
| showing quite a few things already done, some in progress,
| and a handful todo or blocked each
| luuurker wrote:
| No iOS version as the other comment mentioned, but if you
| want to contribute, try Every Door ( https://every-
| door.app/ ) for now.
|
| It doesn't have points and badges like Street Complete, but
| you can easily add/update/fix amenities, update addresses,
| add info about buildings, and fill in the same data using
| the "micromapping mode". I started with Street Complete,
| but now use this for most things.
| fizwidget wrote:
| The Go Map!! editor on iOS recently added StreetComplete-
| style quests.
| patrickdavey wrote:
| Funny, I find OSM most useful for all the little walking
| paths people plot... Way better than Google maps. No car
| based system will ever be good there.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Street Complete is rather good. I filled in a few details in
| Hong Kong (come on you lot, the population density there is
| huge!) recently.
|
| Street numbering is generally quite awful on all maps. Google
| has made a right old hash of much of my town. It manages to
| put a hairdresser in the middle of the road on the exit from
| a pretty large roundabout and a taxi company on a small C17th
| Methodist cemetery.
|
| The entrance to my own company as shown by Google would
| involve a multi car pile up thanks to the massive
| "intelligence" that can't manage multiple requests for a
| change from someone who is listed at Company House, who uses
| a 20+ year old Google account with the same name and a
| company email address with the same, quite uncommon surname,
| in it. I have tried multiple ways to address getting Google
| to correct their fucking map. I've even tried simulating
| their own instructions in my correction attempts.
|
| Go on try it yourself - which little UK company am I MD of?
| Go and find it and put street view on to see why driving
| through a railing, pavement and a 20' retaining wall is a bad
| idea. No, it isn't hard for humans to figure out but it is
| hard for the clever kiddies at Google to get their algorithms
| let me fix their fucking map to find the actual entrance and
| the route to it.
|
| In the UK a postcode can cover something up to 100
| properties, as required. My business is in a fairly odd stub
| of land and has its own postcode. The other property
| adjacent, within the same plot also has its own postcode.
|
| A fairly large dose of irony is that I do occasionally do
| reviews for Google and am apparently a guide or some such
| nonsense and my reviews have 1000's of views. My reviews are
| treated as gold (and might help or hinder a business) but my
| attempts to fix a real issue with my own company address is
| ignored.
|
| Just fixing up street numbering will make a huge difference
| to navigation but Street Complete covers much, much more.
| I've also done my best with the paths in my local [edit: sp]
| park, to describe accessibility and "cyclability" etc.
| jraph wrote:
| Seems quite good, how come I have not run into it yet?
|
| Even for someone who just want a quick feature look up it seems
| pretty useful.
|
| Search has two "magnifying glass" buttons, and could probably
| use a suggestion popup.
|
| A nice showcase of Svelte too, the thing is refreshingly light
| and fast.
| pietervdvn wrote:
| Oh, you're flattering me! First time someone called it 'light
| and fast', it can be an underperforming, buggy piece of
| software at times!
|
| And I spent quite some time getting it somewhat fast - not to
| mention that my caching server is currently down.
| carstenhag wrote:
| I looked at a few network requests and you are fetching the
| country code for some locations, is there some docu on this
| how/why you are doing so? I soon perhaps also have to implement
| a simple "is this location in country XY" check and it seems
| both trivial and complex at the same time to solve, without a
| full map-aware database/system.
|
| https://github.com/pietervdvn/MapComplete-data/tree/main/lat...
| pietervdvn wrote:
| Yeah, the country location is a requirement to show the
| opening hours. The library (https://github.com/opening-
| hours/opening_hours.js) is aware of holidays in many
| countries, but for that it needs to know what country a POI
| is in.
|
| The country awareness source code is here:
| https://github.com/pietervdvn/latlon2country
|
| The idea: I've taken all the country boundaries from OSM (via
| nominatim); I slice them in four parts. If the resulting
| geojson is too big, I slice this again until I have small
| geojsons, suitable to download. If you know the zoomlevel and
| location, one can use the standard slippy-tile-index to fetch
| the correct tile. (Alternatively, if the entire tile is
| within a country, it'll just return the country code)
|
| However, the client also needs to know what zoomlevel there
| is. For that, I built a search tree.
|
| It's been a while though, so I've forgotten some of the
| details ;)
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| I wonder if Niantic would ever open up some API's to gamify this
| by tying it into Pokemon Go.
| pietervdvn wrote:
| Pokemon go already is based on OpenStreetMap. And yes, a few
| OSM-contributors started because a park was missing and they
| thus lacked a spawnpoint for pokemons.
|
| But we've also head plenty of teens adding fake data to have
| pokemons in their front garden. To much gamification hurts.
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| Fascinating! Didn't know that Go was based on OSM.
|
| This sounds like a really cool project. Thanks for your hard
| work.
| pietervdvn wrote:
| Thanks! Niantec started as a startup within Google's
| startup incubator and thus used Google Maps in the very
| beginning. However, they got 'spun out' and when the price
| became to expensive, they switched to OSM anno 2017.
|
| (I'm not sure about the details, but I think the spawn
| points were OSM based long before the map rendering was OSM
| based to). In either case, read their Wikipedia page for
| more details (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic,_Inc.)
| and our OSM-wikipage
| (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Go)
| nakedrobot2 wrote:
| 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 _completely_
| dependent on the charity of Microsoft who donates the aerial
| /satellite images, which cost them _millions_. Without these
| images, there just would not be any openstreetmap at all. So
| while I appreciate the fiercely independent attitude of a lot of
| the OSM community, I also saw a lot of self-deception about how
| very dependent they are on these very large corporations, without
| whom they would have no source of data from which to make these
| maps.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| There are other providers, like Mapbox and Esri, not to mention
| local governments. There's a dependence, but not critical.
| aendruk wrote:
| Depends where you go. Around here the local government provides
| aerial imagery as a public service and it's higher quality than
| Microsoft's.
|
| A nearby city recently began using OSM in its GIS services and
| bootstrapped the new arrangement by collaborating with local
| OSM volunteers to import previously inaccessible data into OSM.
|
| Implementing open data projects through government is
| completely in line with the goals of OSM.
| pastage wrote:
| While true that Yahoo and then Bing has been important there
| are many other free sources of satellite imagery now days. OSM
| did not have access to imagery for quite a few years, so it
| possible without them, and also quite a lot more fun.
| sp8962 wrote:
| 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.
| sp8962 wrote:
| 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.
| aendruk wrote:
| 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)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| the iD editor https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ID
| aendruk wrote:
| 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.
| sp8962 wrote:
| 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.
| ikawe wrote:
| > 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?
| aendruk wrote:
| To add to this, not everyone needs to pursue the same kind of
| work. As a more experienced mapper I make a point of
| allocating my time toward what I think of as "scaffolding"
| tasks that enable others' mobile contributions--geometry,
| wide area edits, alignment, navigational references, model
| clarification, or anything that might trigger new quests in
| StreetComplete or declutter formidable ones. It's gratifying
| to have exposed new opportunities for mobile contributions
| and see the questers begin filling them in.
| luuurker wrote:
| > point people to the editor on openstreetmap.org, not any of
| the mobile or "simplified" editing
|
| I wouldn't have made most of my contributions (or even started
| mapping) if I had to use their website on a tiny screen or had
| to take pictures or notes to add it later when I had my
| computer. I use their website, but that only for more advanced
| stuff.
|
| The right approach is approach is probably somewhere between
| the two extremes. Teach new users about the website, but also
| about apps that let you quickly fix/update/add new stuff right
| on your phone.
|
| You don't have to do this yourself, just understand that simple
| apps are a good way to bring new users in, that they're good
| enough for a lot of tasks, and that this newer generation of
| tech users usually prefer apps to web editors.
| orblivion wrote:
| 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.
| contrapunctus wrote:
| Hey, author here. I guess this is something I should update the
| post to address.
|
| I guess I have always been in the "agonizing over every detail"
| stage, and remain so today (looks like we both have mapping
| parties tomorrow, because tomorrow's our 7th party :) ).
|
| In the beginning, we were much more "lax". We waited for
| latecomers. During the survey, we moved in one big group. We
| focused on the social aspect of the meetup - often, the meet-
| and-greet phase would go on for too long, and there wouldn't be
| much time spent in actual mapping. After each party, I would be
| disappointed to note that most people did not make significant
| map changes during the survey.
|
| In the 5th party, we decided to observe a stricter schedule,
| and tried a new approach - that of splitting up into teams,
| assigning an area to each team, surveying the assigned areas,
| then regrouping and reviewing the contributions. There was a
| radical difference. Everyone was contributing. A significant
| amount of data was gathered, and the social aspect of the
| meetup didn't seem to suffer as we feared it might.
|
| Delhi is very populous, but somehow there are very few OSM
| contributors here. [1] It's been a real struggle to get people
| interested in OSM, and even more of a struggle to keep them
| contributing in the long term. Most participants don't continue
| mapping after the mapping party/workshop. I prefer to think
| there's something off in my approach rather than in the people,
| because that gives me the energy to keep trying new things.
|
| It's great that you're organizing mapping parties in your
| region. I laud your initiative. Good luck for your parties!
|
| [1] India's OSM community seems to mostly be concentrated in
| the southern states. For the Delhi OSM community, Bangalore
| remains our inspiration both for OSM coverage and for mapping
| party productivity.
| orblivion wrote:
| Yeah once I get to the point you're describing I will think
| about rules and details again. And I will keep your blog post
| handy. I just think I've just been optimizing prematurely. I
| have to get a sense of the failure modes before I start
| making too many rules. I end up spending energy on the wrong
| thing and get frustrated when it doesn't work anyway. I'm
| also doing something much simpler than you guys. Good lord,
| laser distance meters!? I'll be happy to number the houses in
| town and add all the restaurants and stuff for now :-)
|
| BTW I'm also not just targeting newcomers, I'm also trying to
| gather a community among the existing local editors. It's
| just something I enjoy doing and it would be fun to do with
| more people.
|
| As for the low numbers of newcomers - I could reach out more.
| There's a local tech scene slowly coalescing in my area. Once
| I have regular mapping meetups I'll be able to invite people
| at the wider tech meetups here with more confidence. (For
| existing editors, I should spend more time combing local
| edits, that's worked so far)
| ilaksh wrote:
| 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.
| contrapunctus wrote:
| Hi! Author here, wasn't expecting that someone would share this
| hastily-hacked-together post on HN ^^'
|
| Thanks for reading, and ask me anything!
|
| PS - I suspect some may have missed my footnotes if they were
| reading on mobile - tap the numbers to see them.
| Tactician_mark wrote:
| Those footnote toggles that transition to margin notes on
| bigger screens are absolutely amazing! Definitely going to try
| stealing that, thank you :)
| contrapunctus wrote:
| Glad you like them :D They come from the tufte-css project -
| https://github.com/edwardtufte/tufte-css
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