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25/08/2020-31/08/2020

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Mapping

[1] Since 4 August the French community has been discussing > the project of the month for September (defibrillators) in detail on the mailing list talk-fr. Anyone wishing to participate can now read up on the wiki > what to do and which tools are available. The project includes > daily evaluations.
The Open Maps team from Microsoft announced they will start road editing in Colombia. They will use available street-level and aerial imagery to add where possible but there will be no automatic imports, algorithms or robot edits to improve the map.
RobJN published two proposals: ref:GB:usrn=* to refer to the unique identifiers for every street and ref:GB:uprn=* to refer to the unique identifiers for every addressable location in the United Kingdom. The voting for both is open until 13 September 2020.
OpenStreetMap hit 90 million changesets. The changeset was done using RapiD by Diana IRM-ED, an Indonesian mapper paid by HOT.
Christopher Beddow is concerned about the ‘OpenStreetMap undated imagery crisis’ and he documents it with two pictures on Twitter.

Community

In early October, the Wikimedia Foundation’s OSM-based public tile service will be shut down. The reason for this is abuse; the majority of traffic has nothing to do with the Wikimedia projects or comes from commercial websites, writes Erica Litrenta on the Maps-l mailing list of the Wikimedia Foundation.
OpenStreetMap US announced that Connect 2020 will be held online from 29 to 31 October. The call for participants is now open and everyone is invited to apply with proposals related to OpenStreetMap.
The Unite Maps Initiative seeks a new logo and has announced a competition for one. The deadline for entries is 16 September 2020.
In the run-up to the 2020 State of the Map conference, OSM Africa surveyed OpenStreetMap community leaders across the continent. Geoffrey Kateregga looks at the results and offers a deep dive into the state and trajectory of OpenStreetMap communities in Africa.
Changeset 90148752 briefly turned Great Britain into a giant beach and was even visible on the map tiles for about an hour before it was reverted.
As OSM users of printed maps and OsmAnd Live, the fire fighters in Cordoba, Argentina, requested assistance in mapping roads, waterways and other elements. The community launched a mapathon and in three days they added a lot of information in a very wild area. The firefighters confirmed > that OSM’s detailed maps help save forests.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

The OSM Foundation is funding the development of Nominatim, osm2pgsql, and Potlatch 2.
The minutes of the OSMF board meeting in August are online.

Events

Members of the Italian OSM community in the Piedmont region are organising > an event in the mountains on 19 and 20 September. The weekend includes presentations, mapping and sharing OSM experiences. To participate you must fill in this form > .
The next Geomob, organised as always by Ed Freyfogle and Steven Feldman, takes place on 16 September at 6.00 pm UTC (20:00 CEST) online. Speakers will be Jenny Allen, Maps Team Lead at Elastic; Ian Hannigan, founder of Formation; Olivier Cottray, discussing using GIS for demining and Hanc Naum, founder of PinApp.
State of the Map Japan 2020 > will be held online on Saturday 7 November. The organisers are calling for volunteers and presentations.

Education

All 35(!) worksheets of OpenSchoolMaps > are now available not only as downloadable PDFs but also as web pages. The materials are available in English as well.
A paper released by the Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis, University of Southern California, uses OSMnx to analyse how urban evolution, planning, design, and millions of individual human decisions shape cities.

Maps

Frank Schmirler now also offers his ‘Light of the Seas’ in the Portuguese and Russian languages. It is really worth taking a look at this impressive map to explore new shores.

Software

Pieter Vander Vennet announced MapComplete on talk, where you can now create your own theme with the ‘new easy-to-use editor’. If you have over 500 changesets, you can create a theme from scratch which can be shared via URL. Please visit GitHub to see some results such as cyclofix or the Open Bookcase Map.
Over the past three months DWeaver worked on OSM2World for the Google Summer of Code. The aim of his project was to add support for indoor tagging, allowing the rendering of indoor data in 3D. This includes basic features such as rooms and corridors, windows and doors as well as objects that may span levels such as stairs and barriers. The code that he produced can be seen in these three pull requests: 1, 2, 3.

Releases

The GIScience Research Group of HeiGIT, the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology, announced that it is now possible to calculate long distance routes using all bike and pedestrian profiles, whilst taking into account restrictions such as avoiding ferries, with the newest update of OpenRouteService.

Did you know …

Martijn van Exel published his stream on how to use the Meet Your Mappers tool.

OSM in the media

Buzzfeed contributors and reporters have investigated the regions that were blanked out on Baidu’s maps by comparing with other data sources including OpenStreetMap. They have used those locations to find a network of buildings in Xinjiang bearing the hallmarks of prisons and internment camps. They explained their methodology in this article.

Other “geo” things

China released > a new version of its standard map, displaying the ‘correct’ map that all map publishers should follow. The standard map shows the Chinese territorial area extending to include Taiwan and disrupted South China Sea, along with the infamous 11-dash-line. When the announcement was reported by Taiwanese media > netizens of Taiwan derided the map by saying that China is ridiculous and the imagery map is divorced from reality.
Mapillary announced that anyone can now access their map features directly via an API; filtering and downloading images, detected objects, and map features programmatically.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #20	2020-09-07
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle	2020-09-08
Berlin	147. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	2020-09-10
Munich	Münchner Treffen	2020-09-10
Zurich	121. OSM Meetup Zurich	2020-09-11
Leoben	Stammtisch Obersteiermark	2020-09-12
San José	National Day of Civic Hacking	2020-09-12
Ashurst	Trek View New Forest Pano Party	2020-09-13
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2020-09-15
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-09-15
Kabul / Online	Why OSM and how to Contribute into it on Software Freedom Day 2020	2020-09-18
Nottingham	Nottingham pub meetup	2020-09-22
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-09-25
Alice	2020 Pista ng Mapa	2020-11-13-2020-11-27

Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM. Please check your event in our public calendar preview and correct it, where appropriate.

This weeklyOSM was produced by AnisKoutsi, Anne Ghisla, MatthiasMatthias, Nakaner, Nordpfeil, NunoMASAzevedo, Polyglot, Rogehm, Sammyhawkrad, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, richter_fn.

01/09/2020-07/09/2020

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Wheelmap.org celebrates its 10th birthday – Happy birthday! ¹ | © Wheelmap.org | data © OpenStreetMap contributors

About us

Our editorial system now gives you the opportunity to post your articles directly into our system, and to suggest an initial formulation. We may make slight editorial changes to adapt the text to our language style. Translation into 12 languages will be done by us.

Mapping

The French ‘Project of the Month’ > , has a graphically prepared interim balance of what has been achieved. It still has 18 days to run and aims for the complete mapping of defibrillators (AED). PanierAvide gives > , in addition, a few tips for further work.
In September 2010, the Berlin-based association Sozialhelden e.V. launched > the Wheelmap.org project. Ten years later, Wheelmap has become the largest online map of wheelchair accessible places with over one million entries. In September, the team invites you to join in the celebrations under the motto ‘Wheelmap turns 10’. The campaign is taking place in the Wheelmap social networks and as a digital mapping action. They are also launching a small mapping campaign with the aim of getting people to each evaluate ten places on the Wheelmap that still have unknown wheelchair accessibility.
Andrew Harvey proposes the new tag shelter_type=rock_shelter to mark the difference between the already existing natural=cave_entrance and a shallow cave-like opening at the base of a bluff or cliff, which may be used to protect yourself from the weather.
In his blog post > , Robhubi deals with different types and names of watercourses that lead to mills in Austria and Germany. He evaluates entries in OpenStreetmap. WSHerx rates the publication as ‘impressively thorough work and convincing argumentation’.

Community

On 1 September, Amazon Web Services (AWS) released an episode of their documentary series Now Go Build, which highlighted the work done by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team in the Philippines, especially in mapping the town of Guagua, in the province of Pampanga.Several members of the OSM-PH community, however, observed that there were missing and problematic narratives in the video related to the story it tells of geospatial and humanitarian workers in the country. Therefore, they prepared and released this statement (pdf).
Martin Koppenhoefer asked on osmf-talk whether Brexit will have an effect on OSM and wondered if the foundation could be moved to another European country. The core database, website and API are already hosted in the Netherlands (since late 2018), but there is still some user data stored in the United Kingdom (Forum, Piwik, Foundation wiki, mailing lists). Additionally AWS is used for some data storage needs; the data is primarily stored on AWS Ireland.
AI is not a magic bullet. Even for a company as resourceful as Facebook the results of an image recognition algorithm still needs to be manually verified. Some mappers using the results of MapwithAI, bypassing the upload limits, mass uploaded without reviewing the results. As a result users have discovered strange ‘roads’ on Rudy Map, the most important offline map dataset in Taiwan, and have reported them in the Facebook user group. Cartographers of a mountaineering group have also had to remove non-existent roads in the mountains, or correct streams without water in the dry season, which were wrongly classified as roads.
Prajwal Shrestha, a student of the Institute of Agriculture and Animal Science-Lamjung, Tribhuvan University (Lamjung Campus), Nepal, shared his excitement about joining the OSM community through the creation of a new YouthMappers chapter (Agri-Mappers Lamjung) on his university campus.
Facebook has released a third update to Daylight, their complete, downloadable preview of OpenStreetMap data (57 GB). Michal Migurski gives some insights in his blog and provides relevant links.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Dorothea Kazazi gave us a brief overview about the recent OSMF reports: Volunteer WGs, the Board of Directors and the Committees, Local Chapter applications and related news, Membership statistics and added a link to previous reports.

Events

The 2020 Pista ng Mapa (Festival of Maps) organisers from the OpenStreetMap and FOSS4G communities in the Philippines are calling for presenters and workshop proposals on Open Data, Mapping, and FOSS4G for presentation at their 2020 conference this November. The call is open until 30 September. Also, this month, they are holding a map and poster making contest with the theme ‘Mapa para sa lahat’ (Maps for everyone). Check out their website for details. Prizes await winners in two categories: students and professionals.
Alessandro Sarretta presented a poster entitled ‘OpenStreetMap: an opportunity for Citizen Science’ at the ECSA 2020 conference, showing the many ways OpenStreetMap and citizen science can help each other.

Humanitarian OSM

Jean-Marc Liotier criticised HOT’s use of the number of mapped buildings as a measure of the ‘state of OpenStreetMap in Africa’. At the same time, he acknowledged that criticising bad metrics is easy, but finding good ones is difficult and he agreed to participate in an ‘open working group on OpenStreetMap metrics’.
Taichi Furuhashi (User MAPconcierge) looked back on the crisis mapping conducted in response to heavy rain in Japan and summarised points to be improved. Over 1800 people participated in the task, and over 65,000 buildings were mapped.

Maps

Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) has developed a mapping system to assist blind people in navigating cities.

Open Data

The Croatian State Geodetic Administration has published > new aerial imagery for the eastern and southern parts of Croatia taken in 2019, and extended new topographic 1:25,000 map coverage.

Software

Ulf Buermeyer has created MapAlarm, an iOS app that allows you to save POIs. According to his own statements MapAlarm should become a ‘personal placebook’. The application is in beta testing and Ulf is asking for help.

Programming

At the Google Summer of Code, Kishan Tripathi, K Rahul Reddy, Rebecca Schmidt and Daniel Weaver worked on OpenStreetMap.
- K Rahul Reddy documented his project about search suggestions on osm.org in detail on his blog.
- Here you can find the code for indoor tagging by Rebecca Schmidt, Kishan Tripathi and Daniel Weaver, whose blog post we reported on last week.

Releases

The changelog for the stable version #17013 of JOSM lists, among many others, the addition of the Serbian language with Latin script, GPX routes as a separate layer, and a dark mode via the plugin FlatLaf as major changes.

Did you know …

… OSM Streak? Do you still need a few days to get your free membership at the OSM Foundation? Ilya Zverev’s Telegram bot OSM Streak reminds you with a small daily task.
… there is a list of the OSM mailing lists? However, many of them are orphaned.
… OSM Ireland has its own site for mapping tasks that can be solved from home? The focus is on buildings.

Other “geo” things

Allan Mustard says the article by Maite Vermeulen, Leon de Korte and Henk van Houtum in The Correspondent presents an ‘excellent case study of political bias in maps’.
When US companies were ordered to stop working with Huawei, Google Maps was one of the apps that was dearly missed. Now the Chinese smartphone company has released TomTom’s navigation app on Huawei AppGallery. With OsmAnd, Here WeGo and maps.me there were already some alternatives available in the store.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When
Potsdam	147. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	2020-09-10
Munich	Münchner Treffen	2020-09-10
Zurich	121. OSM Meetup Zurich	2020-09-11
Leoben	Stammtisch Obersteiermark	2020-09-12
San José	National Day of Civic Hacking	2020-09-12
Ashurst	Trek View New Forest Pano Party	2020-09-13
Montrouge	Rencontre des contributeurs de Montrouge et alentours	2020-09-14
Cologne Bonn Airport	131. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch (Online)	2020-09-15
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2020-09-15
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-09-15
Kabul / Online	Why OSM and how to Contribute into it on Software Freedom Day 2020	2020-09-18
Nottingham	Nottingham pub meetup	2020-09-22
Bratislava	Missing Maps Mapathon Bratislava #9	2020-09-24
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-09-25
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-09-29
Alice	2020 Pista ng Mapa	2020-11-13-2020-11-27
Alice	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2020	2020-11-20

This weeklyOSM was produced by AnisKoutsi, GOwin, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, Polyglot, Rogehm, TheSwavu, derFred, richter_fn.

08/09/2020-14/09/2020

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I want to work with OSM data! – Which tool do I need? 1 | © HeiGIT gGmbH

Mapping

Michał Brzozowski asked, on OSM-talk, for some examples of good paid mapping. He has received many responses from mappers sharing their experiences and opinions.
Crowd2Map Tanzania organised and hosted training sessions for YouthMappers chapters at the Institute of Rural Development Planning Dodoma (IRDP) and the University of Dodoma (UDOM) on open geospatial data and open source geospatial software.
‘Ça reste ouvert’, the French original ‘Staying open’, closes > on 30 September 2020, with the satisfaction of the work done by the team and the certainty of having made a contribution to the big picture. Its creators will then launch the development of the OpenStreetMap community’s ‘project of the month’: a new ‘energy catalyst’ tool for more collaborative adventures!
François Lacombe published a very detailed proposal, with photos and examples, to create three new tags to better describe pumps used for liquids.
Please feel free to comment.
François Lacombe is also proposing the new tag man_made=utility_pole and asks for comments. His proposal aims to review and complete man_made=utility_pole with existing utility=* for poles intended for other activities than power transmission and distribution.

Community

Allan Mustard, aka apm-wa, published a diary entry about his new camera setup for Mapillary imagery and the recent decisions of the OSMF Board about funding the development of OSM editors (namely iD, Potlatch and StreetComplete) and the hire of a full-time system reliability engineer.
Branko Kokanovic has created a Mapnik-based tile server where names are internationalised. He has retrieved the names from Wikidata and Wikipedia. The project is available on GitLab.
Florian Lainez is proposing > an OSM-Fr Association newsletter, which would include news from the association itself such as communications or board decisions, general OSM updates and project of the month > related news.

Imports

Sous-surveillance.net was created 7 years ago and has stored in their database the location of around 20,000 cameras, mostly located in France and Belgium. OSM currently has the location of around 80,000 cameras over the entire world. After a successful test import in March 2020, for the city of Brussels, in September 2020 authorisation has been granted to import the full dataset into OSM.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

The OSMF announced that their 14th Annual General Meeting will be held online on 12 December. More details will be available soon on the dedicated wiki page.

Events

On Sunday, 4 October 2020, 25 Swiss castles invite you to the 5th National Castles Day. The Wikimedia CH association and Swiss OpenStreetMap (SOSM) will complement the event with a Swiss ‘Burgentag’. They ask for the mapping of castle ruin sites and initiated a photo challenge to upload photos of castles missing from Wikimedia Commons.

Humanitarian OSM

Disaster Map Foundation, a Jakarta-based non-government organisation, has launched ‘MapaKalamidad.ph‘, a web-based, flood reporting platform to help disaster authorities gather life-saving information during calamities in the Philippines. The project was done in partnership with the Office of Civil Defense (OCD), National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, Pacific Disaster Center, and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.
HOT’s 2020 Summit has moved online. It will be held virtually across multiple time zones on 4 December, in conjunction with the Understanding Risk conference. The theme is ’10 Years of HOT: The Past, Present and Future of Humanitarian Mapping’. Proposals are currently being accepted for sessions.
Eugene Chong has written a blog post entitled ‘How Can OpenStreetMap be Used to Track UN Sustainable Development Goals?’.
Flip Science reporter Mikael Angelo Francisco gave a first-hand account of joining in on a Missing Maps mapathon to map villages in Nigeria.
Mikel Maron has written an article entitled ‘Typhoon season in Japan: Crisis Mapping and OpenStreetMap’.
Thomson Reuters Foundation News covered the work of the humanitarian mapping community supporting COVID-19 responses in communities around the world.

Education

Stratofortress explained, in his instructable, how to create custom-stylised maps using OpenStreetMap.

Maps

Have you ever thought ‘Gee, I wonder what would happen if you took #OpenStreetMap data for North America, and coloured the image based on the distance to the nearest building?’ If yes, Rory McCann can show you the results.
Omri Wallach presented a 3D map which shows the highest population density centres of the world.
Have you ever thought about the distribution of street suffixes such as streets, boulevards, avenues, and other roads in a city? Lansingography gave us some examples from Lansing, Michigan, USA.

Open Data

Have you ever wondered what GTFS is and how to use it to complete OpenStreetMap? Noémie Lehuby, from Jungle Bus, has published > a long blog post explaining the format, the steps to follow and the tools that can be used to map public transport routes and stops in OpenStreetMap from a GTFS open dataset.

Software

[1] Marcel Reinmuth, from HeiGIT in Heidelberg, drew attention, in a blog post, to a decision tree that helps you choose which of the various tools from ohsome suits your needs. The flowchart can be downloaded as a PDF.
JOSM is now also available in Farsi (a language spoken in Iran and elsewhere).
This year Nominatim celebrates its 11th birthday. On 11 November 2009, the OpenStreetMap (OSM) homepage used Nominatim as its main search engine for the first time. Since then OSM has grown enormously and with it the need for a geocoder based on OSM data. The OSM Nominatim servers alone now serve more than 30 million queries per day. Read more about the present and future for Nominatim.

Programming

Paul Norman explained, on the Dev discussion list, that the upgrade of Ironbelly, the primary site planet server, to Ubuntu 20.04 revealed a bug in the software that generates the weekly planet dump. He also described the various actions taken to fix the problem.
Stefa called on all JOSM plugin authors to follow them in transforming their icons to SVG (or to reuse JOSM core icons if suitable).

Releases

Fabian Kowatsch reported on changes and new functions in the ohsome API on the GIScience News Blog.
iD released patch update 2.18.5 with changes from 12 contributors, seven of whom are new!

Did you know …

… the interactive Geo Open Accessibility Tool (GOAT)? This tool allows dynamic analysis of walking and cycling accessibility to different destinations (e.g. supermarkets, schools).
… that every user gets a blog on OpenStreetMap? Go ahead and write your first blog post!
… Pascal Neis has updates on Trends and Changesets?
… the bike travel wiki? Here you will find > references to maps and route planners, but also to everything else that is of interest to cyclists.

OSM in the media

GeoSpatial World showed which interesting discoveries can be made during walks through your own or a foreign city. OsmAnd supports the navigation, if necessary, with maps downloadable for offline use.
Researchers at the Technion (Israel Insititute of Technology) have developed an innovative mapping system for blind pedestrians (we reported earlier). Their study examined the possibility of using OpenStreetMap to map spatial data relevant to blind pedestrians while calculating optimised walking routes.
The director of Ramblers Scotland (Ramblers is the largest hillwalking organisation in GB, ~100 years old with ~120k+ members) says OSM ‘has the most complete public map of Scotland’s paths that is currently available’.

Other “geo” things

Grant Slater reports that there is, finally, a free RTK / NTRIP Broadcaster in London.
The United Nations has decided to establish a new UN Global Geodetic Centre of Excellence (GGCE) in the city of Bonn, Germany.
The Karlsruhe-based software company Disy Informationssysteme GmbH presented > the new version of their data analytics, reporting and GIS platform ‘Cadenza’. The extension of the analytics functionalities with the provision of an integrated routing function and the POI search are two of the essential innovations.
Matt Burgess presented the best privacy-friendly alternatives to Google Maps, which is arguably the easiest mapping service to use, but that doesn’t mean it’s the most secure.
The earth observation company 4 Earth Intelligence (4EI) has published information packages that provide an overview of countries in six layers (demography, land cover, points of interest, major events, transport and wealth index). The Country Intelligence Data Suite, derived from satellite imagery and other resources such as the World Bank, OpenStreetMap, census data and historical archives, was created to support economic analysis, policy-making and reporting on the SMART Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The information is provided as a mixture of point, line and polygon features and is suitable for use in desktop mapping software or geographic information systems (GIS).

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When
Kabul / Online	Why OSM and how to Contribute into it on Software Freedom Day 2020	2020-09-18
Nottingham	Nottingham pub meetup	2020-09-22
Bratislava	Missing Maps Mapathon Bratislava #9	2020-09-24
Munich	TUM – Mapping Party	2020-09-24
Alice	HOT Working Groups 101 Community Webinar	2020-09-25
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-09-25
Helsinki	State of the Map Suomi 2020	2020-09-26
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-09-29
Zurich	Missing Maps Mapathon Zürich	2020-09-30
Ulm + virtuell	Covid-19-Mapathon	2020-10-01
San José	Civic Hack & Map Night	2020-10-01
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #21	2020-10-05
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon	2020-10-06
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch	2020-10-07
Berlin	148. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	2020-10-09
Alice	2020 Pista ng Mapa	2020-11-13-2020-11-27
Alice	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2020	2020-11-20

This weeklyOSM was produced by AnisKoutsi, Anne Ghisla, Climate_Ben, MatthiasMatthias, MichaelFS, Nordpfeil, NunoMASAzevedo, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, TheSwavu, derFred, richter_fn

15/09/2020-21/09/2020

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How did you contribute – celebrated its 10th birthday ¹ | © Pascal Neis | Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

Mapping

Alex started a discussion on what to consider when mapping a street’s width and the different variants currently used. In the discussion, Tobias Zwick, from StreetComplete, referred to a helpful app for measuring with your phone and the help of augmented reality.
After the approval of amenity=funeral_hall, user Vollis is proposing the subtag funeral_hall=*, for a building or room used for funeral ceremonies ancillary to a funeral director’s shop or a crematorium.
Andrew Wiseman, from Apple, has updated > the challenges on MapRoulette for Bolivia using new data. The challenges can be found here.
Michael Montani, from the UN Department of Operational Support, invited > OSM contributors, on various African local discussion lists, to help support UN missions. Mappers can do this by participating in the Tasking Manager jobs they have created to map highways, waterways, land cover, land use, places, and any other relevant points of interest.
User stragu warned users of OsmAnd Maps for iOS about a bug that shifts POIs without notice, due to incorrect rounding of coordinates. The issue affects versions 3.10 to 3.14, but was promptly addressed and is solved in version 3.80.

Community

After a long break, the Belgian community continues its choice of the ‘Mapper of the Month’. This month it is Jacques Fondaire, aka jfonda, from Belgium.
[1] The widely-used tool ‘How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap’ celebrated its 10th anniversary – we congratulate and say thank you, Pascal Neis, for this and also for all the other nice stats you have added over the years!
The 35th edition of the Geomob Podcast features an interview with Sarah Hoffmann who, as a software developer, is responsible for the maintenance of Nominatim, the most important software for geocoding used by OpenStreetMap. Sarah explains the technical aspects and challenges of managing a technically complex and publicly visible open source project.
Maning Sambale notes that diversity and inclusion are fundamental for OSM’s spread and growth, but seldom make it to centre stage. Plenary sessions such as State of the Country at SotM Asia 2016 and GeoLadies-PH plenary at Pista ng Mapa 2019 aim at increasing the audience listening to community stories. The second Pista ng Mapa (November 2020, online) hopes to feature more stories, maps and posters from the community.
OSM contributor hocu wrote about a changeset discussion where he (once more) realised that, thanks to OSM contributor Alikam, the OSM data is more up to date than the official sources, IETT (the governing body of Istanbul’s transport network) in this case.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Christoph Hormann took a look at OSMF’s strategic reorientation and changed way of working and communicating over the past year and expresses concern and frustration about the, in his view, insufficient attention to the long-term consequences and risks of this.
Rory McCann (᚛ᚏᚒᚐᚔᚏᚔᚋ᚜ ) wrote in his blog about his activities in August 2020 and reports, among other things, about his activities on the OSMF Board of Directors and the Communication Working Group. mmd complained in a comment that apparently no formal candidate selection process (for the new paid positions on the OSMF) has taken place. Instead, he suspects that this was ‘all done behind the scenes’. Rory confirmed, in his response, that OSMF ‘had a preferred candidate in mind, rather than an open interview process’.

Events

Last weekend members from the Italian OSM community gathered > in Limone, Piemonte for a weekend dedicated to OSM. On Saturday, they gave talks and shared their OSM experiences and useful tools for mapping. Sunday was dedicated to mapping excursions around the area using OSM-based phone apps.
On Monday 21 September, the New Caledonian chapter of the cycling association ‘Droit au Vélo’ hosted a mapping party in its office in Nouméa. The event focused on mapping cycling infrastructure and welcoming new mappers.
The Hungarian colleagues have moved their meetings and ‘regulars’ table’ to the Internet .
A virtual mapathon will be held > on 30 September by the Italian OSM community. During the mapathon participants will draw the maps of the 78 municipalities of Benevento based on satellite images using OpenStreetMap. The event is a collaboration between Valerio De Luca (Map For Future Roma > ), Luciano Amodio (ThinkSannio ), and Nicola De Innocentis (GeoPillole), with the support of Wikimedia Italia > .

Humanitarian OSM

The European Youth Humanitarian OpenStreetMap is planning a two-day online workshop on 15 and 16 October, aimed at students and teachers. The participants will learn to use JOSM and will map the streets and houses on the island of Terceira (Azores), as pre-disaster mapping.
The app MapSwipe is being extended to be able to compare the completeness of OSM data with airborne or satellite imagery. A first prototype was developed and tested in the LOKI project at Heidelberg University. The use case is building footprints, as they are important inputs to earthquake risk exposure models.
HOT detailed their strategy for achieving equal pay and organisational gender equality in a news post on International Equal Pay Day.
HOT is currently in a hiring push, with many jobs available, to scale up their staff to carry out the Audacious Project to map an area across 94 countries, home to one billion people.

Education

Daniel Feldmeyer et al. have published an article with the title ‘Using OpenStreetMap Data and Machine Learning to Generate Socio-Economic Indicators’ in the International Journal of Geoinformation. A remarkable sentence from the abstract: ‘OSM provides an unparalleled standardised global database with a high spatio-temporal resolution. Surprisingly, the potential of OSM seems largely unexplored in this context’. In their study, they used machine learning to predict four exemplary socio-economic indicators for communities based on OSM data.

Maps

Camille Scheffler announced > on Talk-fr that magOSM > , a project of services linked to OSM thematic data from the Magellium company, offers four new thematic layers at the level of France :
Jean-Louis Zimmermann mentioned >
on Talk-fr that OSM-fr publishes a demo map of thematic layers known only to the initiated. Further announcements are planned, and comments are welcome. The different layers, such as territories, schools, and transportation, are selected
simply on the map from a list.
Google Maps will soon show COVID-19 risk areas in mobile versions so that users can avoid them. This does not mean automated routing.

Open Data

The Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of Italy at 10 m resolution is available > for the whole country as open data and downloadable here.
The Baden-Württemberg mobility data platform MobiData BW started > operations on 14 September 2020. On the new website > , the available data and interfaces are clearly described and are available for further use.

Software

A new WordPress plugin called ‘Out of the Block’ has been published. Benefiting from WordPress’s Gutenberg editor, the plugin tries a different approach to adding locations on a map and other user actions compared to existing plugins.
Google is a heavy user of open source tools. They are using iD for the historical map project Kartta Labs. Kartta Labs uses a customised version of iD, which lets everyone draw the historical landscape of a city based on georeferenced old paper maps.

Releases

An update of OsmAnd has been released. For iOS, version 3.80 introduces application profiles with independent settings, the ability to import and export profile settings, the capability to download online maps to cache, and fixes a crash that appeared while starting navigation. On Android, version 3.8 brings an updated plan a route function, a new appearance menu for tracks, and improved search algorithms.

Did you know …

… you can download > geological maps for all of Germany to your smartphone, with this detailed guide, and use them offline with OsmAnd?
… Taginfo, the site which allows you to explore the tags and values used in OSM? Several local versions are available for you to explore at a country level.
… there is a step-by-step guide > on how to display parking spaces reserved for people with disabilities in OsmAnd?

OSM in the media

Just van den Broecke informed > us that the live streaming web show, which ran April to June 2020, will return, running on the first Thursday each month (19:00-21:00 CEST), starting on 1 October.
Rina Chandran reported about HOT’s activities in Indonesia, where handwashing stations were mapped to help fight COVID-19.

Other “geo” things

Geospatial Media and Communications will present the Geospatial World Awards on 6 October virtually for the first time due to the COVID-19 pandemic . Since its launch in 2007, the awards have been presented to more than 200 individuals and organisations for remarkable innovations and ideas in global geodesy.
After a successful trial showed enormous potential, Ramblers have embarked on the Mapping Scotland’s Paths project.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Montrouge	Soirée de fin de projet “Ça reste ouvert”	2020-09-24
Bratislava	Missing Maps Mapathon Bratislava #9	2020-09-24
Munich	TUM – Mapping Party	2020-09-24
online	HOT Working Groups 101 Community Webinar	2020-09-25
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-09-25
Helsinki	State of the Map Suomi 2020	2020-09-26
online	FOSSGIS OSM Communitytreffen	2020-09-27
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-09-29
Zurich	Missing Maps Mapathon Zürich	2020-09-30
Ulm + virtuell	Covid-19-Mapathon	2020-10-01
San José	Civic Hack & Map Night	2020-10-01
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #21	2020-10-05
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon	2020-10-06
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch	2020-10-07
Berlin	148. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	2020-10-09
Michigan	Michigan Online Meetup	2020-10-12	USA
Cologne Bonn Airport	132. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch (Online)	2020-10-13
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	2020-10-13
online	2020 Pista ng Mapa	2020-11-13-2020-11-27
online	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2020	2020-11-20

This weeklyOSM was produced by AnisKoutsi, Anne Ghisla, Climate_Ben, MatthiasMatthias, MichaelFS, Nordpfeil, NunoMASAzevedo, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, Supaplex, TheSwavu, YoViajo, alesarrett, derFred, richter_fn.

22/09/2020-28/09/2020

lead picture

Interactive Map for Environmental Emergency Management 1 | © Gobierno de Missiones CC-BY-SA map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

About us

The number of local chapters recognised by the OSM Foundation is increasing. For this reason from issue #533, weeklyOSM will have a new category ‘Local Chapter News’. Here every local chapter will have the opportunity to post articles using our guest mode. The local chapter can also decide in which language(s) the article should be published.

Mapping

OSM contributor bkil proposed a scheme for tagging auditory signals, which are often used at pedestrian lights.
User Vollis proposed the tag amenity=chapel_of_rest for a room or building where families and friends can come and view someone who has died before their funeral.

Community

Mateusz Konieczny recommended the following links as good instructions for 100% beginners in JOSM: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JOSM,
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JOSM/Guide and https://learnosm.org/en/josm/. Mikel Maron also suggested the instructions on the Mapbox website.
Lukasz Kruk laments the lack of mapping quality in some regions and explains his view on causes and possible remedies.
The idea to create a French newsletter (we reported) is discussed > on loomio.
Map maintenance with StreetComplete is the first of the 12 projects funded by the first OSMF microgrant to submit a final report.
OpenStreetMap US published the 11th issue (September 2020) of its newsletter.
A (draft) wiki page concerning limitations on mapping private information has been set up. It states where mapping efforts should stop, for example not adding the names of inhabitants of dwellings or limiting the mapping of personal possessions (like TV sets, numbers of livestock or washing machines) to only those for communal use.

Imports

Pieter (user: pcmill) would like to start a project to import around 160,000 trees in the city of Utrecht, The Netherlands, and asks for comments.
The wiki page ‘Friesland Hydranten Import’ describes > a procedure to import an official and complete list of fire_hydrants=* (only two were mapped before in OSM); user osmcux asked > for support to avoid duplication in a more complex scenario.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

The OSMF Board approved two new local chapters during their September monthly meeting: USA and Kosovo.
The Board is considering forming a personnel committee to have a structured way to support people working with the OSMF nearly full time. Mikel Maron is now asking for input to the discussion draft.

Humanitarian OSM

The Forecast-based Financing Programme blogged on the work of the HOT-OSM community and ‘Missing Maps’ of the American Red Cross in the interest of cooperation through worldwide mapping to combat the COVID-19 epidemic.
HOT reported on the progress of mapping in Liberia in connection with financial support through a microgrant from the COVID-19 Rapid Response programme.
Can Unen reports that BİMTAŞ A.Ş. and HOT partner Yer Çizenler are working together to put the Istanbul Planning Agency campus on OpenStreetMap.

Maps

Michael Schultz reports on a contiguous high resolution OSM landuse map of the European Union made by combining Copernicus data and OpenStreetMap.
Robert Goedl, Head of Linux Bibel Österreich > , in the past has presented > Marble as a Linux alternative to Google Earth; now he describes > how to use Marble for navigation, based on OpenStreetMap data.

switch2OSM

[1] The Ministry of Ecology and Renewable Natural Resources of the Province of Misiones presented the ‘Interactive Map for Environmental Emergency Management‘ , based on OpenStreetMap.

Licences

A company using OSM data passed on complaints > about outdated OSM data in Mexico and asked for help.
Adam Franco found his contributions to OSM on maps being used by a college in the USA and asked if he should follow the path described in the wiki for missing attribution.

Software

MRVDH launched BuDongSang, a real estate idle game based on OpenStreetMap data. It is still in early development on GitHub; feel free to leave feedback and suggestions.
Jochen Topf reported the launch of the new osm2pgsql.org website, the first visible result of the support by the OSMF for osm2pgsql development.
Sven Geggus, maintainer of the German Style OSM Carto fork, explained why the development of the fork of the OSM Carto Style is currently stuck.

Releases

HeiGIT presents version 6.3.0 of openrouteservice, with an improved technique to speed up the calculation of isochrones (a map area that can be reached from a starting point within a given time or distance limit). By taking advantage of the topological properties of a road network, network cells connected to other cells by very few roads can be identified; with this technique, called partitioning, it is possible to drastically reduce the computational time required to find all roads that can be reached within a given time limit.

Did you know …

… that the JOSM plugin Gridify will generate a grid of ways (as blocks or lines) from any four nodes? It may be useful for creating repeating features, such as individual parking spaces.
… Mapping with OpenStreetMap? This website, hosted by MapBox, provides multiple resources to help learn how to map, from novice level to power user.
… that OpenStreetMap India has a YouTube channel?
… the ‘Europe map with countries and their capitals‘? The English menu navigation has some unexpected Cyrillic submenu entries. There is still some room for improvement.

Other “geo” things

Matthias Schwindt reviewed > the new Garmin ‘TOPO Switzerland V2 PRO’ map, which brings together government and commercial data sources. His conclusion was: ‘It would only be worth the price to me if I were touring the Swiss mountains very often. Otherwise, the free OSM maps are also very suitable for mountain biking’.
SuperMap, a China based GIS platform developer, displayed at the GIS Technology at 2020 GIS Software Technology Conference.
Heise reported > about projects that rethink unethical ‘Smart City’ concepts for the common good. Among the linked projects are works against surveillance, projects that benefit citizens, and a conference held with an interesting schedule.
Garmin launched their first GPS devices with multi-band GNSS receivers. Previously, accuracy has been improved by better antennas and multiple GNSS satellite systems (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo). Now Garmin has added a new GNSS receiver chip that can evaluate both frequency bands.
On 23 September 2020, Norway’s Ministry of Climate and Environment entered into a contract with Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) and its partners, to provide universal access to high-resolution satellite monitoring of the tropics in order to support efforts to stop the destruction of the world’s rainforests.
The mathematics learning website Mathigon uses different map projections to sum up their lesson about spheres, cones, and cylinders. The interactive map projection animation is worth a try – not only for kids.
Kate Behncken, Vice President and Lead of Microsoft Philanthropies, reported on their planned expansion of programmes to support underserved refugee camps. Over the past two years, the company has worked with non-profit and humanitarian organisations to help address global humanitarian issues, such as disaster relief by improving open mapping of vulnerable areas with Bing and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT).
Beginning this week, Google Maps will show, after an update, how prevalent COVID-19 is in a geographic area (we reported earlier). For an area, seven-day averages of daily new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people will be shown using colours together with shadings, and labels will show whether cases are increasing or decreasing.
Understanding the risks associated with COVID-19 outbreaks in British universities requires navigating many datasets, and a deep understanding of the arcane administrative geographies of the United Kingdom and their inter-relationships. David Kernohan provides a useful guide in a post on the WonkHE blog.
Michael Prodger shared his insights about maps and landscape painting in the 16th century.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #21	2020-10-05
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon	2020-10-06
Montrouge	Rencontre des contributeurs de Montrouge et alentours	2020-10-07
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch	2020-10-07
Berlin	148. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch (Online)	2020-10-09
Michigan	Michigan Online Meetup	2020-10-12
Cologne Bonn Airport	132. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch (Online)	2020-10-13
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	2020-10-13
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-10-13
Cobb Virtual Academy	OSMUK AGM plus presentations	2020-10-17
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2020-10-20
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #16 (Online)	2020-10-20
Nottingham	Nottingham pub meetup	2020-10-20
Online	2020 Pista ng Mapa	2020-11-13-2020-11-27
Online	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2020	2020-11-20

This weeklyOSM was produced by Elizabete, Climate_Ben, Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, MichaelFS, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, TheSwavu, richter_fn.

29/09/2020-05/10/2020

lead picture

Water Map – refill your bottle 1 | © European Water Project – map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

Mapping

lukas64 proposed the new tag electricity:source=* (renewable, solar, wind, etc.) to define the source of the available electricity as renewable or from other sources. The proposal is open for comments.
reDoubleYou proposes the new tag shop=direct_marketing to describe a place where privately produced products can be purchased. The proposal is open for comments now.
Voting is under way until 19 October for the proposed tag amenity=drinks, for a place which sells bubble tea, milk tea, milk, juice, and other similar beverages.

Community

User naveenpf explained to us his way of contributing to building a successful OSM community.
The Italian user Cascafico described his attempts to put the Italian schools ‘in their place’, an exercise, in his opinion, almost desperate, given the uneven situation of OSM civic numbers in Italy and given the (for the moment) poor flexibility of the Nominatim geocoder. It remains an exercise because we are waiting to clarify the licence (IODL) of the source data.
Last Wednesday Map For Future, an active group of OSM contributors in Italy held an online Volunteering Workshop – Mapathon.
They mapped housing settlements and interconnecting infrastructure in the city of Wajaale in Somaliland using OpenStreetMap, to contribute to the development of the area and help local and international NGOs in their action in the field.
The Italian OSM community gathered last Wednesday in a virtual meetup organised by Lorenzo Stucchi, the Lombardy OSM Coordinator for Wikimedia Italia. Several short OSM presentations were held during the meetup.

Local chapter news

The minutes of the OpenStreetMap France Board of Directors meeting of 6 October are available >
The new Local Chapter OpenStreetMap US wants to redesign its website. Suggestions are being sought.

Events

Next Geomob event, a forum to learn and exchange ideas about any interesting services and projects that deal with location, will take place online on 14 October and will be open to up to 100 participants. Videos of the talks will be published after the event.
The Australian Surveying & Spatial Science Institute (SSSI) is organising a mapathon to be held on 31 October, focusing on mapping water infrastructure (dams, water tanks, etc.) in preparation for summer 2020/2021. The updated information will be used in the Growing Data Foundation’s FireWater web app to provide real-time water source data to on-the-ground fire crews.

Humanitarian OSM

User feyeandal reported about HOT-Philippines’ completion of remote mapping and validation for Pampanga.
HOT’s 2020 Summit will be held online on 4 December, in conjunction with the Understanding Risk conference. Four of HOT’s staff members reflected on how they have learned, connected, and been inspired at Understanding Risk conferences in the past.

Maps

The Federal German Office of Cartography and Geodesy and the Federal German Institute for Population Research presented a demographic and cartographic journey through 30 years of German unity and diversity.
LEO-BW, the regional information system for Baden-Wuerttemberg, presented > a new orthophoto of the state made by digitising aerial photographs taken in 1968. You can view the changes that have taken place since then in a side-by-side view.
The Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) has made data from OpenStreetMap available through the Pacific Environment Portal to enable users to directly download OSM data.

switch2OSM

The German ‘FragDenStaat’ (‘Ask the Government’) answered > a query looking for a map of public railways in Germany by referring to openrailwaymap.org, among other things.
Teritorio shared , under a free licence, a video in French entitled: Feedback with the Bidart Tourist Office on the OpenStreetMap approach. Apitux transcribed several excerpts in a message > on their Dessinetaville > mailing list.

Software

Katharina Przybill showed how to carry out complex analyses using ohsome’s magical filter parameter by investigating Heidelberg’s cycling infrastructure.
The Prototype Fund, a funding program of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), is supporting > the further development of StreetComplete.Other projects > are also worth a look – including, for example, Grandine > for vectorising OpenStreetMap maps or the GeoHub > for adding new geodata to OpenStreetMap and many more!

Programming

Thérèse Quy Thy Truong, Guillaume Touya and Cyril De Runz, members of LaSTIG (IGN), presented a new approach to detecting vandalism in OSM based on deep learning and the use of random forest classifiers. This new method, along with the associated scripts, is called OSMWatchman. This work has also been the subject of a PhD thesis completed by Thérèse Quy Thy Truong, which reports on the different forms of vandalism and the detection methods that can be implemented accordingly. The OSMWatchman source code is available on github.

Releases

Version 17084 of JOSM was released on 5 October.
GeoServer, a Java-based software server that enables users to display and edit geodata, is now available in version 2.18.0.
Version 2.0 of the open source GraphHopper routing engine has been released.

Did you know …

…[1] the NGO European Water Project ‘Water-Map’? Created in 2019, it shows places where you can fill your water bottle free of charge and encourages people to contribute to the map. Menus are available in nine different languages, unfortunately without permalinks (you have to reselect the language every time you return to the website).
… Unroll, the latest tool from the Jungle Bus team? Use it to display the details of public transport routes: attributes, trips, timetables, stops, shapes, etc.
… about OpenStreetMap US Mappy Hours, the virtual hangouts for the US community? Recordings of most past events are available on YouTube.
… what to do when you find OSM maps used without attribution? There is a wiki page listing websites that are using OSM data without correct attribution. The page also describes the steps to follow if you discover another example of missing attribution. We note that the list is getting longer and longer, which raises the question whether there should be a formal body to follow these up?

OSM in the media

Antônio Heleno Caldas Laranjeira outlined > good reasons to talk about open maps.

Other “geo” things

Apple Maps has launched > more detailed maps for Europe starting with Great Britain. The added details range from vegetation to street coverage and buildings; the ‘Look Around’ function, an alternative to Google’s Streetview, is currently only available for London, Edinburgh, and Dublin.
We reported that Grant Slater announced that there is, finally, a free RTK / NTRIP caster (RTK base station) in London. Adrian 2 has tried it and concluded that the position is approximately aligned with WGS 84. This contrasts with the other stations on Grant’s list, which are aligned with the European datum ETRS. Adrian 2 also describes the Centipede > project in France, which has set up an independent network of RTK base stations > . No password is needed to receive corrections from the NTRIP caster. If you are setting up an RTK base station, he describes in the second half of a diary entry how you can obtain the position to within one or two centimetres using free online services.
pocketnavigation.de compared > two navigation devices in detail: the Garmin Edge 1030 Plus and the TwoNav Cross.
This new simulation game (we reported earlier) allows you to redesign the streets of Seattle and study the effects.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When
Berlin	148. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch (Online)	2020-10-09
Michigan	Michigan Online Meetup	2020-10-12
Bonnclos_fabric.txt	132. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch (Online)	2020-10-13
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	2020-10-13
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-10-13
Cobb Virtual Academy	OSMUK AGM plus presentations	2020-10-17
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2020-10-20
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #16 (Online)	2020-10-20
Nottingham	Nottingham pub meetup	2020-10-20
Bremen	Bremer Stammtisch	2020-10-26
Arlon	Réunion des contributeurs OpenStreetMap	2020-10-26
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-10-27
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-10-28
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-10-29
Online	2020 Pista ng Mapa	2020-11-13-2020-11-27
Online	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2020	2020-11-20

This weeklyOSM was produced by AnisKoutsi, Anne Ghisla, MatthiasMatthias, MichaelFS, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Rogehm, SK53, TheSwavu, richter_fn.

06/10/2020-12/10/2020

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Visualization public transport traffic flow (VBZ), Zurich, Switzerland ¹ | © Stadt Zürich Open Data – map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

Mapping

GIScience Heidelberg and HeiGIT have created a new land use map, initially for all the EU member states, by combining satellite images from Sentinel with OpenStreetMap using machine learning. It is available on OSMlanduse.org. The quality of the new version of OSMlanduse is being validated in an online campaign. You can participate in the Landsense Mapathon. There are different topics, such as nature, urban, agriculture and expert. The validation campaign is supported within the framework of the EU regions week.
The UK quarterly project for Q4 has been selected as defibrillators.
Sarah Hoffmann (aka lonvia) informs us, in her blog post, how Nominatim can be used to search for addresses and how Nominatim also now uses the addr:* tags recorded in OSM to determine addresses precisely.
Diego Cruz proposed the new tag landuse=dehesa to describe a type of man-made land use that has existed for centuries in the Southwestern quarter of the Iberian Peninsula and which is a sparsely-treed forest (Quercus species) in which the ground is cultivated or used as pasture for grazing animals.
Voting started on 12 October on Andrew Harvey’s proposed tag shelter_type=rock_shelter to mark the difference between the already existing natural=cave_entrance and a shallow cave-like opening at the base of a bluff or cliff, which may be used to shelter from the weather.

Community

k_zoar is a Japanese mapper and lets us take part in reviewing his 10 years of contributing to OSM. For years, he was one of only two mappers to publish the Japanese version of weeklyOSM.
Thomas Skowron has submitted an interim report for his OSMF Microgrants project focused on the OpenStreetMap Calendar, documenting his progress at the halfway mark.
Richard Fairhurst complained about an undercover change of the Mapbox GL licence.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

The minutes of the OSMF virtual board meeting on 2 and 3 October have been published. The minutes of the agenda item on a possible move to the European Union, where the OSM database enjoys legal protection, have also been published.
Ilya Zverev shared > his thoughts about recent large-scale payments made by OSMF Board.
Simon Poole has left the OMSF’s Licensing Working Group. The team at weeklyOSM would like to thank Simon for his hard work over the years.

Local chapter news

Minh Nguyen wrote about OpenStreetMap US becoming a local chapter of the OSMF.

Events

There will be a GIS track at the 18th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2021). You can submit a full paper until 6 December, while short and practitioner papers can be submitted until 31 January 2021.
The next CH Open Business Lunch will take > place in Basel 26 November, from 11 AM with Stefan Keller and the topic ‘The innovation potential of OpenStreetMap and Wikidata/Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons’. Language: , Slides: .
Stefan Keller (Switzerland) reports > that this year’s DINAcon 2020 will take place on Friday 23 October 2020. (This time, as the name suggests, online and not at Well7 in Bern.)
The keynote speakers for SotM Japan 2020 > , which will be held online on 7 November, have been announced . And registration has also started .
The programme > for the FOSS4G Japan 2020 Online core day to be held on 8 November has been announced .
Speakers from HOT, YouthMappers, Facebook, and Microsoft are coming together at the UN World Data Forum on 19 October, 4:00 PM UTC. Find the programme here, and register for your free participation in the online event.

Humanitarian OSM

In collaboration with the Deltares institute and with funding from German International Cooperation Agency, OpenMap Development Tanzania was able to collect accurate and precise river cross-section surveys using an innovative, low-cost technique. This information will help in improving existing flood risk models and prevention.

Maps

Hartmut Holzgräfe was happy to report that his MapOSMatic instance has rendered 130,000 maps and also announced email conversion and style upgrades.
Curvature is a programme that analyses the geometry of OSM roads and generates a map of the most twisty roads, colour-coded by how many curves they have.
Bloomberg described a building resembling Taiwan’s Presidential Office found in the military training base of Zurohe, which is in Inner Mongolia, China. Supaplex writes that you could compare the outline of both buildings on OpenStreetMap.

Open Data

[1] 15 projects have made it on the DINAcon Awards 2020 shortlist > . Winners in the five categories will be honoured at the Digital Awards Ceremony on 23 October at the online held Conference for Digital Sustainability (DINAcon, register here). Among the finalists are the NeTEx Converter plugin for JOSM, the geo-admin map viewer, and a traffic flow > visualisation from Zurich.
The Norwegian Mapping Authority ‘Kartverket’ was awarded > ‘National Geospatial Agency of The Year’ by Geospatial Media in the Netherlands. The jury especially noted its international efforts in humanitarian projects, the UN and sea charts. Kartverket has had a significant impact in OSM in Norway due to the large quantity of open data, including high quality orthophotos, which has been most useful, along with import projects related to land cover and road networks.

Licences

Nuno Caldeira complained about the incorrect attribution of OpenStreetMap by Mapbox.

Software

CyclOSM has released its new 0.3.7 version, including many rendering improvements.
15 years ago, Immanuel Scholz proudly announced a beta for JOSM, his Java OpenStreetMap Editor. At that time, the software was only capable of reading and saving a local GPX-file, but already had a homepage, wiki and bugtracker!
A new version of MapComplete has been released by Pietervdvn. This simple editor now has an easy-to-use opening hours selection and a richer selection of background options. In order to celebrate this, an editable map with shops was created through which you can send opening hours directly to OSM. Furthermore, we remind everyone that anyone can easily make their own custom preset (or theme). Yopaseopor figured out how to and has already created ten such themes, which can be found on his wiki.

Did you know …

… that the website ‘Map of the Week’ recently featured the best map-related manhole covers?
… the twitch channel of Martijn van Exel as the curious mapper? Martijn is a former member of the OSM US and OSMF Board of Directors and the author of MapRoulette.

OSM in the media

The Daily Star featured female mappers from YouthMappers Dhaka University Chapter and YouthMappers Regional Ambassador Maliha Mohiuddin to recognise inclusive mapping on the occasion of International Day of the Girl Child.
The Information reported on an antitrust battle against Google. ‘Credit for that goes to Mapbox’ and further ‘A congressional report on Tuesday, which made antitrust claims against four major tech companies, included a little-noticed allegation that Google Maps abused its market power and harmed its customers’ by not allowing apps using Google’s location data and other providers’ maps or geographical services at the same time.

Other “geo” things

The European Commission has opened a position for a trainee to explore synergies between INSPIRE and the OpenStreetMap data ecosystems and assess the potential of OSM for the creation and updating of identified high-value datasets.
The publishers of the decorative atlas Mad Maps have also published a serious game, teaching the basic elements of cartography. You can download it for Windows, Mac and Linux, or play online – but unfortunately it is only available in French.
Search engine DuckDuckGo now allows route planning in their map service, based on maps from Apple’s Mapkit JS framework. As Golem.de reports > , the location query should be particularly secure because location data is transferred separately from personal information and is deleted after the query.
dmontagne presented > the results of their effort to georeference and superimpose historical maps on to current ones using the French platform Navigae.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When
Cobb Virtual Academy	OSMUK AGM plus presentations	2020-10-17
Cologne Bonn Airport	132. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch (Online)	2020-10-20
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2020-10-20
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #16 (Online)	2020-10-20
Nottingham	Nottingham pub meetup	2020-10-20
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle pour tous	2020-10-20
Žilina	Missing Maps Mapathon Žilina #9 (Online)	2020-10-22
Bremen	Bremer Stammtisch	2020-10-26
Arlon	Réunion des contributeurs OpenStreetMap	2020-10-26
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-10-27
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-10-28
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-10-29
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon	2020-11-03
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch (online)	2020-11-04
Dresden	Dresdner OSM-Stammtisch	2020-11-05
Online	2020 Pista ng Mapa	2020-11-13-2020-11-27
Online	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2020	2020-11-20

This weeklyOSM was produced by AnisKoutsi, Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, NunoMASAzevedo, Polyglot, Rogehm, Guillaume Rischard (Stereo), TheSwavu, YoViajo, alesarrett, derFred, k_zoar, osmapman, richter_fn.

13/10/2020-19/10/2020

lead picture

opening_hours evaluation tool 1 |

Mapping

Robert Delmenico suggested, on the tagging mailing list, replacing man_made=* with human_made=*. Many doubted the value of the proposal. Such suggestions are repeated every few years (February 2012, March 2017).
Following a report > by n-tv, which reveals the unexpectedly high number of trees in the Sahara and Sahel, there was a discussion > about what forest density and size is actually needed to match the established tagging for forest and woodland in OSM.
Mueschel’s proposal for the new tags electric_bicycle and speed_pedelec has been approved.
User bkil proposed the tag audible=* for ‘objects generating audible cues’. Voting is underway until the end of October.
Robhubi published a blog post > about the distinction between pavements and footpaths in Austria. The differentiation has an impact on the vehicles permitted to use them.

Community

Jean-Marc Liotier published an article ‘Measuring data quality or why are we even Openstreetmapping anyway’ in which he doesn’t define any quality metrics but reframes the problem instead.
LCCWG, the ‘Local Chapters and Communities Working Group’, invites you to join the working group.
The Mapillary team is seeking editors using JOSM to interview about their workflows, whether or not they include use of the Mapillary plugin for JOSM. Interested users should reach out to osm@mapillary.com.
Want to receive a postcard? Hungry for a connection with a fellow OSMer? Try OSMCards: a service to send or request postcards from many OSM contributors all over the world. See the talk recording from the SotM 2020 to see why it was made and how it works.
Steve Coast is upset that he was denied a Foundation ‘free membership’. Active Contributor Memberships were introduced by the Foundation to encourage more active community members to join the OSMF. People can demonstrate their active contribution by having mapped on 42 or more days, or explaining how else they have contributed to OpenStreetMap, over the past year.

Imports

Ben Discoe updated his TIGER node/way burndown chart and concludes that, if progress continues at the same rate, in about 29 years each imported TIGER node will have been touched and the community will need more than 9 years ‘before each path is hopefully aligned and cleaned up’.

Local chapter news

Anita Graser was honoured with the 2020 Sol Katz Award, presented on 10 September 2020, during the virtual OSGeo Annual General Meeting. She is best known for being involved in QGIS, which is one of the most successful OSGeo projects. Read more about Anita Graser in her blog.
OSM RDC’s application for membership as a local chapter of OSM in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is online.
Thierry Hancart is Mapper of the Month of the Belgian local chapter.

Events

The OpenStreetMap conference US Connect 2020 will take place online next weekend. The programme has been announced: three days of talks, workshops, birds of a feather sessions, mapathons, and opportunities to connect with fellow OpenStreetMap enthusiasts!
Geoweek and Weekend 2020 > will be held as a pre-event for mapping and hacking to make SotM Japan 2020 > and FOSS4G 2020 Japan Online > even more exciting. Registration is here .
The OSGeo Day videos of AGIT 2020 are now available online > .

Humanitarian OSM

The UN Mappers (‘Mapping the #world and serving humanity’) have set up a task on HOT’s Tasking Manager to map roads, waterways, and villages in Somalia.
Students of EuYoutH_OSM met online for a joint mapping exercise using the Task Manager of FrancophoneLibre.
Russ Deffner has called on the OSM community to take action against COVID-19, by contributing to one of HOT’s projects either on their Tasking Manager or Mapswipe.
Five OSM communities, spread across the Philippines, Turkey, Uganda, Kenya, and Zambia, have received Facebook Community Impact Microgrants to support community engagement and training.
Long-time contributor Russ Deffner celebrates his 10-year anniversary with a diary entry where he summarises the past year and shares his aspirations for the next one.
CartONG has announced it has opened registration for the 2020 GeOnG Forum. The forum will be focused on how information management technology and practices can truly be human-centred, integrating the (different) rights of people and communities in their full diversity.

Maps

The Ministry of Public Works and Transport of Costa Rica has published, over an OSM base map, a map of the National Road Network with roads classified as primary, secondary, tertiary, or cross streets.
The CGN Spotter Guide makes > plane spotting much easier around Cologne Airport (CGN) and some other places.

Software

Still a fan of the Potlatch 2 aesthetic? JOSM includes a conversion of the map style. Guillaume Rischard has vectorised it. The modernised version can be included in the Map Paint Styles preferences.

Programming

The new openrouteservice map client (VueJS) development is in the final phase and now has a feature that allows routes, isochrones, and other features from openrouteservice (ORS) to be integrated into other websites (with the embedding code available via a share button). This allows webmasters and editors to embed those geographic features easily into their websites using the new ORS client.

Did you know …

[1] … there is a tool to check your opening_hours tagging?

Other “geo” things

Wikimedia CH is currently running a four-language writing competition for articles on Swiss castles and palaces. The purely virtual event runs until the end of November. Every Monday an online meeting is held from 7 to 8 PM, as an informal BigBlueButton session, in which everyone speaks their native language or English.
Germany introduced > their Experimental Space Surveillance and Tracking Radar (Gestra), designed to track space debris. It consists of two units, each the size of a shipping container. Entry into service is planned for the beginning of 2021.
Apple announced version 1.0.0 of their ‘Indoor Mapping Data Format’. As a commentator said ‘YAPF: Yet Another Proprietary Format’.
The Sounds of the Forest collected sounds from forests and woodlands across the world. Supported by the PRS Foundation’s Open Fund for Organisations, music will be created from the collected data and premiered at next year’s Timber Festival on 2 to 4 July 2021.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When
Cobb Virtual Academy	Wikidata+OSM: Its use cases	2020-10-25
Rennes	Atelier découverte OSM / Wikipédia / Wikidata [1]	2020-10-25
Bremen	Bremer Stammtisch	2020-10-26
Arlon	(cancelled – annulé) Réunion des contributeurs OpenStreetMap	2020-10-26
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-10-27
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-10-28
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-10-29
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon	2020-11-03
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch (online)	2020-11-04
Dresden	Dresdner OSM-Stammtisch	2020-11-05
Online	State of the Map Japan 2020 Online	2020-11-07
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #22	2020-11-09
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-11-10
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	2020-11-11
Zurich	123. OSM Meetup Zurich	2020-11-11
Berlin	149. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch (Online)	2020-11-12
Online	2020 Pista ng Mapa	2020-11-13-2020-11-27
Online	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2020	2020-11-20

This weeklyOSM was produced by Climate_Ben, MatthiasMatthias, MichaelFS, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, richter_fn, Can.

20/10/2020-26/10/2020

lead picture

Wikimap with all geotagged Wikipedia articles ¹ | © Louis Jencka, Wikidata, Wikipedia | map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

Mapping

User Darafei updated the Disaster.Ninja tool, which was developed to assist HOT in their activation process, but could also be useful for the general mapping community.
Robert Delmenico published a proposal to substitute the existing tags man_made=* with the new tag artificial=* in order to make the language more gender-neutral. The proposal is open for comments.
Jeroen Hoek and Supaplex have made a proposal for parking=street_side for tagging areas suitable, or designated for, parking, which are directly adjacent to the carriageway of a road and can be reached directly from the roadway without having to use an access way. The proposal is now open for comments.
Brian Sperlongano (User ZeLonewolf) has published a proposal for a new tag boundary=special_economic_zone to map Special Economic Zones. The proposal is now open for comments.
Alter Geosystems explains > how OpenStreetMap data can be enriched with Wikidata knowledge. They also link to the Wikidata Query Service, a facility for running queries.
PanierAvide reports > about the most successful project of the month of the French OSM community so far, the mapping of defibrillators.

Community

Labian Gashi has won the DINAcon 2020 Award in the category ‘Best Newcomer’ for his JOSM plugin ‘NeTEx Converter‘. Stefan Keller, from the HSR Rapperswil/Ostschweizer University of Applied Sciences, as well as specialists from SBB, supervised the project. The ‘NeTEx Converter’ converts OpenStreetMap data into the Network Timetable Exchange (NeTEx) format, (a CEN standard), which is ‘designed for the efficient exchange of complex transport data’. The plugin also checks rudimentary indoor routing within stations.
coolmule0 has been mapping since July of last year and has summarised a beginner’s experience of OSM in a blog post. Among others things they discuss Mapcarta and the wiki article about building=terrace.
DeBigC blogged that he discovered a little brother of the infamous Melbourne skyscraper in Dublin and traced it down to a typo.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

If you are intending to run for an OSM Foundation seat, don’t forget that the deadline is Saturday 7 November 2020.
Rory McCann, member of the OSMF Board of Directors, proposes an amendment to Article 91 of the OSMF Constitution. In future, it should be possible for board committees to include members who are not board members.
User Nakaner is proposing a resolution for the upcoming Annual General Meeting of the OSM Foundation on 12 December 2020. About 80 supporters are necessary before 4 November.
Some OpenStreetMap Foundation board members will host an Ask me Anything (AMA) on Reddit. All questions can be asked. The AMA will start 9 November at 16:00 CET. Questions can be raised from 2 November in the AMA thread.
Between concern and disappointment, Severin Menard outlined his opinion of OSMF’s development since the last elections. He refers to Christoph Hormann’s (Imagico) blog post that we covered earlier.
The OSMF-Talk mailing list discussed two proposals from the OSMF board of directors to harden OSMF against hostile takeovers by big/bad companies. Well-known employees of Facebook and Mapbox argued against these proposals.
- Rory McCann proposes that the OSMF bylaws include a provision that memberships expire, and votes become invalid if a member cannot freely exercise his or her rights or is contractually bound (e.g., with the employer) in the exercise of those rights. The opponents believe that this is practically impossible to prove. Proponents believe that the non-usability of the clause does no harm and that one must assume that companies are evil.
- Tobias Knerr proposes a member resolution on minimum requirements for new members. In the future, the board should reject membership applications if the interested party has not made significant contributions to OSM. Here, too, there is headwind from the American business environment.

Events

The next Geomob will take place online on 17 November 2020. Signing up for an invite (Zoom URL) is necessary.
A mixed physical-digital Missing Maps Mapathon is planned > for 30 November. If the epidemiological situation permits, the physical part will take place in Wabern (Bern, Switzerland) at swisstopo.
On Monday and Tuesday (2 and 3 November) the biennial conference GeOnG will take place for the seventh time and participants will join in over 30 live sessions around the topics of technology and information management in the humanitarian and development sector. This year’s theme is ‘People at the heart of Information Management: promoting responsible and inclusive practices’. Check the full agenda here.

Humanitarian OSM

Marcel Reinmuth provided a cross-sectional analysis about mapping physical access to health care for older adults in sub-Saharan Africa and the implications for the COVID-19 response.
Jikka Defiño reports about the collection of field data for the PhilAWARE disaster risk reduction project and training in the Philippines.
The Mapping Power campaign was featured in Mapillary’s Blog, explaining how students across the YouthMappers network are using augmented and volunteer mapping through Mapillary, Map With AI, TeachOSM, and HOT to improve Sierra Leone’s electrical grid and connect rural communities.

Maps

Diego Alonso explained > how to download Sentinel images with QGIS.
flo2154 provided > his first MapComplete theme, which displays benches amenity=bench and other elements tagged with bench=yes.
derstefan is looking > for beta testers for the new OpenTopoMap-Garmin maps. The temporary address is https://garmin2.opentopomap.org.
cquest presented a map showing the areas affected by the health curfew in France.

Open Data

Russian startup company Geoalert has published Urban Mapping, the first open dataset of automatically traced building footprints covering Russia. To achieve this the company used Mapbox Satellite imagery, which Mapbox has explicitly permitted others to auto-trace using machine learning algorithms. Despite the fact that Mapbox has quite poor coverage in Russia, in terms of images quality and timeliness, for some regions the ‘Urban Mapping’ datasets surpass the current count of OSM buildings significantly.Currently there are three regions available via the links on Github: Chechnya, Tyva and Moscow.

Programming

Simon Legner reports that the Java version of Osmpbf, a library for reading and writing OSM PBF files, is now available from Maven Central.
Erick de Oliveira Leal explained how to enable the Strava High Resolution Layer in OpenStreetMap (JOSM or ID). Editor’s note: Please note that when you are using this Strava layer there is, at present, no permission to use this layer for OSM and you run the risk of having your edits removed.
Guillaume Rischard, maintainer of the Editor Layer Index, suggests abandoning the ELI and for iD to use the background layer list from JOSM (we have covered previous discussions of this).
Sarah Hoffmann, aka lonvia, reports that the download server for Photon now has ready-to-use database dumps for over 200 countries.

Releases

QGIS 3.16.0 ‘Hannover’ has been released. It brings new options for 3D mapping, mesh generation from other data types, additional spatial analysis tools, symbology and user interface enhancements.

Did you know …

… the list of English exonyms for foreign toponyms?
[1] … Wikimap, a map showing the location of all geotagged Wikipedia articles?

Other “geo” things

Matthias Schwindt, from GPS Radler, presents > three models of the robust outdoor Garmin Montana 700 series in practical tests and helps you to decide which one is the right one.
Google AI recently launched the open-source browser-based toolset rǝ, which was created to enable the exploration of city transitions from 1800 to 2000 virtually in a three-dimensional view.
Jonathan Amos, a BBC Science correspondent, reported about Norway’s funding of satellite maps of the world’s tropical forests.
Seán Lynch informed us of his decision to make OpenLitterMap available as open source (GPLv3).
David Hambling, from BBC Future, poses the question of what the world would do without GPS.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (FhG-IAO) offers as a result of the Communal Innovation Center (KIC@bw) > a full-text download of the practice-oriented guideline ‘Communal Data for Future-Oriented Urban Development’, which is intended to provide orientation knowledge and show fields of application, options for action and development possibilities. The data, generated by administrative digitisation or the use of digital offerings in public spaces, can provide municipalities with potential for improving the quality of life, reducing the number of resources used, cutting costs, improving citizen services, or making administrative processes more efficient, and thus making a significant contribution to municipal development.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When
Bratislava	Meeting Missing Maps CZ & SK [1]	2020-10-31
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon	2020-11-03
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch (online)	2020-11-04
Bochum	Bochum OSM-Stammtisch (Online) [2]	2020-11-05
Dresden	Dresdner OSM-Stammtisch	2020-11-05
Online	State of the Map Japan 2020 Online	2020-11-07
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #22	2020-11-09
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-11-10
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	2020-11-11
Zurich	123. OSM Meetup Zurich	2020-11-11
Berlin	149. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch (Online)	2020-11-12
Online	2020 Pista ng Mapa	2020-11-13-2020-11-27
Cologne Bonn Airport	133. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch (Online)	2020-11-17
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2020-11-17
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #17 (Online)	2020-11-17
Cologne	Köln Stammtisch ONLINE	2020-11-18
Online	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2020	2020-11-20

This weeklyOSM was produced by Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, MichaelFS, Nakaner, Nordpfeil, NunoMASAzevedo, PierZen, Rogehm, TheSwavu, derFred, richter_fn.

27/10/2020-02/11/2020

lead picture

Daily updated corona incidences per county ¹ | © netgis.de | map data © OpenStreetMap contributors | © RKI, DIVI Intensivregister, BKG, LVermGeo Rlp 2020

Mapping

TheFive reported that weeklyOSM often receives messages alerting us to map errors. In a small blog post he points people > to the map notes system and encourages people to participate.
Yuu Hayashi, who published > a draft of a scheme for route mapping of Japanese historical paths, is asking how to manage a long-term mapping project with multiple members, and whether there is a form of monitoring that works better than updating mapping progress on OSM Wiki. He also asked if there is a better way to decide on a scheme for mapping a series of features than the Tag proposal process.
The user Vollis proposed the tag amenity=chapel_of_rest for a room or building where families and friends can say goodbye to a deceased person before his or her funeral. This proposal is now up for vote until 18 November.
Privatemajory, Luke proposed the tag electricity=[grid, generator, yes, no] to indicate the electricity source used in a dwelling, a general building or a settlement. After a short voting period (29 and 30 October) the voting was stopped due to a formal error and the proposal is again in RFC state and open for comments.

Community

The MapRoulette team pointed out, on Twitter, that a MapRoulette user box can be added to OpenStreetMap wiki user profile pages.
The video ‘4 tools to start with OpenStreetMap‘, by Captain Mustache, is now available under a free Creative Commons BY licence on the PeerTube OpenStreetMap France instance.
- In another video, he answers the question, ‘OpenStreetMap? What is it?’
DeBigCs examined the claim that poorer areas around Dublin are less completely mapped than wealthier ones and the reasons for this.
Jennings Anderson writes in his blog about ‘OSMUS Community Chronicles’, exploring the growth and temporal mapping patterns in North America.
Nuno Caldeira is committed to the correct attribution of maps based on OSM and he has criticised Mapbox many times about the incorrect attribution function on their map service. This time, he praises Mapbox customer Flickr, which has managed to use correct attribution, even on the smallest maps. So, small size seems to be just an excuse and one can clearly add visible attribution on any map.
OpenStreetMap US published its newsletter for November 2020.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

You can find the key dates for the upcoming OSMF Annual General Meeting 2020 here.
Mikel Maron would like to revitalise diversity and inclusion in the OSM Foundation; in his blog post he calls on all those who have been less represented so far not to be shy but to contact him.

Local chapter news

FLOSSK, the Local chapter for OSM Kosovo, signed a Memorandum of Cooperation with the LUMBARDHI Foundation. This cooperation will serve for the exchange of knowledge, capacities, and resources for digitalisation, as well as the provision of materials and publications for free use by the public. FLOSSK and LUMBARDHI will cooperate in the digitisation of Zëri newspaper, TAN newspaper, and completion of the digital archive of Rilindja newspaper, as well as Jeta e Re, Përparimi and Çevren magazines, which will also be public with free access.
Maggie Cawley, Martijn van Exel, and Steven Johnson report on the OpenStreetMap US Charter Project Program.
The OpenStreetMap France Blog described > a cartographic portal initially developed by the OSM Cameroon Association. This interactive visualiser/downloader of OSM data (OSMdata ) allows you to visualise different OSM thematic layers, defined by Jean Louis Zimmermann and grouped into 16 geothematic layers. The open source code for the portal is on Github.

Events

As part of National Heritage Week in Ireland, the local OSM community has decided to focus on the historic town of Clonmel. The first step was to quickly map from satellite imagery; in order to supplement this a Mapillary stream was also taken, COVID-19 compliant with mask from inside a car, using a camera attached to the window so that it could capture both sides of the road.

Humanitarian OSM

Russell Deffner, from HOT, is asking for assistance in mapping Izmir, Turkey. On 30 October a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the region encompassing south/southeast Greece and western Turkey, with the epicentre being the city of Izmir, home to about 4 million residents.

Maps

Sven Geggus has had trouble with the capacity tag on OpenCampingMap, wrote a blogpost about it, and is trying to engage with the community, on the tagging mailing list, to clarify ‘the meaning of the capacity tag for tourism=camp_site‘.
AcquaMAT is a project powered by CleaNAP, based in Naples. It is creating a crowdsourced map of drinking water points scattered in all the cities of Europe, with the aim of promoting the use of public water, thus reducing the purchase of plastic bottles for water.
The map allows you to geolocate to see if there are points in the immediate vicinity of streets or squares of the city. Help the project by mapping water points that work and those that do not work, through a reporting form on the site.
[1] The map of Germany by sven_s8 , from the NETGIS > office in Trier, visualises the incidence of COVID-19, updated daily, as well as the intensive care bed situation (DIVI Intensive Care Register ) in districts or independent cities. It uses various open data interfaces and, of course, OpenStreetMap. The OSM data are imported via a map of the Federal Office of Cartography and Geodesy. The application uses the UMN Mapserver and PostgreSQL/PostGIS in the backend.

switch2OSM

Deutsche Bahn has updated their information portal about active and future construction projects. The start page shows where all of the projects are located on an OSM-based map.

Software

The JOSM issue tracker reached ticket #20000. The issue, a bug in the Wikipedia plugin, was fixed a few hours later.
Mail.ru sold MAPS.ME to Daegu Limited for 1,557 million RUB (£15.3 million). They had acquired the mobile app and its services in 2014 for 542 million RUB (£5.3 million).
The app has been installed more than 140 million times and has ten million active users.
An updated version of mod_tile, the classic raster tile stack of OpenStreetMap, has been released by Felix Delattre, from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ). They packaged this software and included it as libapache2-mod-tile and renderd in Debian so that it will automatically be part of upcoming Debian and Ubuntu releases, and they are now asking for help with testing.

Releases

Quincy Morgan reported the updates to iD in v2.19.4 (#2931).
Tobias Zwick compared the download times for StreetComplete before and after he reworked the download to exclusively use the OSM API, instead of individual Overpass queries, in this chart. User mmd commented, on OSM Slack, that a similar reduction in download times might have been achieved through the performance improvements he developed for Overpass a year ago but which still haven’t been merged. The StreetComplete changes have been released in v26.0-beta1.

Did you know …

… where to find the most complete statistics about the users of the different OSM editors?
… Speichenkarte (spokes map), > which provides OSM data for Garmin devices?
… the Dex2000 > Overpass query collection > ?

OSM in the media

The Times of India reported that the OSM community in Kerala has created geospatial open data maps of all local government bodies in the state, numbering over 1200.

Other “geo” things

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has adopted a new international standard, opening the way to a common format for cartographic description.
If the world were a piano roll, this is what it would sound like.
Marios Kyriakou created a YouTube video showing the entire changelog of QGIS 3.16 (Hannover). There is a lot to show in those 12 minutes, so it’s blazingly fast. If you prefer a slower overview you can also watch this screencast in Spanish made by Patricio Soriano from Asociación Geoinnova and QGIS.es. In this one the first 15 minutes are introduction and installation.
In Quantarctica, a collection of Antarctic geographical datasets, version 4 is intended to offer expanded theme coverage and newer datasets, with more capabilities. Therefore, help is needed to identify the community’s requirements. The questionnaire takes a maximum of ten minutes to complete and will be very helpful in developing the next version of Quantarctica.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When
Online	State of the Map Japan 2020 Online	2020-11-07
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #22	2020-11-09
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-11-10
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	2020-11-11
Zurich	123. OSM Meetup Zurich	2020-11-11
Berlin	149. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch (Online)	2020-11-12
Online	2020 Pista ng Mapa	2020-11-13-2020-11-27
Cologne Bonn Airport	133. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch (Online)	2020-11-17
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #17 (Online)	2020-11-17
Cologne	Köln Stammtisch ONLINE	2020-11-18
Online	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2020	2020-11-20
Derby	Derby pub meetup	2020-11-24
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-11-24
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch [2]	2020-11-25
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #23	2020-11-07

This weeklyOSM was produced by AnisKoutsi, Joker234, Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, MichaelFS, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, TheSwavu, YoViajo, alesarrett, derFred, richter_fn.

03/11/2020-09/11/2020

lead picture

Peruvian vaccination bases on an OSM map. ¹ | © Ministerio de Salud, Perú | map data © OpenStreetMap contributors |

About us

Since issue #537 we have been publishing in the Polish language. We are very happy to welcome our new colleagues and hope that this service in Poland will inspire even more people to contribute to OpenStreetMap when they can read our news in their native language. Witamy, polska drużyno.

Mapping

Pascal Neis has just updated his ‘Unmapped Places‘ using OSM data from 30 October 2020.
Christina Ludwig, Sascha Fendrich and Alexander Zipf report about their study on ‘Regional variations of context‐based association rules in OpenStreetMap’. This study investigates the variability of association rules extracted from OSM across different geographic regions and their dependence on different context variables, such as the number of OSM mappers.
The Spanish Red Cross is organising an online Mapathon on Thursday 19 November from 17:00 to 19:00, to help people in Burundi vulnerable to natural disasters, armed conflict and epidemics.
OSM Ireland now offers a Tasking Manager that organises the simultaneous mapping of buildings close to each other, by multiple mappers, by assigning the mappers different squares to work on. Another possibility is to start your own projects anywhere in the world.
PoliMappers report on their effort to introduce new and interested people to the world of geospatial collaborative projects in the Politecnico di Milano campus of Piacenza.
Brian M. Sperlongano (ZeLonewolf) announced that his proposal boundary=special_economic_zone, to tag an area in which the business and trade laws are different from the rest of the country or state, is now open for voting until 24 November.
With the outbreak of COVID-19 in March 2020 the German speaking Telegram group started voting on and publishing a weekly mapping focus. Along with the German version, they recently made available an English version of their wiki page to inspire more people to contribute to the weekly changing mapping challenges. amenity=car_sharing is the current ‘Weekly Focus’. Please enter your own ideas in the ‘Focus Idea Depot’ and vote on them in the Telegram group ‘OSM de‘.

Community

YouthMappers has appointed a new cohort of regional ambassadors for 2020–2021.
You can now read the answers to questions from the AskMeAnything thread on Reddit with some of the OSM Foundation Board members.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Jonathan Beliën, one of the OSMF Microgrant Program recipients, has submitted his final report for the Road Completion Project. The project focused on software for conflating open data road networks against OpenStreetMap roads in Belgium. The code is open and can be used to achieve similar results anywhere in the world.

Local chapter news

Due to the lockdown in place since late October, OSM Ireland has come up with a schedule for November to make focused progress on the osmIRL_buildings project. Each day, there is a different town or group of towns to be mapped using the HOT OSM task manager.
mapeadora reported > in her blog about the official opening of the YouthMappers chapter at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México (UAEM), Faculty of Geography, on the Campus Toluca.

Events

Code The City’s 21st hack event invites everyone to use mapping, software, open data, or programming tools on Saturday 28 November and Sunday 29 November to create, update, digitise and modernise maps of our locales. The event will take place online and coding is, despite the name, only a small part of what is planned – take a look at the agenda here.
The OSM Geography Awareness Week is taking place from 15 to 21 November. ‘OSMGeoWeek’ is a week when teachers, students, community groups, organisations, and map lovers around the world can join together to celebrate geography and OpenStreetMap. Consider planning a mapathon, a webinar to show off your latest project, a career panel to talk about how your organisation uses OSM, or a workshop to teach others what you know. Follow #osmgeoweek, and share your experiences using the #osmgeoweek hashtag. When editing in OpenStreetMap add the #osmgeoweek2020 hashtag to your changesets to be included in the metrics. Add your event, or find one, at osmgeoweek.org!
State of the Map Japan 2020 and FOSS4G Japan 2020 were jointly held on 7 and 8 November. The summary of tweets and each video are now online (SotMJ , FOSS4G ).
Following the success of the mapping party held in September, the Chair of Urban Structure and Transport Planning of the Technical University in Munich is organising another mapping party to be held on 18 November at 18:15.

Humanitarian OSM

The HOT Disaster Services Team offers an update on the disaster responses the team is currently supporting or preparing to support around the world, as well as detailing ways the community can help.
Ramani Huria has been training students in Dar es Salaam and equipping them with industrial and technical skills for the 21st century while generating vital high-precision, low-cost data for flood prediction and preparedness. Through the students’ work, Ramani Huria has mapped more than 10,000 flood data points in eight weeks.
Crowd2Map, which was created in 2015 by Janet Chapman, has enabled volunteers to map almost five million buildings in Tanzania. This made it possible for welfare workers to locate and save 3000 girls from female genital mutilation and bring them to safe houses, where they can also receive education.

Maps

[1] The Peruvian Ministry of Health has published > its vaccination data points on an OSM base map.

Open Data

terrestris shows us several different possibilities for visualising the SRTM-30 elevation model.
The European Data Portal has 2259 (and counting) open datasets for Romania.

Software

Jochen Topf gave an overview of the first ten years of Taginfo, a service developed and maintained by himself, and describes some of the recently added features.
Trufi Association has created a new multi-modal bike app. It has information about the cycling road network, the public transport network, at what times bicycles can be carried on it, and how busy the vehicles are, enabling the app to propose combination routes that no other routing engine can. Maps and POIs are based on OpenStreetMap and the routing is based on OpenTripPlanner. The app can be adapted for use in any city.
The MIERUNE Inc experimentally released > an address and facility search service ‘MIERUNE Search‘ . This service focuses on geo services. OSM is used > for some data, such as POIs.
Dongha Hwang (LuxuryCoop) has created a Taginfo instance for South Korea.
Hartmut (maposmatic) added some new ‘OpenOrienteeringStyles’ to ‘OpenOrienteeringMap‘, the easy Street-O map creation tool. You can quickly and easily set a map, add controls, and create a print-ready, high quality vector PDF. If you have any comments, leave them at the end.
Researchers from the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), the University of Maryland (UMD), and the University of Florida published a free e-book on QGIS in October. QGIS is a free and open-source cross-platform desktop geographic information system that supports viewing, editing, and analysing geospatial data. The book is intended for both students and professionals.

Releases

Walter Nordmann (wambacher) has started rebuilding the OSM Software Watchlist (a list of the current release status of OSM software products).
Marcus Wolschon announced the highlights of the Vespucci 15.1 Beta, released on 28 October.

Did you know …

… the osm-in-realtime website by James Westman?
… Taginfo now has a chronology tab? You can use it to see how often a tag has been used in the past.
… that Geofabrik is hosting Taginfo instances for each country (plus some regions) and continent, even Antarctica?

Other “geo” things

I Hate Coordinate Systems! has a very informative overview of common questions and pitfalls encountered when working with coordinate systems.
Topi Tjukanov started the #30DayMapChallenge, a daily social mapping project for every day of November 2020.
Hoefler&Co has compiled a cartography font collection, with 70 fonts recommended for maps and inspired by mapmaking.
Udo Urban, from the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), presented > the project ‘TreeSatAI – Artificial Intelligence with Earth Observation and Multi-Source Geodata’.
Mike Darracott reported about Yorkshire Wildlife’s use of MGISS cloud technology to map and help protect habitats.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When
Online	2020 Pista ng Mapa	2020-11-13-2020-11-27
Cologne Bonn Airport	133. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch (Online)	2020-11-17
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #17 (Online)	2020-11-17
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle (virtuelle)	2020-11-17
Cologne	Köln Stammtisch ONLINE	2020-11-18
Munich	TUM Mapping Party	2020-11-18
Online	Missing Maps Mapathon Bratislava #10	2020-11-19
Online	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2020	2020-11-20
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)	2020-11-23
Derby	Derby pub meetup	2020-11-24
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-11-24
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch [1]	2020-11-25
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon	2020-12-01
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch (online)	2020-12-02
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #23	2020-12-07
Michigan	Michigan Online Meetup	2020-12-07

This weeklyOSM was produced by Elizabete, Climate_Ben, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, Sammyhawkrad, TheSwavu, derFred, k_zoar, richter_fn.

10/11/2020-16/11/2020

lead picture

Map of “Ghost Bikes” ¹ | © Pieter Vander Vennet | map data © OpenStreetMap contributors |

About us

This week we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the first Weekly OSM Summary. Thanks to Pascal, Jonas, and Dennis, who started the project in November 2010. Alongside number 17 of the German Wochennotiz, Weekly OSM Summary started in the English language, first weekly, later fortnightly until issue 100 in July 2014. Then in October 2014 it was relaunched as a complete translation of Wochennotiz, along with its own branding and website – sponsored for several years by the Archbishop Sentamu Academie, Kingston upon Hull, UK – and synchronised with Wochennotiz numbering. Number 219 was published in English, Spanish, Romanian, Turkish, Japanese and German. Today the website is paid for by FOSSGIS. Today we provide weekly summaries in: Čeština , Deutsch , English , Español , Français , 日本語 , 한국어 , Polski , Português do Brasil , Português , Русский , Türkçe , Italiano , 台灣中文
weeklyOSM recently expanded its publishing to 14 languages. Without our content management system OSMBC, designed and developed by TheFive, this would not be possible. Christoph maintains the OSMBC system and our Mattermost service, on servers provided by FOSSGIS. In his blog post, TheFive mentioned: ‘nearly 24k articles. Currently 70 users are listed as editors and nearly 700 are guest users’.We thank FOSSGIS for the financial support, but especially Christoph for the continuous maintenance, constant responsiveness and unswerving development of OSMBC.
We are looking for volunteers to help us improve our newsletter so we can get it out faster, have more depth and coverage, and generally improve it for our readers, like you.We are currently urgently seeking proofreaders who are native English speakers. So it is not a problem if you are new to OSM, we are looking for your language skills.Please join our team by contacting us now, it’s fun!

Mapping

Kana Lee reported about the Microsoft Open Maps team’s plan to work on OSM data in Peru, focusing on the road network. More details can be found on GitHub.
Everywhere She Maps is an activity to support girls and women in mapping for their own security, livelihoods, access, prosperity, and also their participation in innovation and economic capacity. It is an initiative of YouthMappers sponsored by USAID.
Awesome work by OSM Ireland in mapping Joe Biden’s ancestral town of Ballina, Ireland. If you would like to continue to make Ballina the best mapped place in Ireland, then use this gorgeous taskmanager. (Menus are available in en, fr, pt, pt-br, it and es.)
Jake Low calls attention, via the tagging mailing list, to his proposal for tagging fire lookouts.
Janko Mihelić proposed a framework for mapping admission to places which is now open for voting until Thursday 26 November.
Rouelibre proposed the tag training=bicycle for cycle (repair) shops or other facilities related to cycling that offer instruction in bicycle riding.
With the outbreak of COVID-19 in March 2020 the German speaking Telegram group started voting on and publishing a weekly mapping focus. Alongside the German version, they recently made an English version of their wiki page available in order to inspire more people to contribute to mapping challenges, which change weekly.’Public Toilets’ are the current ‘Weekly Focus’. Please enter your own ideas in the ‘Focus Idea Depot’ and vote on them in the Telegram group ‘OSM de’.

Community

Dan Stowell, Jack Kelly, and others have published, in the electronic journal Nature Scientific Data, their curated open data for solar power in the UK. The data are based on OSM, and this publication represents a significant milestone for the OSM-UK community project to map rooftop solar power. On 13 November 2020 the project itself reached a notional 33% completion mark compared with the national FIT (Feed-in tariff) open data set.
OSMF Board member Rory McCann provided an October update on his OSM-related activities.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Nuno Caldeira has noticed that most of the candidates for the upcoming OSM Foundation board elections have less than 15% of active mapping days.
Dermot McNally interviewed Allan Mustard while he mapped buildings in Ireland as part of #buildingsIreland project and talked about his origins in mapping, the role of the Foundation in aiding the creation of the map through funding and employing staff, and the Board’s relationship with corporate sponsors. Rory McCann was also present during the interview.
Did you know that the monthly board meetings are public and broadcast live on the web? The dates will be published in an OSS calendar.

Humanitarian OSM

HOT has opened up registration for the sixth annual Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit. The Summit has the theme ’10 Years of Humanitarian OpenStreetMap: The Past, Present and Future of Humanitarian Mapping’ and is open to the whole humanitarian mapping community.

Maps

[1] A ‘Ghost Bike’ is a memorial for a cyclist who died in a traffic accident, in the form of a white bicycle permanently placed near the accident location. On this map, you can see all of the ghost bikes known by OpenStreetMap, add new ones and upload photos. Menus on the website are available in , and .
An OSM contributor from Montreal noticed an interesting historic cycling map of Montreal from 1897.

switch2OSM

Switch2OSM now includes a manual on how to install, set up and configure all the necessary software to operate your own tile server on Debian Linux 11, even though this (stable) release is not due until at least next year.

Open Data

Julien de Labaca reports > on Norwegian activities to provide and process standardised European traffic information data.

Software

Denis Peshekhonov and Grigory Frantsuzov have used OSM data to create a VK app for those who like exploring the neighbourhood. The app suggests a random POI within walking distance and gives ‘achievements’ to those who keep visiting new points.

Programming

The Freehand Drawing Utility ‘The Sandbox’ permits adding waypoint markers and tracks on a new layer over one of a lot of available map backgrounds and then downloading the drawn layer as plain text, GPX, or Google Earth KML.
Jennings Anderson demonstrated, in his blog, how to work with the weekly updated OSM data available as open datasets on Amazon Web Services. For example, he queries OSM changesets using Amazon Athena (PrestoDB).
An interactive (password protected) beta of the developer documentation for Osmose-QA is now available. It can be used to learn how Osmose’s backend works and helps in modifying or adding new validation rules.

Did you know …

… there is a list of films, movies, or TV series that are either about OpenStreetMap, use OpenStreetMap, or give credit?
… you can use Alexander Avtanski’s ‘GPS Visualization Tools‘ for visualising recorded GPS tracks?
… the quiz in which you are presented with a shape and have to guess which country? Arun Ganesh, from Mapbox, has developed the quiz using OSS Svelte and it is based on OSM data (water and place labels, but not the boundaries) and Wikidata. The source code is available on GitHub. The boundaries are from Mapbox and are a combination of proprietary and (non-OSM) open data.

OSM in the media

Berlin police used an OSM map in a tweet to show the evacuation area imposed after a World War II bomb was found.

Other “geo” things

People around Philadelphia are continuing to add businesses around the city. Nothing unusual about that you might think. This one, however, has been in the news recently. More details here.
Arizona University is currently seeking a PhD student for a funded research assistantship, via a NASA Funded LCLUC (Land-Cover/Land-Use Change) Grant, to start in August 2021, mapping clandestine infrastructure (airstrips and roads) in protected areas of Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When
Online	2020 Pista ng Mapa	2020-11-13-2020-11-27
Online	Missing Maps Mapathon Bratislava #10	2020-11-19
Online	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2020	2020-11-20
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)	2020-11-23
Derby	Derby pub meetup	2020-11-24
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-11-24
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch [1]	2020-11-25
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon	2020-12-01
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch (online)	2020-12-02
online	HOT Virtual Summit (online)	2020-12-04
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #23	2020-12-07
Michigan	Michigan Online Meetup	2020-12-07
Heidelberg	Mannheimer Mapathons e.V. – Int’l. Mapathon (online)	2020-12-08
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-12-08
Munich	Münchner Treffen	2020-12-10

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, NunoMASAzevedo, PierZen, Polyglot, rogehm, SK53, Sammyhawkrad, TheSwavu, derFred, richter_fn.

17/11/2020-23/11/2020

lead picture

European electricity grid ¹ | © eBin | map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

Mapping

User mahdi1234 published a quick note on how to show the latest OSM data on-the-fly on umap using a query to link directly to Overpass.
In a thread on the talk mailing list about ‘bad’ edits, Andy Townsend outlined some guidelines for good changeset discussions which are well worth a read.
Voting for the ‘pumping proposal’ is open until 3 December. Although the initial impetus was for better mapping of pumps associated with water wells, the proposal considers other uses as well, as InfosReseaux describes in a diary entry.
Jochen Topf describes how coastlines are processed in OSM. He explains the reasons why updating of land/water polygons (based on natural=coastline) can be seen as too slow and unreliable.
Marcos Merino wrote > about the role of big Silicon Valley companies in contributing to OSM and the fact, probably surprising, that OSM is older than Google Maps.
Robert Whittaker (user rjw62) has added extra features to his Survey Me tool hosted on the OSM part of his site. Survey Me highlights potential mapping issues in the UK largely based on comparisons with a suite of external open data sources. New sources include Geolytix open data on food retailers.

Community

The National University of Singapore (NUS) recently invited Jinal Foflia, an OSM community member, to lecture on OpenStreetMap and the OpenStreetMap community.
Florian Lainez wrote about the importance of building resilience in local OSM communities. Through examples from Myanmar, Mali and Morocco and his own experience as CEO of JungleBus (developing OSM-based public transport solutions), he showed that mapping priorities will vary according to country or region specific needs, which can only be successfully mediated locally.

Imports

Minh Nguyen explained, on the Imports-US mailing list, that Code for San José volunteers want to import 14,000 shops via MapRoulette.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Allan Mustard, chair of OSMF, welcomed new, and old, local chapters at the Local Chapters Congress on 21 November.
Michael Collinson, acting as facilitator for the presentation process of the new OSMF candidates, published the official set of questions, asking the candidates to answer by 25 November.The answers and manifestos are here.
Suggested community discussion period: 28 November to 5 December (when voting opens).

Local chapter news

Joost Schouppe (Secretary OSMF) asks the Slovakian OSM community about Freemap Slovakia’s application to become an official Local Chapter of the OSMF. Please forward your questions, comments or concerns before 7 December.
Joost Schouppe (Secretary OSMF) asks the OSM community of Uganda and the OSMF Membership about OpenStreetMap Uganda’s application to become an official Local Chapter of the OSMF. Please forward your questions, comments or concerns by 7 December.
Mapper of the Month: Diseret (Belgium) – OpenStreetMap Belgium.

Humanitarian OSM

The Collective for the Protection of Sugamuxi Province requested support from OpenStreetMap Colombia and its Tasking Manager to update the map of the Lake Tota Basin. High levels of lead contamination alarmed the population and the authorities, who still do not know the origin of this heavy metal in the ecosystem. The map update > aims to help identify and solve the health and environmental problems of the second largest lake in the Andes.
Pete Masters (pedrito1414) summarised a remote workshop held by HOT to consider how the community relates to the goals of the Audacious project.

Maps

In his #30DayMapChallenge Sebastian Meier shows us a new map of Berlin based on open data every day. Day 20 and other days also use data from OSM. The code is available on GitHub.
The Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy showed a map of water bodies in Germany on Twitter. Florian Lohoff responded with a much more detailed map of the river basins of Central Europe by Martin Kompf, based > on OSM data. Martin Kompf describes on his page in detail how he created the map and the source code is also available
[1] eBin, a member of the Polish OSM community, has produced a vector overlay map of the European electricity grid based on OSM data.
Hernan J. López reports that after a year and a little more work, the categorised protected areas > of Argentina are now visible on OpenStreetMap.

Software

HeiGIT has extended their OSM history explorer with new features.
Richard Fairhurst announced the availability of development versions of Potlatch 3 for testing. Potlatch 3 is a desktop editor using Adobe Air, and has some new features compared with Potlatch 2, perhaps most importantly remote control support. Currently Apple MacOS and Windows are supported: some testing of use on Linux is reported in the comments.

Programming

The OSM Ops Team are looking for beta testers for a new torrent distribution of the latest OSM planet PBF file.

Releases

Walter Nordmann (wambacher) has his newly established OSM SoftwareWatchlist under control again. It provides a continuously updated list of the latest releases of all software products in the OSM cosmos. If the cosmos is not currently wide enough to include your favourite piece of OSM-related software then let wambacher know on the forum.

Did you know …

… that CheckTheMonuments provides suggestions and detailed information on quality assurance of historical objects as well as a map? > .
… the wide range of bridges which can be encountered on a single trail? A few years ago Kevin Kenny documented some of the more unusual examples on the Northville Placid Trail.
… streetmangler > and shrtnms? They are tools to abbreviate street names in Russian, Ukrainian and English.
… about Web to OSM Opening Hours? It’s a tool which parses opening hours from free text or a URL where the opening hours can be found. The tool will work if the website uses the OpeningHours specification of Schema.org and will convert it to OSM format and put it on the clipboard.

OSM in the media

Joe Morrison has blogged about how large companies are actively contributing to OSM. There are some interesting comments on the article on Hackernews.

Other “geo” things

Nick Giles reports, in The Guardian, that use of the OS Maps Get Outside adventure planning app has increased by 78% since Feburary, with around 3.5 million people using it now.
Misinformation about the 2020 US Presidential Election result was trending on social media and elsewhere in mid-November. But you might have missed this Fox News map ceding part of Michigan to Canada. We will gladly not seek OpenStreetMap attribution for this fantasy map, and nor will we add provocative border polygons to the map!Such misunderstandings of geography are so common that academic geographer Peter Gould studied them 50 years ago, coining the term ‘isoignorans’ for contours of equal geographical ignorance in his book Mental Maps.
In an article in CNRS News (French National Centre for Scientific Research), Erwan Bocher explains the ins and outs of the new SymCore standard of the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium), which he developed with Olivier Ertz.
ALPIN explains > the basics of using GPS devices and explains how one can install OSM maps on them.
Procedural GL JS now is open source. It is a library that allows 3D maps to be embedded into web pages.
It seems Amazon is starting to map pavements (sidewalks) for autonomous delivery – a mapping robot has been spotted in Everett.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon	2020-12-01
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch (online)	2020-12-02
Bochum	Bochum OSM-Stammtisch (Online) [2]	2020-12-03
Dresden	Dresdner OSM-Stammtisch (online)	2020-12-03
online	HOT Virtual Summit (online)	2020-12-04
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #23	2020-12-07
Michigan	Michigan Online Meetup	2020-12-07
Heidelberg	Mannheimer Mapathons e.V. – Int’l. Mapathon (online)	2020-12-08
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-12-08
Munich	Münchner Treffen	2020-12-10
online	OSMF Public Board Meeting	2020-12-10
Berlin	150. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch (Online)	2020-12-11
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #18 (Online)	2020-12-15
Cologne Bonn Airport	134. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch (Online)	2020-12-15
Nottingham	Nottingham pub meetup	2020-12-15

This weeklyOSM was produced by AnisKoutsi, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, Polyglot, rogehm, SK53, Sammyhawkrad, TheSwavu, derFred, richter_fn, tordans.

24/11/2020-30/11/2020

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Indoor map by François de Metz ¹ | © François de Metz | map data © OpenStreetMap contributors |

Breaking news

The next public OSMF board meeting will take place on Thursday, 10 December 2020, at 5.00 PM (GMT) with some interesting items – Treasurer’s report, attribution guidelines, conflict of interest policy for Working Groups, and Brexit update.
The reworked proposal electricity=* is open for voting, and ends Tuesday 15 December.

Mapping

François presented a heat map and a new styling for indoor tags, and makes some recommendations for better indoor mapping.
And another tenth birthday – Happy birthday Potlatch 2.
The Portuguese delegation of Médecins Sans Frontières held its first online Mapathon in Portugal on 24 November. User NunoMASAzevedo gives a report > of the event in a post in his diary.
User Espen’s proposal, later adopted by ZeLonewolf, to tag hazard=* for a potential source of damage to health, life, property, or any other interest of value is open for comment.
Jeroen Hoek’s and Supaplex’s proposal for parking=street_side, for tagging areas suitable, or designated for, parking which are directly adjacent to the carriageway of a road and can be reached directly from the roadway without having to use an access way, has been approved. The parking=street_side feature page is here.
Brian Sperlongano’s (user ZeLonewolf) proposal for the tag boundary=special_economic_zone to map Special Economic Zones has been approved.

Community

k3ninho expresses his concerns about the oversized interest of the big players Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft in OpenStreetMap. In this context it is interesting to note that two of the companies contacted have expressed their concerns and one of them is also represented by a candidate for the OSMF board.
Geochicas are celebrating their 4th anniversary.
Alexander Zipf analysed how much local information is captured in OpenStreetMap data, which can be an indicator of data quality. In addition to the blogpost a Jupyter Notebook is available to generate an interactive map and plots for regions of your choice.
Marcel Reinmuth explored Indian healthcare facilities mapped in OpenStreetMap and analyses health-related imports.
Jean-Marc Liotier, currently a candidate in the OSMF board election, uses a clever pun to explain where OSM fits into economic theory. He uses this to identify some aspects of OSM which clearly require fundamental support and protection by the OSMF.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

The OSMF has published the minutes of the OSMF 19 November Board Meeting.
These are the answers of the 2020 OSMF board election candidates to the official questions created by our election facilitator, Michael Collinson. Voting is already in progress.
Tobias Knerr (user Tordanik) is running > for re-election to the OSMF board and reflects on his work so far.
Michal Migurski, working for Facebook, writes on his blog why he is running for the OSMF board and offers an online audio-video chat (‘office hour’) on 9 December for an hour from 4.00 PM (GMT) to answer questions.
Simon Poole discussed the proposed amendment to the OSMF Articles of Association (AOA) regarding Board sub-committees and explains why he will not be supporting it.
Christoph Hormann reflected (part 1) / (part 2) on the OSMF changes during the past year and what they mean for the future.

Humanitarian OSM

Laurent Savaëte, a co-developer of MapSwipe, is encouraging people to join and contribute to the Missing Maps Project.

Maps

AnyGIS allows you to download specialised raster maps directly to your smartphone and use them without access to the Internet. Menus in and .
Jacek Czapla has made some suggestions as to how to reduce the size of an OSM file before use in an application. His approach uses the –tag-filter option of Osmosis to retain only the road network and buildings.

Software

OpenStreetCam is now KartaView. The name change happened after the OSM Foundation (OSMF) adopted a Trademark Policy discouraging names like OpenStreet-Thing. To support this, the team decided to change the name to KartaView.

Programming

The tagging templates and tag validation rules of iD have been moved to a separate GitHub project called iD Tagging Schema.

Releases

JOSM stable release 17329 was published on 22 November.
With the kind help of Mike, Jiri Vlasak, aka qeef, merged Mike’s JOSM-Scripts into the Mapathoner JOSM plugin. He informed us about it on the HOT mailing list. Mike’s JOSM-Scripts are untouched and can still be run as usual. However, you may now also run the functionality of the scripts directly from the Mapathoner menu.

Did you know …

[1] … the indoor map by François de Metz ?
… the Swiss Fog Map Nebelkarte Schweiz, where you can visualise foggy areas at altitudes between 500 m and 2000 m? Menu only in German.

OSM in the media

A detailed article about the State of the Map Japan 2020 has been published > on GeoNews.

Other “geo” things

What the Fugg: the Austrian village of Fucking is to be renamed Fugging.
Germany’s first data centre that binds more CO2 > than it generates is located on the Green Tec campus in Enge-Sande in northern Germany.
A free map update is available > for Garmin Outdoor GPS devices with TopoActive map.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When
Bochum	Bochum OSM-Stammtisch (Online) [1]	2020-12-03
Dresden	Dresdner OSM-Stammtisch (online)	2020-12-03
San José	Civic Hack & Map Night	2020-12-03
online	HOT Virtual Summit (online)	2020-12-04
online	(Discord) OSM World Mapathon	2020-12-06
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #23	2020-12-07
Michigan	Michigan Online Meetup	2020-12-07
Hamburg	Hamburg OSM-Stammtisch (Online) [2]	2020-12-08
Heidelberg	Mannheimer Mapathons e.V. – Int’l. Mapathon (online)	2020-12-08
Salt Lake City / Virtual	OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night	2020-12-08
Munich	Münchner Treffen	2020-12-10
San José	Code for San José Winter Virtual Mixer	2020-12-10
online	OSMF Public Board Meeting	2020-12-10
online	Missing Maps Slovakia online mapathon #1	2020-12-10
Berlin	150. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch (Online)	2020-12-11
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #18 (Online)	2020-12-15
Cologne Bonn Airport	134. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch (Online)	2020-12-15
Nottingham	Nottingham pub meetup	2020-12-15

This weeklyOSM was produced by AnisKoutsi, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, Polyglot, rogehm, SK53, Guillaume Rischard (Stereo), TheSwavu, derFred, richter_fn.

01/12/2020-07/12/2020

lead picture

Breaking news

The election of OSMF board members at the Annual General Meeting 2020 for the three seats in play this year led to the election of Tobias Knerr (re-elected for another term), Jean-Marc Liotier, and Eugene Alvin Villar (user seav). The resolution to make changes to the Articles of Association (which we reported earlier) and three others all succeeded.

Mapping

[1] The German OSM Forum is discussing > how to map German COVID-19 vaccination centres, whose locations are currently being published in the local media. They are also asking if anyone wants to publish a map of these centres. A proposal can be voted on until 22 December. There is also a wiki page and a first map based on uMap. A much more detailed overpass turbo query can be found here.
Discussions about hazard tags continue on the tagging list, with particular attention to the best tag to use for the common ‘falling rocks’ road sign. Various different types of unstable landforms (landslides, rock falls, mudslides, frost heave) were noted, but Kevin Kenny pointed out that nearly always the actual immediate hazard which drivers may encounter is that of already fallen rocks.
Brexit will bring many changes to the United Kingdom, some of which impinge on mapping. Brian Prangle asked, on the UK mailing list, about how to tag Inland Border Facilities. Jerry Clough (SK53) tried to find vaguely equivalent examples from around the world, but concludes that they are often not tagged in detail.
Minh Nguyen is asking for help adding businesses in Silicon Valley. You can participate in the associated MapRoulette tasks, even if you do not live in the area.
The International Day of Persons with Disabilities is observed every year on 3 December, and OpenStreetMap marks this day by saying ‘Our aim is to be the best world map for accessibility’. The statement is backed with a list of helpful resources and hints related to OSM and accessibility.
Graeme Fitzpatrick is suggesting changing existing tags for coastguard bases to landuse=military with emergency=marine_rescue. Details of the proposal are on the wiki.

Community

Alexandre Duclaux shared an updated overview of the OpenStreetMap project, which he conducted for Suez Smart Solutions in November, for French-speaking contributors who may wish to reuse all or part of its content.

Imports

Frederik Ramm, from the Data Working Group (user woodpeck), notified the Swedish community about an undiscussed import of a Lantmäteriet dataset. The import has been conducted in a covert manner, by using (presumably hacked) OpenStreetMap user accounts, many of whom do not live in or have never before mapped in Sweden.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

In the run-up to the elections for the OSMF Board of Directors, there were again some heated and overheated discussions on the Talk and OSMF-Talk mailing lists:
- Michal Migurski’s (Facebook) invitation to virtual consultation hours led to a question about the relationship between him and Facebook. Michal repeated that Facebook adhered to ‘best practices’ in terms of attribution. Richard Fairhurst pointed out that this claim is not true, Martin Koppenhoefer highligted the conflict of interest, and Jochen Topf called out the re-framing of the issue. Christoph Hormann criticised Michal for evasive responses to the questions and asked other companies to take a stand with respect to Facebook’s treatment of the attribution requirements.
- Mateusz Konieczny and Alexandre Oliviera examined Michal’s remarks point by point (1, 2).
- Andy Mabett pointed out a huge contradiction in Michal’s statements. On the one hand, Michal claims to speak as an individual, while on the other hand he stands for election to represent the interests of large companies.
- ndrw6 wrote that employees of companies like Facebook, which fulfil the attribution requirements evasively rather than proactively, should not be on the OSMF Board.
During discussions about Facebook’s strange ODbL interpretation (see above), Frederik Ramm drew a comparison of Michal Migurski’s handling of the licence with a notorious phrase about sexual assault used by Donald Trump in a 2005 interview, thus triggering a particularly heated discussion:
- Clifford Snow criticised the tone of voice, while Stevea reminded the audience that inappropriate topics should not be hushed up. Mateusz Konieczny noted that the same thing could have been said without referring to either Trump or genitalia. Martin Koppenhoefer replied that clear and unambiguous language was appropriate for major grievances.
- Rory McCann said that Frederik’s email could be seen as diminishing the seriousness of a type of crime which is already treated too lightly by many cultures and communities.
- Responding to the controversy, Frederik wrote a second email trying to provide more context as to why he used the Trump quote and provided a more detailed comparison of Facebook and Trump.
In a welcome innovation Allan Mustard, chair of OSMF, made his annual report available in advance of the Annual General Meeting, which was held on Saturday 12 December.
Joost Schouppe analysed which countries are over- and under-represented in the membership of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. He calls for mappers from under-represented countries to be made aware of the Active Contributors Membership programme.

Local chapter news

FOSSGIS announced > a number of events for 2021. The main conference is scheduled to be held in Rapperswil, Switzerland in June, but some online events will occur in the interim, including FOSSGIS-Update > on 28 January 2021.
The OSM local community in the Democractic Republic of the Congo (OSM RDC) was welcomed as the first local chapter of the OSMF in Africa.

Humanitarian OSM

Map Kibera reported on their work supporting COVID-19 community initiatives in informal settlements of Kibera, Kenya, by providing a tracker map and supporting them remotely in the use of various tools for conferences and data collection.
HOT has launched a second round of funding from the Community Impact Microgrants, supported by Facebook. In this round, six grants of $5000 will be available, three in the East Africa region and three in the Asia region, for projects that focus on a community mapping project that responds to a local challenge. Applications will close on Sunday 31 January 2021.
HOT, with support from ESRI, is offering a microgrant opportunity at the 2020 Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit: the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit Grant 2020. One grant of $5000 will be available for an OSM community that attends at least one of the sessions at the summit. In addition to being provided support, mentoring, and training during the grant period, one team member will attend and present their project at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit 2021 (date and location TBD).
Kontur wrote about how their Disaster Ninja tool is used in response planning by HOT. Russell Deffner (Response Coordinator) tells us how he uses this tool for humanitarian mapping projects, and how population data helps optimise disaster response mapping.
Tyler Radford, Executive Director of HOT, shared a message at the 2020 Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit with his thoughts on the future of the relationship between HOT and the wider humanitarian mapping community, focusing on de-emphasising HOT as an organisation, putting greater emphasis on the wider community, and amplifying community voices.

Education

OSM mapper empers has created an anonymous survey to study differences between first time mappers and long time mappers. You can take the survey here.

Software

Hauke Stieler has created the simple Android app GeoNotes to easily and quickly create and manage georeferenced notes on a map while collecting data outside.
OpenTripPlanner (OTP), a long-standing open-source software package for multi-modal routing, reached a significant milestone with the release of version 2.0. OTP was originally developed collaboratively to meet the needs of TriMet, the public transit authority for Greater Portland, Oregon. It makes use of a range of open data: notably OSM and GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification). OTP has been widely used for over 10 years in many parts of the world.Entur, a state-owned Norwegian company dedicated to providing digital infrastructure for the public transport sector, has developed the new version over 2 years. The codebase has been entirely refactored using a more modular design to improve maintainability. Functionality and performance have also been improved, notably the routing algorithm has been replaced, and additional transit feeds (SIRI, NaTEX) are now handled.

Programming

Jochen Topf provided some background on recent work on osm2pgsql (used to import OSM data into a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database), in particular the work paid for by OSMF.
The SimpleTaskManager by Hauke Stieler is now also available in German, Japanese (thanks to miurahr), and partly Chinese. In the latest update it also received a new user interface for project creation.

Did you know …

… about the the OSM Purity Self-Test? Answer the questions, sum up your points and divide by the number of questions to get an average score. Add your score to the list below. It is in average-score decreasing order. If your average score is above 2, you might need therapy for your OSM addiction.
… show me the way?

Other “geo” things

Google Design blogged about their minimalist approach to colour on Google Maps.
The deadline for submitting CoRe papers for the virtual 18th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2021) has been extended to 21 December.
Just like Mapillary, Google now allows user generated Street View photos, taken with a mobile app, to be added in areas where it has low coverage. While users have been able to submit Street View imagery in the past, it required a special 360-degree camera. This new feature just makes use of an Android phone camera.
Komoot, a German-based portal and app for outdoor activities which uses OSM, has had a change in its share ownership > . The state of Brandenburg’s innovation fund (BFB Frühphasenfonds Brandenburg) originally supported the firm with a, reportedly, 1 million Euro investment for 15% of the share capital. This investment has now been realised, and has been sold, with both René Banko (of Karstadt Kaufhof) and Berlin-based June Fund expressing interest. The latter was successful.
The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory used machine learning approaches to estimate traffic density across the entire road network of a metropolis (Los Angeles) from the road network and sparse data on actual traffic density and journey times. Sounds like a very useful approach in association with OSM, but you need a heavy duty supercomputer.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When
Berlin	150. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch (Online)	2020-12-11
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #18 (Online)	2020-12-15
Cologne Bonn Airport	134. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch (Online)	2020-12-15
Nottingham	Nottingham pub meetup	2020-12-15
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle (virtuelle)	2020-12-15

This weeklyOSM was produced by AnisKoutsi, Climate_Ben, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, NunoMASAzevedo, PierZen, Polyglot, RicoElectrico, rogehm, SK53, TheSwavu, derFred, hauke-stieler.

08/12/2020-14/12/2020

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About us

In these COVID-19 times, it is important over the New Year holidays to socially distance, take a good deep breath, walk outside, contact friends and family, and pause from regular activities.At weeklyOSM, after publishing an issue week after week without interruption since issue 219 in September 2014, issues 544 and 545 will be on holiday in some language versions. The issues that will appear will be published with reduced content, as we are unable to cover all stories due to staff shortages. If someone wants to see a very urgent item published, please be sure to use the guest access to ensure we don’t miss it.

Mapping

The tag healthcare=vaccination_centre is being proposed to map vaccination centres. It may be used with the recently approved vaccination=* key that can specify the specific vaccination available, e.g. vaccination=covid-19.
The vote on the proposal for the key electricity=* was cancelled before the end of the voting period. About 70 percent of voters had voted against the proposal at this point.
Brian Sperlongano is proposing the key hazard=* to primarily map hazardous locations that have warning signs. The key has been in use for many years with over 30,000 cases, but this proposal takes up an unfinished version from 2007 (by user Espen) and documents many examples in detail (for example, as we reported on, landslides).
António Madeira presented a proposal for the creation of the wait key, which applies to the lanes: scheme. The proposal is open for discussion.
Development of the proposal for crossing=priority has stopped.

Community

Sadly Olivier Courtin has passed away > . Olivier made substantial contributions to RoboSat after it was open sourced, and started robosat.pink and neat-eo to drive forward machine learning in the geo-spatial domain.
He always made it a priority to educate the open geo-data community, and gave various talks at OpenStreetMap conferences. He will be missed.
A Matrix/element/riot.io channel for OpenStreetMap Mexico has been created to try to revitalise their OSM community.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Heather Leson writes in her blog (and Céline Jacquin notes on the talk list) that the OSMF and OSM need to prioritise diversity and inclusion in positions of power and governance. She, and the other signatories of an open letter (in PDF) to the OSMF, are calling for the renewal and implementation of an OSM Code of Conduct and delivering on the next recommended stages for a diverse and inclusive OSM and OSMF. They want the OSMF to ask itself: who does it exist to serve? How can we be more open?
Allan Mustard announced the decisions made by the OSMF Board in response to the open letter addressed to them. A moderator team for the OSMF-talk and talk mailing lists will be setup to enforce the current Etiquette guidelines. The Board will also start work on updating/replacing their Etiquette rules and has asked the Local Chapters and Communities Working Group to take the lead on this.
Responses to the open letter on the talk mail list were many and varied. As we can’t report them all, the following is a sample of the views:
- Heather Leson (ex HOT and OSMF Board member) stated that many of the people who have signed the open letter do not participate in the OSMF mailing list’s discussions for fear of targeting. Clay Smalley also made the connection between the apparent lack of non-male voices on the mail lists and hostility towards women in the OSM community.
- Céline Jacquin pointed out that women, particularly from southern countries, are already materially limited in how much they can participate and aggression of any type further limits this.
- Kathleen Lu observed that the volume of attacks and hostile tone against Céline in reaction to the document she shared demonstrates why OSM is not a welcoming community for women.
- Maarten Deen expressed unease at supporting a document that singled out an individual, when it is supposed to be addressing a systemic issue. ndrw is concerned at the scope of the proposed changes and sees them as attempts to forcefully change OSMF governance and concentrating on issues that can’t be goals on their own.
- Mateusz Konieczny is strongly opposed to the idea of quotas and Andrew Hain is unhappy at the apparent imposition of ‘divisive North American attitudes to a worldwide project’.
- Andy Townsend noted the irony that neither Frederik’s original email nor the open letter abide by all of the points under the existing Etiquette guidelines and reminded readers that hyperbole really doesn’t help to shed light rather than heat on things.
Harry Mahardhika M shared in his diary his thoughts on the OSMF Board and OSM Community, making reference to the open letter and how it reminded him of several conversations with his colleagues and team members about the situation in the OSM community.
Arnalielsewhere explained in her diary her point of view on the question as to why women are pushing for a safe and inclusive space in OSM.
Nicolas Chavent (co-founder and former Director of HOT) believes that the open letter’s call for action will create more community awareness and result in more attention being paid to actual/potential violence in communication. He advises that prior to enforcing a Code of Conduct (CoC), the issue should be worked out within the existing Etiquette guidelines, as these have not been used to their full potential. He points out that the idea of a CoC for OSMF and OSM messaging has been advocated since 2015–2016 by HOT, which has a similar policy that he and others believe is used to control the membership and to remove a minority of members criticising particular organisational changes.
The detailed results of the OSMF board election and the proposed resolutions are available on OpaVote.

Local chapter news

OpenStreetMap Belgium interviewed December’s Mapper of the Month, Vucod.

Humanitarian OSM

The Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) announced that they are a founding partner of the ‘Anticipation Hub‘, launched on 9 December. The partners in the Hub seek to share knowledge on anticipatory actions for humanitarian aid. The lead organisations are various branches of Red Cross/Red Crescent (DRK, RCCC, IFRC).
‘Reflecting on HOT and the Humanitarian Mapping Community’, HOT Executive Director Tyler Radford’s closing remarks from the 2020 Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Summit.

Open Data

Ilya Zverev gave > an interesting overview about downloading the complete OSM database using BitTorrent and other recent developments in OSM infrastructure.

Software

Moritz Tremmel and Sebastian Grüner described > the versatility of OsmAnd in comparison to Google Maps.

Programming

Mapbox GL JS is no longer free software.
- Paul Ramsey comments on the move in his blog.
- Ilya Zverev reported > on the forks and alternative libraries being developed, and comments on the development of Mapbox.
- Paul Norman reacted, on the OSM-Dev mailing list, by saying that he is placing the client-side rendered OpenStreetMap Cartographic project on hold.
- The new MapLibre project wants to maintain a free and open source fork of Mapbox GL JS 1.x, which might make Paul reconsider his decision.
- Steve Bennett tweets that missing attribution of Mapbox GL by Azure Maps might have been a cause for Mapbox’s decision. Mapbox’s own attribution of OpenStreetMap data has been controversial.

Did you know …

… that blindly following driving directions given by a machine can lead to death? The Siberian Times reports that faulty Google Maps directions might have played a role in a tragic incident in Yakutia, Siberia, the coldest place on earth. Google Maps has since changed its directions.Note that travelling in isolated areas is hazardous, as it is difficult to verify a road’s accessibility and condition in these areas, and how this varies with weather and season. Planning, seeking advice, routing information, and survival kits are essentials for a pleasant and secure trip.
… that you can download extracts of OSM data by country or region from Geofabrik? They also have a number of other helpful tools available.
… the patents assigned to Mapbox such as finding the visual centre of a polygon and much more? Reported by @cartocalypse on Twitter.
[1] … the OpenCage Geocoder? It is based on open source software and open data, OSM of course amongst others. Registration is necessary, with up to 2500 requests per day being free.

OSM in the media

Through the World Bank / GFDRR projects since 2018, Open Cities Africa teams have trained more than 500 urban residents, students, and civil servants to gather data on risk. They have mapped over one million roads, markets, hospitals, canals, and other features onto OpenStreetMap. The objective is to have more local dynamics with participation of local actors and collectivity to assure more resilient cities to disasters and enivironment challenges.

Other “geo” things

Agreeing on the height of the highest point in the world has always been difficult. Different geodetic datums, surveying standards, varying snow cover, plate movements and the odd earthquake don’t make the problem any easier. Now Chinese and Nepalese scientists have worked together to produce a new agreed figure for the height of Mount Everest/Chomolungma/Sagarmāthā, and at 8848.86 m this is a little bit higher than earlier figures.
In a new book, Data Action – Using Data for Public Good, Associate Professor Sarah Williams issues a call for thinking ethically about data.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When
	Missing Maps London Mapathon	2021-01-05
San Jose	Virtual Civic Hack & Map Night	2021-01-08
Bochum	Bochum OSM-Stammtisch (online)	2021-01-07

This weeklyOSM was produced by AnisKoutsi, Nakaner, Nordpfeil, NunoMASAzevedo, PierZen, Polyglot, rogehm, SK53, SeverinGeo, TheSwavu, alesarrett, derFred, richter_fn.

15/12/2020-21/12/2020

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Test your local knowledge, game by ¹ | © Adam Lynch | map data © OpenStreetMap contributors | (note the festive nature of the placename)

Mapping

Michel wonders > why there are alpine huts mapped in lowland France. Françoise was more amused > by the discovery of three glaciers in Marseille (natural=glacier). Street-level imagery is available > if you want a closer look at these artisanal glaciers!
Voting is open till 4 January for the barrier=guard_stone proposal. Guard stones are architectural features generally positioned to protect a specific object, such as a corner of a building or the side of a gate.
Pascal Neis tweeted that his OSMstats tool now features counts of organised editors by country.
Wille Marcel outlined improvements recently made to OSMCha. New features include filtering changesets based on metadata, visualisation of changesets with relations, and integration with the MapRoulette micro-tasking service.

Community

The Wikimedia Deutschland Technical Wishes team > will spend two years working on the topic of ‘Better support for geoinformation‘ > . Collecting, structuring, developing and discussing problems, wishes and ideas will > take place on the wiki page. Wikimedia Deutschland is also inviting contributions from the OSM community.

Imports

User Polarbear answers > the question ‘What is an import?’ in a very understandable way.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Jean-Marc Liotier, newly elected to the OSMF Board, started a conversation about formalising the running of the OSMF operating reserves. Currently, this is around three years of historical operating expenditure. The ensuing discussion touches on a wide range of points, including how to estimate the size as expenditure increases; moral, rather than contractual, obligations to employees and others whose livelihoods depend on OSMF expenditure; and whether processes need to be set out in detail or formally at all.

Humanitarian OSM

Ed Freyfogle interviewed HOT Executive Director Tyler Radford in episode 49 of the Geomob podcast.
HOT announced that Nama Budhathoki, Founder and Executive Director of Kathmandu Living Labs, is the incoming Regional Hub Director for Asia.
Bo Percival introduced the four new members of the HOT Tech Team.
From September to November 2020, HOT Indonesia organised a mapping design competition called LOKAVISTA for university students across the nation. The mission was simple: to increase public awareness that OpenStreetMap data can be utilised for many purposes and different aspects of life.
RCD49 from MAnnheimer MAPAthons e.V (MAMAPA) reported that all 178 Stolpersteine memorials currently in Mannheim, Germany have been successfully imported into OSM. Stolpersteine commemorates victims of repression and racism during the Nazi era. The data and in-depth research regarding the history of those to whom the Stolpersteine memorials are dedicated has been done by the Mannheim City Archive (Marchivum) > .

Maps

[1] A bit of fun for the holiday break, ‘Backofyourhand‘ is a game to test your local knowledge by asking you to identify five streets in an area of your choice. The game was developed by Adam Lynch as a Christmas present for his dad.
Manfred has quickly put up a map depicting the increasing number of vaccination centres in Germany and surrounding areas.
After a friendly hint via email, the Institut für Zweiradsicherheit (Institute for Motorbike Safety) managed in less than 2 hours not only to answer, but to also correct the attribution on their Streckenheld-Karte (Route Hero Map). For this we give them a thumbs up!
infraVelo is a state-owned company that takes care of cross-district measures for improved cycling infrastructure in Berlin (Germany), all of which are visualised on a map and supplemented by detailed information and photos.
Radio-Canada/CBC published a story-map to help visualise the distribution and intensity (3D bars show cases per 100,000 people) of COVID-19 cases across Canada during the two pandemic waves of 2020.

Open Data

The deputy Director of IGN (the French national mapping agency) announced the wide availability of open data from 1 January 2021. A thread on the French mailing list discusses >
what this may mean for OSM.

Software

OpenMultiMaps is an Android application that allows you to display maps from OpenStreetMap and to quickly switch from one map to another. Maps are grouped into categories:
- Trips
- Life-skills
- Hobbies
- Regional maps
- Contributions
Geovelo is > a (navigation) app that lets cyclists find the shortest or safest route depending on their needs.
Maps.Me version 2.0 elicited some hostile feedback on twitter. The related discussion on the OSM subreddit is more informative. There seems to be a general loss of both features and functionality, in the version for Apple devices only, at present.
Simon Poole provided an update of the changes made to Vespucci in the latest version, 15.1.
Thomas Skowron announced in his OSM diary that, thanks to the microgrant from OSMF, OSMCal (OSM Calendar) is production ready. There is an extension already installed on the wiki, and a number of local chapter OSM sites and weeklyOSM are already using it.

Programming

Alen Smajic has created the ‘3D Public Transport Simulation’, a Unity-based simulation that uses OpenStreetMap data, in order to support the simulation of worldwide locations.
Jochen Topf has created two prototype implementations of a replacement for osm2pgsql’s ‘middle’ – the part of the code that remembers the details of objects that will be required again later in the import or update.

Did you know …

… clubs-de-foot-pros-europeens? It’s a uMap instance showing a map of all the professional football (soccer) clubs across Europe.
… by using the shortcuts of the DuckDuckGo search engine you can perform searches directly in OSM, Taginfo, or the Wiki?
… about SMASH? The open source iOS and Android app that helps you collect notes from the field while surveying.

Other “geo” things

Amazon Web Services has added location-based features to their web-based and mobile applications. The Amazon Location Service allows you to add maps, points of interest, geocoding, routing, geofences, and tracking to applications. Data for the service comes from Esri and HERE.
Laurie Clarke discusses some of the issues being faced by tech companies as they try to improve the diversity of their workplaces, in an article in the New Statesman.
Paul Ramsey is finding it hard to believe that Esri is inflicting yet another format on the world. Others were less surprised, saying it’s obvious that if you want to lock people into your software, it’s a good idea to make data as difficult as possible to access without your tools. The new ‘Mobile geodatabase‘ is a collection of God-knows-what in a SQLite file.
Still looking for a very last minute gift for a geography and map fan in your life? Laura Bliss has a number of ideas for you.
Shane Hickey tells the tale of Simon Borghs’s three year battle to get a postcode error fixed on Google Maps; a battle won only after the Observer approached Google to ask why they were unable to fix it. The story highlights the perils of the increasing reliance on private companies and the data they hold.
British place names are notoriously hard to pronounce. The Map Men allege that rather than being traps deliberately set for unsuspecting tourists, British place names reflect the history of the Isles.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When
	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2021-01-05
Landau an der Isar	Virtuelles Niederbayern-Treffen	✓	2021-01-05
San Jose	Virtual Civic Hack & Map Night		2021-01-08
Bochum	Bochum OSM-Stammtisch (online)		2021-01-07
Warszawa	Virtual community meeting.		2021-01-08
Chippewa Township	Michigan Online Meetup	✓	2021-01-14

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by Nakaner, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Polyglot, rogehm, SK53, TheSwavu, alesarrett, derFred.

22/12/2020-28/12/2020

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About us

The entire weeklyOSM team thank you for your interest and wish you a Happy New Year 2021.

Mapping

Comments are currently being sought on the following proposals:
- Reservoir: deprecating landuse=reservoir and clarifying the definitions of a number of values for the key water (Tagging list announcement).
- highway=cart_path: for tagging paths specifically constructed for golf carts use on golf courses (Tagging list announcement).
- traffic_calming=hillocky: for tagging a line of small speed bumps laid out across a road (Tagging list announcement).
- Power storage: aims to standardise the tagging of different methods of storing energy (Tagging list announcement).
- addr:range: to indicate how a hyphenated house number (for example addr:housenumber=190-196) should be interpreted (Tagging list announcement).
- spring:name: to record the name of the spring that is the source of water at a tap (Tagging list announcement).
Voting has started on these proposals:
- Pumping Proposal: to add more detail to something tagged man_made=pump.
- Rescue Stations: to extend the list of values for the emergency key to better map facilities involved in rescue operations.
Voting has closed on the following proposals:
- Hazard: was approved with 35 votes for, 0 votes against, and 1 abstention.
- Vaccination: was approved with 25 votes for, 0 votes against, and 4 abstentions.
Anders Torger asked the tagging list ‘Fuzzy areas again: should we have them or not?’. Fuzzy areas are things such as the Libyan Desert or Dinaric Alps, which everyone can point to on a small scale map, but as we zoom in the more arguments you’ll get.
Carlos Brys has written > an introduction to editing OpenStreetMap using OSM Go!
Taylor Smock, the maintainer of the JOSM Mapillary plugin, has added new functionality called ‘Smart Edits’, which allows mappers to add missing features detected by Mapillary’s object detection to OSM. Clicking on the markers opens a pre-filled edit dialogue with the relevant properties.
Mappers in Poland processed over 2000 notes during December 2020. It is the highest number since notes were added to OpenStreetMap. It is worth noting that these notes were actually processed and not just blindly closed. See the note situation in you country and maybe solve some of them! And thanks to eBin who processed a massive amount of notes which encouraged others to do the same.
Paul Dutronc (user polo0000) has analysed > the mapping of glass bottle recycling collection points in Lyon for accuracy and completeness. He found that OSM is more precise about where the collection points are located, than the Métropole de Lyon’s dataset, but less complete, with only 33% of points currently mapped.
Tobias Jordans reported, in his diary, about a camera tripod prototype he has developed for capturing Mapillary pictures by bicycle.
Map Bundles is a new service by Protomaps for downloading vector basemap tiles based on OpenStreetMap data updated minute by minute. Example HTML and map styles are included. Bundles are designed to encourage rapid integration of OSM edits into custom slippy maps. You can find more details in Brandon Liu’s diary entry.

Community

Pointing out the discouragement felt by some new mappers within the OSM community and supporting a free and more inclusive approach, Jikka Defiño shared some tips for new mappers and described how to use the #newbie tag in her diary.

Local chapter news

FOSSGIS is the largest German-speaking user conference for free geographic information systems and free geodata. The organising committee is calling > for expressions of interest from people who want to present at the conference, to be held 6 to 9 June 2021 as a hybrid online and in-person event (at Rapperswil if the pandemic situation allows). Submissions from those who wish to participate must be in by 7 February 2021.
Nominations for the OpenStreetMap US 2021 Board election opened on 1 January 2021 and close on 24 January. Nominations can be made on the wiki page. 29 January 2021 is the deadline to become a member and be eligible to vote.
Inspired by Projet du mois > and Wochenaufgabe, OpenStreetMap US has launched ’12 Months of OpenStreetMap’. January’s theme is ‘Let it Snow! A Celebration of Winter’, concentrating on snowmobile routes, ski resorts, and emergency snow routes. Suggestions of themes for future months can be made on the wiki page.

Humanitarian OSM

Oğuzhan Er reported on the progress being made by Yer Çizenler using their HOT community development microgrant. Their aim is to add Turkish language support to OpenStreetMap related tools, to translate the existing OpenStreetMap documents into Turkish, and to expand the infrastructure of Yer Çizenler’s volunteer base while considering gender equality and community diversity.
Yer Çizenler, a local NGO in Istanbul Turkey, has shared the data collected and report written after the Aegean Sea Earthquake, on Github.
Adhitya Dido Widyanto outlined what the Pacific Disaster Center Indonesia achieved in 2020.
Geoffrey Kateregga shared his thoughts about ‘Localising Community Support through regional hubs’. Geoffrey’s review of the mapping communities of East Africa is part of his work as the Community Programs Manager based out of the HOT Uganda office.

Maps

Walter Nordmann (Wambacher) has set up his ‘Healthcare Map’, which allows the display of doctors, pharmacies and vaccination centres against a selectable background.
[1] From 25 December OpenTopoMap now provides OSM maps for Garmin worldwide.

Software

’15-minute Santa’ is a game where you deliver presents across Seattle. You earn more points delivering to high-density housing, and you need to refuel from shops, so you’ll have to understand where people live in relation to where they work and shop. You can download it to run on Windows, Mac, or Linux; or just play it online (slower and without music).
As we reported last week, version 2.0 of Maps.Me on Apple hardware has lost significant functionality. A thread on HackerNews provides further discussion with various recommendations for suitable replacement software.
Telegram is a messaging service used widely by the OSM community. TechCrunch reports that its founder Pavel Durov said that the platform needs to generate revenue starting next year to keep the business afloat. The service will introduce its own ad platform for public one-to-many channels and the question remains as to if these will be extended to groups in the future.
WHODIDIT is now working again after a server upgrade.

Releases

StreetComplete continues to have new features added and existing ones improved. These features include support for tagging shops and other objects as gone (directly within SC), improvements to the interface, and asking about the maximum allowed vehicle heights for roads passing under bridges.

Did you know …

… that support for Adobe Flash in major browsers was removed at the end of 2020? And that Adobe will block Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning 12 January 2021? As a result Potlatch 2 will be no more. Its replacement Potlatch 3 runs under Adobe AIR on Mac and Windows (Linux is a work in progress).
… Rob’s OSM Stuff includes a list of OSM objects in the UK that you’d expect to have a name, but which do not have a name tag?
… the OSM Editor Layer Index lists aerial imagery and map layers that can be used in OpenStreetMap? The equivalent list for JOSM can be found on their wiki.
… this simple calculator can show the shortest connection (geodesic) between two points on a world map? The site can also calculate other things such as distance to the horizon or distance from a point to a line.
… that MapRoulette has its own blog?

Other “geo” things

For over 100 years, King William’s College, a private school on the Isle of Man, has set a fiendish general knowledge quiz for its students. Originally the paper was examined twice: once sight unseen before the Christmas break, and once again when pupils returned to school. There are usually a number of geo-related questions or themes (for instance group 3 this year), but rest assured they’re as hard as the rest. The average score on the unseen paper was 2/180 with the best scores being around 50.
Analysis of data from weather stations near Mount Everest has shown that the height of the mountain measured by an altimeter (or your lungs) can vary by up to 740 m. This means that at times K2 can feel taller than Everest.
eBikeNews introduced > the new, very versatile Bryton Rider 750 bicycle navigation system.
The Australian edition of The Guardian presented the oddest (sometimes rude) names for real places in Australia.
The Geospatial Evaluation and Observation Lab (Geolab) shared their 2020 Annual Report. This Lab based at the William & Mary research university campus, Williamsburg, Virginia, collects and provides open GeoBoundaries data of administrative zones and other geolocated data. It also conducts AI projects.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When
	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2021-01-05
Landau an der Isar	Virtuelles Niederbayern-Treffen	✓	2021-01-05
San Jose	Virtual Civic Hack & Map Night	✓	2021-01-08
Bochum	Bochum OSM-Stammtisch (online)		2021-01-07
Dresden	Dresdner OSM-Stammtisch	✓	2021-01-07
Warszawa	Virtual community meeting.		2021-01-08
	Virtual meeting of the Polish OSM Association		2021-01-09
Zürich	OSM-Treffen Zürich		2021-01-11
Chippewa Township	Michigan Online Meetup	✓	2021-01-14
	OpenStreetMap US Mappy Hour		2021-01-14
Berlin	151. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch (Online)		2021-01-14
Warszawa	Virtual community meeting.		2021-01-15
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle (virtuelle) Lyon	✓	2021-01-19
	Missing Maps DRK Online Mapathon		2021-01-19
	135. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2021-01-19
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #19 (Online)		2021-01-19
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2021-01-19

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by Mateusz Konieczny, Nordpfeil, Polyglot, rogehm, SK53, Sammyhawkrad, TheSwavu, derFred.

29/12/2020-04/01/2021

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About us

If an important article is missing, then you have forgotten to enter it here! A short instruction explains in four steps how it works.

Mapping

The French Project of the Month is to add power poles >
on the regional distribution network controlled by Enedis > , which comprises about 95% of the national network.
The following draft proposals are asking for comments:
- Tom Pfeifer’s proposal on emergency=disaster_response
- ipswichmapper’s proposal on addr:interval=*
You can now vote on the following proposals:
- electricity=*, which indicates the electricity source used in a public building or amenity (until 14 January).
- amenity=place_of_mourning, to tag a room or building where families and friends can come, before a funeral, and view the body of the person who has died (until 15 January).
- military=* to tag bases of various branches of military services (until 16 January).
- healthcare=vaccination_centre to tag a healthcare facility where people are vaccinated (until 15 January).
Several National Parks in England and Wales went ‘missing‘ on OSM. Andy Townsend (SomeoneElse) explains his approach to diagnosing what was wrong with the relations for these objects.
If you (maybe as an OSM beginner) want to know how to track your edits to OSM as a number in the form of CS (changesets), this thread > in the German forum might be helpful for you.

Community

CycleStreets, the Cambridge (England) not-for profit social enterprise, reviewed their work for 2020. They provide sophisticated OSM-based cycle routing, both on their own website, and through white label sites for other organisations.
Missing Maps published a blog from a community member, mapmaker David, on how mapping should involve participation of and accountability towards the communities being mapped.

Events

The first (London) Geomob of 2021 will be an online session on Wednesday 13 January at 19:00 GMT. Sign-up is now open via Google Forms.

Humanitarian OSM

Pete Masters shared an OSM diary on ‘Potential HOT tasking manager improvements to help new and existing contributors collaborate more effectively’.

Maps

Christopher Beddow wrote a blog post about why ‘OSM fails to compete with Google Maps’. Although they work for Facebook subsidiary Mapillary these posts are from an entirely personal point of view and include numerous examples of how digital maps fit into work and leisure activities. This initial post has already seen a lot of commentary on the OSM subreddit and Hacker News.

Software

GpsPrune is an application for viewing, editing and converting coordinate data from GPS systems. Basically, it’s a tool to let you play with your GPS data after you get home from your trip. Besides English, the how-tos are also available in German, French and Spanish.
OsmAnd published its ‘New Year resolutions’ for 2021 and also lists achievements from 2019 and 2020. You can select your language directly using the integrated Google Translator on the website.
Jiri Vlasak provided an update on their ‘Divide and map. Now.‘ project, which helps mappers by dividing big areas into smaller squares that a human can map.

Programming

Finnish researchers have used OSM to simulate the logistics associated with volunteer Fire Departments to ask if the commonly used approach of ‘go to the fire station and then respond together’ is actually the best solution.

Releases

Bryce Cogswell announced that the latest release of GoMap!! (2.0.7) is available at the iOS App Store. This release includes some substantial new features, including greatly extended presets (using the Name Suggestion Index and iD presets), dark mode, and an updated user interface. Of particular significance is support for a number of languages beyond the original English.
Sven Geggus wrote about changes made to improve the consistency of tagging for capacity of campsites, which can be number of tents or persons. He also asks for help to fix the localisation of his Camping Sites Map in French, Spanish, and Russian.

Did you know …

… OSM is useful for postal delivery workers?
… about the Wiki Site ‘How to map a …‘?
… that the Massachusetts Bureau of Geographic Information (MassGIS) offers public domain imagery and feature maps for Massachusetts that can be integrated into OSM editors? Included is aerial imagery, a labelled topographic map, property line boundaries, and shaded relief LiDAR (especially neat as it can help locate stone walls and narrow streams beneath tree cover).
… that the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency runs their own OpenStreetMap instance, including their own base map (with English language names in brackets after local non-Latin ones), Nominatim, overpass turbo, and OSRM routing). It’s only provided for US Government ‘authorized’ use only, so don’t go too crazy and do something unauthorised.
[1] … about the GIS Jobs Map? It is a jobs portal showing GIS job openings around the world, overlaid on an OSM basemap.

Other “geo” things

Frank Jacobs, at Strange Maps, produced an interesting and quirky set of thematic maps which show the zombie footprints of the German Democratic Republic.
Intents, an Indian tech startup, has released a pothole warning app. The app is based on HERE technology. The data is collected by a separate app, partly automated, which is used by taxi and truck drivers. Machine learning will also be used in the future to estimate the danger of potholes. According to the developers, around 20 people die every day in India in traffic accidents caused by potholes.
Simon Weckert and Moritz Ahlert presented their art projects based around Google Maps in an entertaining video talk at the Remote Chaos Experience of the Chaos Computer Club – among them, of course, the 99 mobile phones in a small cart. This activity effectively simulated traffic jams and ensured traffic-free streets in Berlin (as we reported earlier).
A prize question for the community: According to an article at n-tv > (the embedded video is already in English), there is only one tree on Campbell Island, a squat old Sitka spruce, but no one is sure exactly how old it is or how it came to be there. Now an overpass query finds two trees on the island, so which one is in the correct place? Who can find the correct answer and the correct tree? The prize is a mention in the next weeklyOSM for the first user to answer this question correctly …

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When
	Virtual meeting of the Polish OSM Association		2021-01-09
Tamia Tahsil	Naksha 2021		2021-01-10 – 2021-01-16
Zürich	OSM-Treffen Zürich		2021-01-11
München	Münchner OSM-Stammtisch		2021-01-12
Chippewa Township	Michigan Online Meetup	✓	2021-01-14
Osborne County	OpenStreetMap US Mappy Hour	✓	2021-01-14
Berlin	151. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch (Online)		2021-01-14
Warszawa	Virtual community meeting.		2021-01-15
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle (virtuelle) Lyon	✓	2021-01-19
	135. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2021-01-19
	Missing Maps DRK Online Mapathon		2021-01-19
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #19 (Online)		2021-01-19
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2021-01-19
San Jose	Virtual Civic Hack & Map Night	✓	2021-01-22
Warszawa	Virtual community meeting.		2021-01-22
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)		2021-01-25
Ville de Bruxelles – Stad Brussel	Virtual OpenStreetMap Belgium meeting	✓	2021-01-26
Warszawa	Virtual community meeting.		2021-01-29

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by Climate_Ben, Nordpfeil, rogehm, SK53, Sammyhawkrad, SomeoneElse, TheSwavu, derFred, richter_fn.

05/01/2021-11/01/2021

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Mapping campaigns

OpenStreetMap Uganda, with support from the OpenStreetMap Foundation, has begun mapping 15 newly created cities in Uganda. Currently three cities (Mbarara, Masaka and Jinja) have been mapped and are being validated.
OpenStreetMap Ghana is mapping Accra to increase map coverage in the capital. This is to support Ministries, Metropolitan Municipal and District Assemblies, local organisations, individuals and other stakeholders by giving them access to quality map data. You can contribute to this project through the HOT Tasking Manager.

Mapping

IpswichMapper described how to facilitate the tagging of housenumbers in StreetComplete by processing building data upstream with JOSM.
Voting is open till 21 January for the traffic_calming=circle_bumps proposal. These are groups of small bumps, installed as traffic calming devices.
As we have reported the Potlatch online Flash-based editors are no longer supported. They are not available anymore on the OSM website, but contributors with one of these editors as their default will need to re-save their editor settings, according to a comment on GitHub.

Community

Christian Quest categorises >
OpenStreetMap contributors as hunters, gatherers and gardeners, roughly corresponding to phases of the population and use of the OSM database itself. The post is particularly a plea for more gardeners to maintain and improve OSM data, and for more tools to help them.
Mikel exploits a somewhat tenuous link, between incoming US president Joe Biden and the townlands mapping project of OSM Ireland, to publicise the work of OpenStreetMap.
Anne-Karoline Distel has made a short video introducing OSM for heritage groups in Ireland.
Mateusz Konieczny is proposing a minor revision to the rules associated with proposal approval.

Imports

The recent availability of open data from the French national mapping agency, IGN, prompts some words of advice and caution >
from Christian Quest. Frédéric Rodrigo offered a sneak preview > of an analysis of the data within Osmose.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

Allan Mustard, chair of OSMF, announced that the Foundation will shortly be running an online survey. The survey will be available in a range of languages and is currently being translated.
The OSM Foundation is setting up a Software Dispute Resolution Panel (as we reported). Now, they are looking for five volunteers to join the panel.

Local chapter news

OpenStreetMap Belgium interviewed January’s Mapper of the Month, Jorisbo.

Humanitarian OSM

Bo Percival has been writing short OSM diary entries to outline a series of rapid assessment and design sprints organised by the HOT Tech team. The sprints cover five days and have focused on topics such as group mapping.
HOT described work done by volunteers to map the floating informal settlement of Makoko using drones and canoes. This informal settlement, much of it built on stilts, is a French- and Egon-speaking enclave in Lagos (as we reported last year).
HOT’s lead of transformation and community, Rebecca Firth (osm RebeccaF) has announced the newly formed Community Team, with Pete Masters as director. She welcomed team members in her diary. The team aims to reorient HOT’s work and to serve OSM communities around the world.
Ruben Martin, a new HOT staff member in the Community Team, shared an OSM Diary of his first week with HOT and humanitarian mapping.

Education

Betaslb has published > an OSM blog post showing how they work with free software and data in public schools. The students of the Jerónimo Emiliano de Andrade School in the Azores used uMap to create a map ‘Futebol em Portugal é intercultural!’ with the birthplaces of the football players of the Portuguese first division. The students wanted to show that football is intercultural and that phenomena such as racism, xenophobia and intolerance do not belong in this world.

Maps

Daniel Hofmann (daniel-j-h) has created a map of public toilets with a cute url: ineedto.pe. Data are based on OpenStreetMap, with standardised attributes available with a click. The code is available on GitHub as an example of domain-driven development.
With COVID-19 vaccination centres opening across many countries, there is widespread interest in how accessible they are to the population. HeiGIT, in Heidelberg, have used OpenRouteService to calculate this for nearly all centres in Germany.NHS England has a map (pdf file) of locations showing all places further than 10 miles (16 km) from the nearest centre.You will find more maps and analyses, especially calculating and illustrating lines of equal distance around positions and regions, in this and next week’s weeklyOSM.
Walter Nordmann’s website now has a map of healthcare facilities in the DACH countries (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland). Naturally it is based on OSM data.

Software

On Sunday evening (10 January), at the traditional online meeting of the ‘Code for Niederrhein, Moers’, a map display was programmed (the coder was Jan), which will show a buffer (an integer number of kilometres) around any OSM relation that is tagged with a wikidata value. A little patience is required with the query. After about 20 seconds it zooms to the result. So far it is only a proof of concept, without much consideration of usability. If you want to see your own movement zones, you can make appropriate adjustments to the URL of the query. Here are the links to GitHub: 1 and 2. Your feedback will be very much appreciated.
Within the COVID-19 restrictions for Germany there is talk of a 15 km circle. Around what is not yet clearly defined everywhere, but Norbert Kück solved the problem using Leaflet, allowing any point to be clicked on the map and a 15 km radius circle to be drawn around it. The THW Markt Schwaben > website allows you to search for a specific address to use as the centre and to specify the circle’s radius.
2kmfromhome is a website that draws a circle of a fixed radius from a given point, using OSM as a base layer. It was created during the first Irish COVID-19 lockdown, but has been used across the world over the past year. The 15 km option may be particularly useful for German readers of weeklyOSM.
The StreetComplete developers presented their thoughts on an option that, in contrast to the previous query-response mode, allows existing data to be displayed, checked, supplemented and corrected.
The Maps.me GitHub repositories have now been cloned, and a preliminary website is available for the Maps.me fork OMaps, which has arisen in response to the problems with Maps.me we reported earlier.

Programming

Pierre Béland discussed some ideas for enhancing Toby Murray’s ChangesetMD (a Python programme for replicating changeset metadata in a PostgreSQL database) to respond to local communities’ needs for analysis. Pierre has published a fork on GitHub along with test files (Linux shell script and Windows Powershell).

Did you know …

… Flopp.net? Some states in Germany have restricted the movement of their populations due to COVID-19. Flopp.net allows you to set a movement radius and use it to draw a circle around a point on an OSM map.
… about EasyPresets? It is a JOSM plugin that helps you create and use your own custom presets.
… the Windy.com website? You can follow the current weather situation worldwide, for many different meteorological elements, over the next nine days, using the slider. The site uses OpenStreetMap as a base map.

OSM in the media

Simon Poole, president of the Swiss OSM local chapter, was interviewed about OSM on the SRF2 radio channel. The write-up > on SRF’s website will be more accessible to non-German speakers. Shortly afterwards there was a noticeable uptick in new mappers.
Taiwanese technology review website and podcast Daodu reviewed and translated > the article by Joe Morrison (which we covered earlier) describing an unofficial alliance between Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple against Google. Supaplex feels that local journalists have little awareness of the OSM community in Taiwan, which meant the discussion missed the local context.

Other “geo” things

Congratulations to Bernard for correctly identifying the one true Sitka spruce on Campbell Island (we asked last week). Your complimentary copy of weeklyOSM should be available in your browser, in about a week’s time.
Joe Morrison speculates that Google Maps’ dominance of the global mapping market may have reached a peak.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When
Tamia Tahsil	Naksha 2021		2021-01-10 – 2021-01-16
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle (virtuelle) Lyon	✓	2021-01-19
	Missing Maps DRK Online Mapathon		2021-01-19
	135. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2021-01-19
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #19 (Online)		2021-01-19
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2021-01-19
San Jose	Virtual Civic Hack & Map Night	✓	2021-01-22
Warszawa	Virtual community meeting.		2021-01-22
臺中市	2021 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 新手教學工作坊		2021-01-24
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)		2021-01-25
Ville de Bruxelles – Stad Brussel	Virtual OpenStreetMap Belgium meeting	✓	2021-01-26
Warszawa	Virtual community meeting.		2021-01-29
臺北市	OSM x Wikidata #25		2021-02-01
	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2021-02-02
Landau an der Isar	Virtuelles Niederbayern-Treffen	✓	2021-02-02
San Jose	Virtual Civic Hack & Map Night	✓	2021-02-05
Dresden	Dresdner OSM-Stammtisch	✓	2021-02-04

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by Elizabete, Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Polyglot, rogehm, SK53, Sammyhawkrad, Supaplex, TheSwavu, YoViajo, alesarrett, derFred.