“𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐡 𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐨𝐧.” – 𝐖𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐲

I am honored to have participated in the 2024 Climate Change Challenge as a member of “𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑷𝒊𝒏 𝑫𝒓𝒐𝒑𝒑𝒆𝒓𝒔”. This challenge, organized by the Open Mapping Hub - Asia Pacific from May 20 to June 20, 2024, brought together over 200 participants from 54 teams to address climate change through collaborative open mapping efforts. I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute my mapping skills alongside so many passionate individuals, and I am proud to have received the Certificate of Participation. It’s inspiring to see how open mapping can make a real impact on global climate action. 𝗜𝘁’𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝗽𝗶𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗲𝗲 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗺𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴, 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘀𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗼𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 TomTom, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) & Open Mapping Guru , 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗱𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗳𝘂𝗹 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲.

ClimateAction #OpenMapping #MappingForChange#ThePinDroppers#OpenStreetMap#ClimateChallenge#openmappingguru

The Discovery

Today was a big milestone for me as an OpenStreetMap (OSM) contributor—I submitted my first-ever bug report! 🎉

• While exploring the iD Editor, I stumbled upon something odd. When the “Quality Assurance” tab in the Help section is open, the “Keyboard Shortcuts” option becomes unclickable. Strange, right? What’s even more curious is that this doesn’t happen with any other Help tab—just this one. Naturally, I couldn’t let it go unnoticed.

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The Process

Here’s what I did step-by-step:

1. I opened the Help section and navigated through different tabs to test the behavior.

2. As expected, all the other tabs worked fine, but when “Quality Assurance” was active, the “Keyboard Shortcuts” button refused to work.

3. To make sure my findings were clear, I documented:

   • Steps to reproduce the issue.
   • What I expected to happen versus what actually happened.
   • Screenshots to visually explain the problem.

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The Submission

Feeling a little nervous, I finally submitted my findings as Issue #10573 on GitHub. To my surprise, within hours, one of the repository maintainer (@tyrasd) confirmed the issue!

Here’s the coolest twist: The issue behaves differently in other languages! For example, it doesn’t happen in the Italian locale. This insight gave me a new appreciation for the complexity of building tools that work seamlessly across different environments.

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The Reflection

This may seem like a small contribution, but to me, it feels huge. By reporting this bug, I’ve left my little mark on a platform I admire so much. It’s exciting to know that even small actions like this help improve the tools that people worldwide rely on every day.

The OSM community is incredibly welcoming, and this experience reminded me that even as a beginner, my efforts are valued.

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Final Thoughts

… See full entry

Santarém To Belém - We Ran Out Of River

Daybreak on our last full day on the river could hardly have been more depressing. The sky I could see from my hammock was a grey-brown colour, and the smell of burning wood was stronger than ever. We were in the middle of the river and there was very little visibility. It hardly even makes It into the news headlines any more, our ability to adapt to the mess we have created means that relatively few people are aware of just how serious the situation is as Amazonía burns.

Fortunately we were not going to spend all of the last leg with the smog. Slowly the sky started to clear, and things seemed better again. The forest on either side even looked a bit more like It had in the upper part of the river.

… See full entry

About 2 days ago, the map started to be darkened. This only occurs on Firefox and Chrome, and it appears to be caused by the browser’s light/dark settings. I am still not certain about the cause.

On the first day of every month, I run a manual monthly statistics script to calculate which Wikipedia article is the most active.

Today, while analyzing this month’s statistics logs, I came across an interesting article.

… See full entry

The Last Boat - Santarém To Belém

Another early start, the day had come for getting on our last boat, the one that would take us to Belém. It wasn’t a promising start, I opened the window in the hotel and the smell of wood smoke was stronger than on any other day here. With limited visibility over the river.

We walked down to the port to find that the boat was already there. The Amazon Star had come down quite full from Manaus and this time we weren’t going to be lucky with our choice of hammock position. It was more a question of finding any free position, which we managed somehow with hammock ropes almost crossing.

Despite the grand sounding name the Amazon Star is a fairly basic boat, we had been spoiled a bit with our boat to Santarem. But It had an open space upstairs and a well stocked bar. The only things that let us down were the views of the river, the smog caused by fires was to be with us for some time to come.

… See full entry

Alter do Chão

So we found something to do with our extra day in Santarém. The Guardian published an article in 2009 on the 10 best beaches in Brazil and there at number 1 is Alter do Chão. This qualifies It as a ‘hidden gem’ which these days means that only 50 million people know about It.

The bus from Santarém to Alter do Chão takes about an hour, and dropped us off just a couple of minutes from the beach. White sands, sparkling river wáter, with forest in the background - It is a beautiful place although I’m not convinced It will be the most beautiful in all of Brazil.

It was quiet too, most of the bars and restaurants on the beach were closed. Clearly not peak season. But the one place that was operating still did good business serving drinks and food to tables that are placed in the water a couple of metres off the beach.

… See full entry

January 29, 2023

On running sudo apt update, users will get a notification similar to this, stating that several packages from the universe repository have security updates that require Ubuntu Pro:

The following security updates require Ubuntu Pro with ‘esm-apps’ enabled: imagemagick libopenexr25 libmagick++-6.q16-8 libmagickcore-6.q16-6-extra libmagickwand-6.q16-6 imagemagick-6.q16 libmagickcore-6.q16-6 imagemagick-6-common

February 10, 2023

Currently we run a combination of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS across our server estate.

Ubuntu 20.04 has recently moved away from the established 5 years of maintenance updates and now requires a paid Ubuntu Pro plan to receive some package security updates.

We’ve also had issues with Ubuntu not fully supporting the packages they source from Debian (e.g. : Apache2 which required us to backport a fixed version to workaround an issue affecting mpm event scaling).

Ubuntu has also caused us issue with some packages now only being distributed as snap packages (e.g. : Firefox).

February 20, 2023

Your Ubuntu LTS is still secured in exactly the same way it has always been, with five years of free security updates for the ‘main’ packages in the distribution, and best-effort security coverage for everything else. This has been the promise of Ubuntu since our first LTS in 2006, and remains exactly the same. In fact, thanks to our expanded security team, your LTS is better secured today than ever before, even without Ubuntu Pro.

Ubuntu Pro is an additional stream of security updates and packages that meet compliance requirements such as FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) or HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), on top of an Ubuntu LTS.

As part of our global mission to amplify the impact of free software, we offer a free personal subscription to Ubuntu Pro that covers up to 5 machines.

November 24, 2023

Servers fume and grisu are now running Debian 12.

… See full entry

Santarém

My first impressions of Santarém were not very favourable. I had the idea of It being a smaller city, but It covers a wide área and our hostal was quite a distance from the centre. Three nights we had here, and It wasn’t clear what we could with that time.

We walked to the centre and found nice places to be by the river, and a restaurant serving regional dishes, including one (Maniçoba) where they have to cook the manioc leaves for days to remove the toxins. I’m still here to tell the story so they must have done It right.

The first full day we dedicated to exploring the centre and looking for another hotel not so far from the port for our final night. There was, naturally, some mapping to be done as we walked around. Outside of the centre there were areas with few amenities mapped.

The haze from the fires comes and goes in the city, with the wind. But at times the smell of smoke is very strong, and the pollution gets to your eyes and throat. Glad I don’t live here, Madrid ‘s traffic pollution is seriously unhealthy but not as bad as this.

… See full entry

Manaus To Santarém

Another early morning start as we walked down to the port at dawn to catch the Santarém boat. This time there was none of the queuing and complication that we had in Tabatinga - we showed our ticket and went straight on to the boat.

The early bird catches the best hammock position, and the first impressions of the Madame Crys were positive. It seemed to be a more modern boat than for Tabatinga to Manaus. It didn’t fill up completely but was busy and we did the right thing getting there early.

As we left Manaus It was clear that this was a more powerful, but less noisy, boat. We were up front looking for the meeting of the waters as the appropriately named Río Negro joins the Amazon a short distance out from Manaus For kilometres the two rivers run with little mixing and very different colours, and our boat steered very close to the visible dividing line.

… See full entry

Debrief conducted by Sam Colchester (HOT) partner engagement lead for this activation.

Relevant statistics

In total 171 contributors made over 125,000 edits to OSM including mapping over 96,000 buildings as part of this campaign. (See ohsomeNow Stats page for tracking overall contributions)

Nigeria Floods 2024 daily contributors

Narrative summary

Shortly after the severe flood event in Nigeria on Tuesday 10 September 2024 the director of the Open Mapping Hub - West and Northern Africa requested support from HOT’s central team to respond.

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Manaus

I had very mixed feelings about returning to Manaus, 36 years after my first failed attempt at an Amazon boat ride to Belém. I hadn”t expected ever to return, had it not been for the FOSS4G announcement of Belém as the 2024 location. I hadn’t liked the city much the first time, although this had a lot to do with the local climate. Maybe I’m a bit more used to this now, after living so many years in Spain, but Manaus still felt like the hottest place I had been on the journey.

We got a new member of the team here, my partner Silvia flew in from Madrid just a few hours after the Tabatinga boat had docked. When she booked her flight back in August we had very little idea of when I was going to arrive in Manaus, in the end it worked out very well.

… See full entry

My Talk at State of the Map 2024

(How the iD Editor still can to do better in the long term)

This September, I presented some ideas for the future of OSM’s iD editor at the State of the Map conference in Nairobi. Now, the video recording of the talk is online. To summarize the talk’s content: I identified two core challenges faced by the iD editor which need to be addressed in the upcoming years:

1. Data Complexity

Naturally, OSM’s data got more complex over time – as an example, a simple school might have typically been mapped as a single POI node in OSM a couple of years ago, while nowadays the state of the art is to model it using multiple map features that are nested within each other. While this allows to represent the reality in a high level of detail, the added complexity needs to be accommodated for by the tooling, especially in an editor tailored for beginner mappers like iD. For a deep dive into this topic, see also Sarah Hoffmann’s talk at the same conference.

… See full entry

Tabatinga To Manaus 3

By day 3 on the Manaus boat I was beginning to doubt that we might get there the next day. It seemed the boat was moving too slowly, we were tracking the route and there was a lot of river still before Manaus.

What we didn’t know is that the boat stops less on the second half of the journey, I guess because many of the places further downstream have their own services to Manaus. It did stop briefly in the river a couple of times just to let people off onto a smaller boat that was waiting.

The main event of the third day was a fairly thorough police check of the boat. I was fast asleep in my hammock when It happened, men had to line up on one side of the deck, women on the other. All baggage was also lined up in the middle so they could pass the sniffer dog by everything. We were stopped about an hour for this, it’s quite a routine thing on public transport here, I was told.

… See full entry

Tabatinga To Manaus 2

Sleeping solidly is not that simple, the boat can stop at any time of night, and it turns out the range of comfortable sleeping positions in a hammock is not that big. But it doesn’t matter, the only schedule on board revolves around meal times, there’s nothing else to prevent anyone from resting when they feel like it. It can also be surprisingly cold on the open boat at night. I came prepared with a thin blanket and it’s not unusual to feel the need for a cover during the night. The first night there was also a distraction, a spectacular lightning display in the distance.

Day 2 started with our early breakfast, a ham roll and a cup of ridiculously sweet coffee. If there is one thing I really dislike in Brazil it is this custom where the people who make the coffee decide how much sugar the person who drinks the coffee is going to want. It’s always a lot, obviously there is a major sugar cane surplus. I managed to get some progress done on my diary entries and then it was river watching as a big rain storm moved in whilst the boat was ar one of the stops. In 20 minutes water was pouring down all the slopes towards the port. A small creek under a wooden bridge transformed into a torrent. All water still welcome in tbe Amazon, looking at the banks of the river I reckon there is room in the river for 8-10 metres more of water.

… See full entry

In the past weekend, I did (two) walks in Ghent where we used https://mapcomplete.org/surveillance to spot surveillance cameras. The press was interested as well, resulting in some interviews and articles!

Those are in Dutch of course.

The local TV did a decent job: https://avs.be/nieuws/openstreetmap-vrijwilligers-brengen-cameras-in-gent-in-kaart

The newspaper article: https://www.hln.be/gent/vrijwilligers-trekken-door-gentse-straten-om-alle-cameras-in-kaart-te-brengen-een-half-miljoen-hangen-er-in-dit-land-maar-niemand-weet-exact-waar~a8b9341c/ which isn’t to bad as well (paywalled, without paywall: https://archive.ph/4GUZQ)

And on VTM: https://www.vtmgo.be/vtmgo/afspelen/e9e73a3b-b932-400a-91b9-af78622cbbaf (starting at 20:30, account required; I wasn’t able to rip it)

Edit 2024-12-02: the local municipalities also wrote about it: https://www.wvigisco.be/tips-en-tricks/open-data/openstreetmap/vrijwilligers-inventariseren-bewakingscameras-met-mapcomplete/

(If you don’t want to create an account, you can also find them on my NAS)

A new week, a new OpenStreetMap-NG development update. This week, we announce the release of two significant features: an overhaul of the User Diaries and the implementation of client-side password hashing.

🔖 You can read other development diaries here:
@NorthCrab/diary/

⭐ This project is open-source — join us today:
https://github.com/openstreetmap-ng/openstreetmap-ng

🛈 This initiative is not affiliated with the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

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Video Summary

Join me for a guided tour of the new functionalities. In this week’s video, I compare OpenStreetMap-NG’s approach with the current implementation, highlighting key improvements in navigation, performance, and user experience.

⬇ Click the image below to play

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The Second Boat -Tabatinga To Manaus

Departure day from Tabatinga and the start of the real adventure. Be here at 8, they told us when we bought the tickets, so here we were not much after that time, but once the people waiting for the fast boat had left there was just a handful of us. I didn’t mind, the early arrivals get the best hammock space and 4 days is a long time to spend in the wrong spot.

… See full entry

The Triple Frontier 3

Monday was a list of things to do, the last day before departure for Manaus. Priority number one was to move from a hostel too far away from the crossing into Tabatinga to one that was almost on the frontier, a pillar 10 metres away from our rooms marked the boundary. A brief stop for breakfast and down to Tabatinga port to buy our boat tickets, again checking out hammocks on the way.

… See full entry

The Triple Frontier 2

Day two in Leticia began with another visit to Tabatinga. It was Sunday and the boat ticket office wasn’t going to be open, but we did need to get our Brazilian entry stamp in our passports, we weren’t going to get on the next boat without that. Remote land borders can often be more difficult to cross than arriving at international airports, but we had no problems here - a couple of questions about the purpose of our visit and it was done.

With the rest of the day free we went back to Leticia and got on a boat to Santa Rosa for the last time on Peruvian territory on this journey. Johnattan was carrying a small drone, and we wanted to do a bit of drone and street level mapping of the island. All of the main points of interest on Santa Rosa are concentrated on a single road, so we mapped our way up from the clutch of restaurants facing Leticia to a midpoint in the village and decided that the heat merited a refreshment stop in a friendly and spacious bar restaurant.

… See full entry