It’s been a while since I posted, and we’ve been working hard in the background to add more (and safe) OSM contributing. Since last we spoke, we’ve actually been in court, defending ourselves against a “competitor” (I wouldn’t consider us competitors, we’re in the same space but they’re for-pay and we’re Libre, Open Source, Open, and Free) who claimed we “stole” their data.

Funnily enough, “their” data seems to come straight from OSM. When I contributed an albergue a while back, I made a typo (è instead of é) and it’s in their dataset. So, yeah, we won, they paid, and they cried. Cheaters always accuse others of cheating.

We renamed ourselves from Camino Now to Ultreia.me, because another competitor didn’t like the fact that we had “Camino” in the name and sued as well.

There is a LOT of money to be made with those apps, which is why they all hate being threatened by a free/libre alternative.

Anyhow, we now sync hostel data back. Mainly telephone numbers, opening hours, wheelchair access, kitchen access, washer/dryer, those things.

As I write in my profile, I was really peeved off, that dozens of “Camino Apps” (apps used to track users along the Ways of St. James, the Caminos de Santiago) did ask their users for updates to opening hours or bed counts in albergues, but never contributed back to OSM what they’d discovered.

I launched a “test balloon” in 2023, renaming an accommodation to reflect its real name, and lo and behold, of the 23 apps I checked, 22 had suddenly also changed the name, meaning they used OSM data, but didn’t ever give back to the community.

So I changed it, wrote a Camino App that did contribute back. We don’t expect our users to have OSM accounts. Instead, we recruited a bunch of volunteers, who are served the changes, check them personally, and then contribute them back to OSM.

First step: fountain potability. Along the Caminos are thousands of fountains providing drinking water to the 500k pilgrims walking the Way every year. Spain is excellent, when it comes to drinking water quality, but sometimes fountains dry out, become undrinkable, or become drinkable again. Nothing sucks more than going 1000m out of your way to find out that fountain has been closed.

I’ll semi-manually start updating fountain “drinking_water=” tags over the next 30 days along the most famous route, the Camino Francés. Once that’s stable and enough volunteers have been trained and shown that they can do this without harming the dataset, we’ll expand to hostel data.