I noticed one of the mappers added a bunch of houses in the last hour. See https://osmcha.org/changesets/91480916 for the first of five edits tonight. They look good but the imagery is from before the fires.

Welcome to OpenStreetMap. When you are ready to start mapping, I recommend mapping what you know best - usually your own neighborhood, restaurants, pubs, parks, and other areas you know well.

I encourage you to join our Slack community. Plenty of friendly people that will help answer your questions.

Did you know that OSM is one of the largest nearly all volunteer organizations? There are millions of volunteer contributors but only a handful of paid staff. We have an assistant to help the OpenStreetMap Foundation, the US Chapter has an Executive Director and we just hired our first developer and soon will be adding a IT person. There may be others but I’m not aware of them.

Clifford AKA Glassman

Easy link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyNaiOE4M3

Welcome to OSM. I love it when people improve their local area. There is plenty to do, from buildings, businesses, sidewalks, trails, benches, parks, playgrounds, and the list goes on. My recommendation - do what you like to do. Just this week I met a person that was paid to map in OSM. He couldn’t stand it. As I explained the difference is I map what I want and when I want.

Can you tell us how you found OSM and what you like about it?

I should also mention RapiD. RapiD has building footprints provided by Microsoft that can easily be added to OSM. Personally I like to merge single address nodes with the building outline.

If you haven’t been invited to the OSM US community’s Slack then please join us at slack.openstreetmap.us. Great place to get help and help others.

Best,

Clifford AKA Glassman

Hey Kirk, When you open the editor as @ABZ_OSM mentions above, there is a tutorial that is runs through basic edits. It only takes a few minutes to complete. Well worth the time.

I’d also suggest joining our Slack community at slack.openstreetmap.us. People are on Slack are more than willing to help.

But most importantly - have fun editing.

Best,

Clifford

I wrote a blog post on editing sidewalks. I included how to use QGIS to look for islands. Islands are those sidewalks that don’t connect to other sidewalks. It’s another way to look for missing connections. In fact I just discovered one just a few blocks from home.

BTW - another good imagery source is Bing. Their Streetside imagery is freely useable in OSM. I’m in Skagit County and found the imagery to be dated. So I also drive around to capture Mapillary and OpenStreetCam imagery.

Nice - Below is a overpass query of the area. Having done sidewalk mapping I know how detailed the your accomplishment is. Keep it up.

http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/W4Z

Best, Clifford

Do the drains just flow into the harbor or are they diverted into wastewater treatment facilities?

Interesting diary post. I looked to and was surprised to discover an open RTK/Gnss base station not to far from my area of interest. What do you use for a gps device that can connect to the RTK base station, specifically any Android apps?

Congratulations and welcome to the OSM community.

I believe you can have a separate opening_hours tag for drive-through as https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:opening_hours:drive_through=00:00-24:00

To reset your Slack password just go to https://osmus.slack.com/

Hope to see you on Slack.

Best,

Clifford

Good concept - adding information that can quickly be discerned by the user. I really had to squint to see the red bar under Moors Inn. Would having a border around the icon in red/yellow/green help?

Working with the University of Washington’s Taskar for accessible technology routing may also be part of the solution as well. Your solution tells the person right away if they should even consider going there.

Keep up the good work.

Clifford

I’m glad to see local fire departments using OSM. This would make a good talk for the Tucson SoTM-US as well as to your state URISA chapter. It also shows the value of adding addresses to OSM.

A couple of thoughts - First, do we need a tag to indicate shared driveways? Second, would adding the address to the driveway help, especially when it’s not easy to determine which driveway belongs to an address?

Clifford

If you feel that I’ve deleted your edits unfairly, please provide me with some documentation on your edits to confirm that they are indeed valid. You are even welcome to report me to DWG if you feel that I’ve overstepped my bounds.

Best, Clifford

Eugene, Thanks for the great post on Wikidata and OSM and the timing was excellent. I was just updating some aboriginal_lands boundaries near me. Your post reminded me to make sure that the tags included wikidata and wikipedia.

With nearly 1.5M wikidata tags it seems like it’s time to start documenting some of the notable uses of having objects listed in both Wikimedia and OSM. I believe it would encourage more mappers to use the tag. Is this something you would be interested in doing?

Thanks for your insights on how OSMF should move forward. I want to comment on two areas you brought up toxic environment and getting diversity data.

Leading up to this last election, I talked with many people to ask them to run. Women would not do so due to toxic environment, power imbalances, reputation targeting, and emotionally draining conversations. This was also the same case cited by leaders from the global majority (sometimes called the global south). People from Asia and Africa told me - the culture of governance in OSM/OSMF is not professional and would not be productive. Simply put - communication is hard in OSM and we need to recognize this.

Solving this will be difficult because it so pervasive and entrenched. I would suggest 1) a good Code of Conduct (CoC), 2) means to enforce it, and 3) training on how to recognize and address CoC issues. OSM is likely the largest open community without a CoC. Just having a CoC will not solve the problem, but it is a step forward. The new Board will hopefully address this shortfall.

One area the Board could tackle immediately is to gather gender percentages from the Working Groups with the goal to set targets for gender and diversity in them. The same could be done with microgrants if they are not already.

Martijn, What a great addition to MapRoulette. Keep up the great work.

Best,

Clifford

@Luana_B Welcome to OpenStreetMap. We have a fun and open community in the US. Please join us on Slack. Slack is a collaboration tool for OSM mappers, organizers, and developers.

I encourage new mappers to map what they know, your neighborhood. So many features just waiting to be added. When you have a question, Slack is a great place to ask. The other advice, even though you didn’t ask for it, is to map your passion. It could be trails, pubs, restaurants, sidewalks, handicap access, and on and on.

Since you are so close to Minneapolis I encourage you to attend the State of the Map US conference being help there September 5-8th. There is even scholarship money to help you attend, you just need to apply.

Have Fun, Clifford AKA Glassman

Congratulations!!! I found 1,664 edits on the task.

All Admin action appears to be Unilateral - Zero Consultation

If these were an iD developer the “community” would be all over the fact. What makes the difference?