Hmm well I was thinking of London but … No actually anywhere in the world. I’m sure we can make arrangements

Also any pub which can’t figure out how to switch to OSM. Just have your laptop at the bar ready! :-)

Error reporting via photo upload we don’t have yet. That’s a good idea. We have a system called OpenStreetBugs for text based bug reporting. This website probably works ok on a mobile. There’s an API too. Not sure if that has been integrated into any native mobile apps, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Navit and OSMAnd have it (not sure). But a dedicated app for just this, might be good. And photo support as you say. There’s actually two categories of bugs. Things which somebody is reporting, as data from the real world, to be added, and things where the data/map looks wrong and we need a survey in the real world to resolve it. So a photo might be part of creating a new bug, or solving a bug in fact. We can think of it as sending a local person on a mission to get a photo of something specific. OpenStreetBugs is set to be incorporated onto the main OpenStreetMap.org front page, so that will bring these ideas to the fore I think.

Congratulations. For more numbers see How did you contribute

The cockerel in front of the guitar shop… is it real?

I was forgetting Martijn’s bing viewer shows reveals the metadata about when the imagery was captured. I gather this isn’t always correct, but it’s saying May 2012 for central London, which seems plausible.

Also bing have blogged about worldwide roll-out of new imagery. Great news for OpenStreetMap!

@compdude. Yes. Why don’t we look to what wikipedia does: “Operation of unapproved bots, or use of approved bots in unapproved ways outside their conditions of operation, is prohibited”. Wikipedia has rules like this because… oh look. All the same reasons woodpeck was stating in relation to OpenStreetMap. “Assume good faith” does not mean wikipedia lets everyone romp around screwing things up with automated edits

And while we’re talking about assuming things, how about assuming that Frederik and others know what they’re talking about when it comes to the technologies and data structures behind OpenStreetMap. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with questioning things. And actually the diagram at the top here is rather good. Perhaps it could help to frame an interesting discussion about how OSM could more efficiently store historical data.

Unfortunately this feels like it is posted in the spirit a know-it-all justification for poor behaviour. If you think all these problems are solved with more disk space and “disk space is cheap”, well that all sounds wonderfully simple. Maybe you should go set up your own OpenStreetMap to show us all how it’s done. You could allow yourself to run lots of bot edits on it. Good luck with that. In the meantime you would be welcome to raise constructive questions while showing some humility and politeness towards those who designed and built the system.

On a practical tagging level, I don’t really think Kayle is right. is_in is a bad tag, I’d hope that one day we might purge it. I can also see your point of view that people laughing and having fun with the ‘Worst of OSM’ site is not a very positive/pro-active approach to fixing problems in OSM data.

But you were banned for making automated edits without discussing it properly. You probably think you’re clever because you figured out how to run a bot. That’s not clever. Clever is persuading and getting the community on your side with your ideas for sweeping changes. If you get annoyed and start talking about going to war against people in the community who work hard to build and protect it… then nobody is going to find you very persuasive.

So don’t be annoyed. Try to discuss more and work on being more persuasive

Congratulations. Your nice mapping photo is on the featured on the OSM wiki Main Page this week.

Sorry the timing didn’t work out for meeting up with you while I was on holiday in Brazil. You were on another hackerbus trip? I had a lot of OSM related fun while I was there anyway

Congratulations. Your nice mapping photo is on the featured on the OSM wiki Main Page this week.

Sorry the timing didn’t work out for meeting up with you while I was on holiday in Brazil. You were on another hackerbus trip? I had a lot of OSM related fun while I was there anyway

Wiki page for Sports Tracker. I was going to suggest you update that with more details of the app, but… were you talking about sportstracker.nokia.com ? It seems to have been shut down by nokia now :-( What are the best alternatives offered via the ovi store? (should put those details on the wiki page)

oopse. Try again. This time with working links

Awesome! Looks like you had a lot of fun. I Love the photographs especially this one and this one. I think one of those would make a great featured image on the wiki if you’re willing to open license it (?)

I see there’s a bit of an unfortunate boundary of the bing imagery coverage in Ribeirão Preto making for a weird shaped map. I always think this kind of thing presents an interesting problem which possibly has an interesting hardware hacking solution. Maybe a challenge for the Garoa Hacker Clube hey? :-)

I’m about to email Cloudmiro and Diogo with some details of my visit to SP (possible dates for a meet-up!) I can’t copy you in because I don’t know your email address, but I’ll send a message with the same.

Awesome! Looks like you had a lot of fun. I Love the photographs especially this one and this one. I think one of those would make a great featured image on the wiki if you’re willing to open license it (?)

I see there’s a bit of an unfortunate boundary of the bing imagery coverage in Ribeirão Preto making for a weird shaped map. I always think this kind of thing presents an interesting problem which possibly has an interesting hardware hacking solution. Maybe a challenge for the Garoa Hacker Clube hey? :-)

I’m about to email Cloudmiro and Diogo with some details of my visit to SP (possible dates for a meet-up!) I can’t copy you in because I don’t know your email address, but I’ll send a message with the same.

"apparent standpoint"? I've tried to reflect a balance of viewpoints and lay out some guidelines to prevent damage being done, and any future antagonism this can cause. If you find the armchair mapping guidelines to be so shocking that you're going to quit OSM, then well that seems like a ludicrous standpoint to me. If you'd prefer to have a level-headed discussion about the guidelines, head over to Talk:Armchair_mapping.

Here Alex is proposing the idea of encouraging/inviting a form of armchair mapping within London data. When people appear so shocked to be asked to do it carefully... that makes me quite uneasy about the idea.

Sounds like fun! So you're setting off on the mapping bus trip tomorrow? Hope it goes well. I shall be on holiday in São Paulo in April. Maybe we organise an OSM meet-up then.

Thanks for a well thought out posting on this topic Alex. We had a long chat over burritos about it too, and I talked about the pros and cons. I know you're aware of all ths issues. I'm in two minds about it.

Armchair mapping can be quite "interfering" and discouraging to real mapping (See Armchair Mapping wiki page I recently wrote with some attempt to be balanced)

But we want better, and particularly more even/consistent, building coverage. Tracing from bing is the best (really the only) way to get that data initially. Ideally this would be followed up with a re-check on the ground. Thats what I've done in small patches during mapping parties throughout the summer, and I encouraged others to do the same. I've been quite cautious while proposing a focus on building outlines at mapping parties, and taken the time to explain the plan and try to get buy-in. But it seems like there's not much interest in that style of mapping from other Londoners, with a few exceptions. We've made slow progress particularly in spreading eastwards from Soho towards Mayfair and the Buckingham Palace area you show there.

I sense there may be even less enthusiasm, or maybe outspoken objection to a pure armchair mapping approach. from some. This is why I've stopped short of suggesting this myself. Even now I'm tempted to sit on the fence.

...but I think on balance I would support the plan for a bit of sketching prior to the olympics. In laying out the details though I think we can take a cautious approach. Firstly I think it's important that we do it from-the-centre-working-outwards, always aiming for even consistent coverage. We don't want somebody deciding to work from West London moving Eastwards, but then getting bored. Even just filling in an area which is unconnected to the central area, creates a messy looking result. Secondly we should agree an approach (OpenStreetBugs? fixme nodes?) for labelling spots which need follow up on-the-ground, because I need a way of choosing where we need to go mapping this summer! But I think this will help to highlight that this is not an exercise in dumping low quality map data into an uncaring database. Local mappers will be seeing the data arrive, and this is a positive thing. Armchair mappers should be adding data with their support, and work together to make a better map. We should be quite clear that flagging bugs is an expected part of the armchair mapping activity, and figure out examples of the kind of imagery interpretation which requires follow up. I'd be more comfortable if we also had better approaches for flagging imagery offsets, and imagery which is out of date, but that needs technical solutions.

Check out the existing Video tutorials and also tools and ideas on the 'Video tutorial development' wiki page. I've had a go at making tutorial videos myself. More videos can't hurt, but I'm quite interested in how we (somebody, a team of OpenStreetMap community folks, perhaps with "outside" help) might progress onto making some really slick refined short videos, both for basic tutorials and also for pitching the idea as a marketing/promotion video.

'OSM Map On Garmin' wiki page presents various options (I think most people use Mkgmap) , and also gives a step-by-step guide.

Diving in now in this area (picked at random) I see there's still some misaligned streets. Lots more work to do, but maybe it's better than before.

Looks great. Did you have to manually put together these vector boundaries though? or where did you get them from? (The data in the file here: http://forge.codedgraphic.com/osm/imagery_coverage/data.js )

How can we get a better view of what's been added worldwide? There's a discussion here about getting updates in to the bing coverage analyser, but it seems that's going to take a while. So far I haven't seen any map, from bing or otherwise, which gives a good overview of what's been added (I'm aware there's several PDFs which don't give a good overview)

We have a wiki page X-Plane. Feel free to edit that with more information / illustrations.