As an OSM contributor, I have my doubts about your sincerity,

“Admittedly, my initial approach was less than tactful, potentially causing offence.” → “A constructive dialogue relies on evidence-based arguments”

“OSM’s priorities seem to have changed” → They haven’t changed

26,000 euros for the technical infrastructure of a project like OSM on a global scale for AWS, that seems okay to me.

We’re concerned about our independence and the people who are spending money on AWS in the first place.

On the question of transparency, I think we can do better, in fact I think it’s more a question of communication.

Nice after :’)

Thanks for your diary !

It’s very interesting this notion of discouragement,
I understand your desire to do things perfectly, I have it too, but we need to find the right balance, because when I saw what “mapping perfectly” meant… I understood that it was a professional skill in my opinion very very complicated to obtain. I’m talking about this level of perfection: osm.org/#map=16/38.7709/125.5247 which is unreachable for me, so my level is more like osm.org/#map=16/42.9543/130.0124 and I’m in peace with that.

What we can do is map well, and that’s hard enough to achieve, but it’s a good job!

On the mental side, I think it’s important to do cartography for fun (as a non-professional cartographer), because the moment it becomes a self-imposed “obligation”, there’s a good chance it will become counter-productive. Knowing how to stop and do something else is an important skill if you don’t want to lose interest in cartography. Sometimes it’s important not to be too demanding on yourself.

Mapping work in poorly mapped areas is too big to be done alone, and we have to accept that.

In my opinion, it’s important to be satisfied with one’s work and also to know how to congratulate oneself on what one has done!

Thanks for this diary!

Waouh very impressive work, the method is very beautiful, and as a bonus I learned several keyboard shortcut, thanks !

Thanks for your diary, it’s a really interessing way to connect free project like OSM, Commons, Wikidata and Wikipedia !

Thank you very much for this very informative and enlightening post on the situation. OSMF must react and enforce its pact with the contributors: the license and attribution

Hi @steveman2123,

I find your remarks very valuable, I also do a lot of armchair mapping for North Korea and especially Pyongyang. By the way, I tried to compile most of the things that can be detected from satellite imagery on a wiki page osm.wiki/North_Korea_Mapping_Guide, did you do something similar in your area? If so, I’d be interested to see it!

I notice that I use the same methods for street lights, but the relative poor quality of the imagery for this country prevents me from accessing certain objects like stop signs.

Thanks a lot for sharing your experience in a diary post !

« The bankers hate it, discover the method that this internaut has found » 😆

Hi Ukundji,

It’s good to see contributors who invest time in areas where the volume of map information is low… like NK !

I made a guide about contributing in North Korea (here: osm.wiki/North_Korea_Mapping_Guide) but it doesn’t talk about the toponyms issue at all.

I know that there is GeoNames (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoNames) which for North Korea compiles a lot of toponymic information mainly from the “nga” https://www.nga.mil/ (“National Geospatial-intelligence Agency” who is a US agency), see also https://web.archive.org/web/20220130070840/geonames.nga.mil/gns/html/index.html). But I don’t find GeoNames very convenient, I can’t use it easily even if I feel it could give us a lot of information!

I join you to have more discussion between contributors about North Korea! To this aim, I recently created a discord server that aims to gather all the people who are interested in contributing to free projects on this subject, whether it is OSM or Wikipedia (and other projects like Commons, or Wikidata).If some are interested here is the link to join this Discord server: https://discord.gg/sT96xGyffM If some are interested here is the link to join this Discord server: https://discord.gg/sT96xGyffM

Indeed, I also met many structures of which I do not know what they are used for !