OpenStreetMap
Getting involved: Netherlands > Amsterdam > Nelson Mandelapark
Posted by NLthijs48 on 12 April 2021 in English.Kickstart using StreetComplete
Around 2 months ago I started my OpenStreetMap involvement with the StreetComplete app. After solving all questions in the neighborhood I live in, I was looking for the next area. During this pandemic period I’m working from home, and like to go on a walk during lunch time. Usually I take a stroll through the park close to my house, the Nelson Mandelapark. Therefore that was a nice area to continue with StreetComplete quests, adding road surfaces, lighting and details to the sport park in the middle of the park.
Adding iD and JOSM to the mix
After just a few lunch time walks I got through the StreetComplete quests for this park, but I noticed a lot of objects were still absent from the map. That is when I started with the iD editor at first, swiftly followed by installing JOSM. Now my lunch time walks had transformed into taking as much pictures as possible of my environment to be able to map all missing features of the park. Each lunch hour I would either take a stroll to make more pictures, or use the editors to add features based on my pictures of the previous day.
Community support
Later I also started to read the forum more often, joined the Discord and even joined a virtual meeting of Dutch OpenStreetMap contributors. Because of these communities I discovered resources like the BGT imagery layer, learned more about tagging practices and got to know more and more use cases of OpenStreetMap.
Outcome
All the above has lead to a much more detailed map of the park, and my neighbourhood, and gave me a nice hobby during this pandemic time :) I already started working on updating additional locations, and mapping even more detail, more updates about that later!
Discussion
Comment from DeBigC on 13 April 2021 at 08:11
Thank you for that post, it is good to hear that StreetComplete is a gateway for you entering the wider world of desktop contribution.
Still today many towns in Europe still lack important details about their ways and the buildings in particular. Some of the original contributors had both a logic and a bias against buildings, which is very limiting if you want OSM to be a fully populated relational database of everything from history to architecture. OSM is much more, and will be much more than simply a navigation source. When the buildings are mapped out with a decent level of accuracy and consistency StreetComplete becomes a hungry beast, so I recommend you map all the building outlines and wait about a week, and walk to that place.
Anyway, good luck to you and keep on contributing ;)
Comment from NLthijs48 on 13 April 2021 at 09:58
@DeBigC Thanks for you comment!
Luckily in The Netherlands all buildings have already been imported based on government data, but there are still a lot of missing 3D building tags. I like how nice 3D maps start to look after adding all those tags.
Definitely good how StreetComplete helps a lot with all road details like sidewalks, surface, cycleways, etc. This way I can just draw in new roads on my desktop, and easily add details later using StreetComplete. Also looking forward to contribute to it on the development side of things, since my profession is software developer :)