I’m writing my first OSM Diary entry in hopes that some local Thunder Bay, ON or Northwestern Ontario mapper(s) will find me here. When I look at the dashboard, I don’t see any local mappers that have edited during the past several years, and no local mappers that have made a single diary entry. If you do stumble across this post, I want you to know that you are not alone trying to improve OSM in Thunder Bay.

• Please feel free to reach out to me here.
• You can find my blog at Corvus Spatial.
• Contact me on Mastodon.
• I’ve also started a rudimentary list of tags and instructions I have gleaned while attempting to follow Open Sidewalks as I’m mapping sidewalks.

As the title suggests this post was precipitated by achieving one of the New Year’s resolutions I made late last December, 2024. At the time I noted that I had only made 42 edits over the ~13 years I had been signed up with OSM and tasked myself with at least doubling this. As of today, 2025-10-19, I have made exactly 84 edits that have included over 1500 individual changes to the map this past year so far. This is small potatoes compared to people that are really active editors, but I just recently started ramping up my edits in the past several weeks as I have gained confidence mapping sidewalks and crossings following a protocol that is designed to be helpful for network modelling for diverse map users.

I have some ideas to get more people contributing to OSM in Northwestern Ontario, including some mapathons and other social events. I hope to meet you soon, in-person or on the interwebs.