Thank you for everything you’ve done to improve the map in one of the least mapped countries in OSM. I’ll miss the interesting diaries about your adventures around Turkmenistan, especially as someone who travels regularly to less developed countries for work. You and Ann are superstar OSM contributors.

Best of luck on your next assignment or wherever your work takes you.

Welcome to OSM!

Great work! The before and after comparison is really cool. Really obvious how much work went into it.

I know Google has machine learning pulling locations of solar panels from satellite imagery for their Project Sunroof tool. Seems accurate, if outdated at this point.

Definitely good to see some work going on to make renewables in all forms.

Awesome, looks great!

I always appreciate your diary entries. Really cool to see how perhaps the most accurate and up to date map of Turkmenistan is being developed.

Looks phenomenal, really fantastic job!

Nice work! Really coming together over there. Hopefully we’ll see some businesses get added in downtown Hackensack soon, with all the new buildings added now.

I think everyone can agree that if there are issues with discrimination in the community, we need to get them out in the open and address them to find solutions.

The biggest possible issue I see has less to do with explicit discrimination and more to do with the small number of female mappers. This leads to a fundamental question of the cause of this (which is also a significant issue in the tech/engineering fields): is it because of a community that does not welcome women or does it have to do with gender preferences regarding specific types of tasks at an aggregate level? Since I don’t think that has been answered fully, I would encourage engagement on the topic.

Certainly, there have been studies that indicate that at a young age (grade school), girls feel a lack of confidence in their abilities in math/science, regardless of the fact that their actual performance in on par or better than significantly more confident male students. I suspect those beliefs, learned early in life, are a big factor in the lack of female engagement in the OSM community, given the generally technical nature of the work.

Hi Heather, I’m quite socially liberal, but like the other commentors haven’t seen any examples of discrimination against the LGBT community or women in OSM. I think without some concrete examples, claiming discrimination does more to harm the cause because it trivializes real, active discrimination against the LGBT community and women in other arenas.

I look forward to seeing some real experiences from women and LGBT community members as a result of this effort, since it will be good to have real examples to point to where they exist in OSM.

I think the burndown for nodes is pretty unimportant except in certain states/counties (looking at West Virginia).

However, 10 years is still a while to someone just to touch all the ways.

Incredible research project! I’m astounded by the amount of work that went into this.

Excellent work, great to see coordination with the government for a win-win project!

Of course we have some classic gatekeeping from the old guard of OSM about imports in the comments. No surprise.

Really cool stats, that’d be cool to see every so often before a new release.

Shocking loss of work. There has to be a better way to revert than just deleting the work of everyone.

Not to diminish the work you all did, just horrible that DWG couldn’t save any of it, such as at least the tags that have been added over the years (not in the original import). There has to be a less ham-fisted approach to reverting data.

Thanks for the effort, all issues notwithstanding.

Zverik, I know you get a lot of disagreement for your views on this site, but I’m with you all the way. I think Pokémon Go is a good thing, I love Maps.me and use it as a regular editor for OSM and think it’s great to have another editor, think imports are stupidly restrictive, and believe more mapper are better, even if they mess up at the beginning. People want to make this a walled garden for experienced craft mappers and that’s not how we map the world.

One of the minor suggestions is one of the best: “Creating a better building tool for iD.” JOSM has a fantastic, intuitive building tool as a plug-in that allows a four sided building to be completed in less than half the clicks (3/2 vs 4 in iD + 2 to square + 2/3 to tag as a building) that would be great for HOT and reduce complaints about new users not squaring buildings. It also makes the process much faster and more enjoyable. This is a readily needed improvement for iD.

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Looks fantastic! The live previews of the models on the website is a great touch. Really hoping we see some contributions from the talented modelers in our community, since we are really lacking in real 3D models versus all the commercial maps. As someone who’s used OSM in Paris, a real model of the Effiel Tower would have been great, and as someone that’s tried to model the Seattle Space Needle using standard OSM 3D nomenclature, this would be way better.

Unfortunately, the vast majority (some 98%, but I can’t find the source) of OSM mappers are men. Therefore, it is to be expected that the vast majority of nominees are men. We need to get better as a community in terms of bringing more women into our ranks, but the lack of female nominees is not representative of an institutional bias. There are just fewer women overall in the OSM community.