Screenshots of the early ‘style’ (which is possibly overstating it) are difficult to find. The only one I’ve unearthed so far is http://vagueterrain.net/journal/13/dreher/dreher-3.png , but it’s very low resolution.

But, in short, the earliest style that I remember was a Landsat background, with thickish white lines for each way, and I think with some black casing. That’s it. Assuming you can get the Landsat background, it shouldn’t take more than five minutes to knock up in Maperitive/TileMill/whatever.

The capital of France is Paris.

WEIRDEST SPAM EVER

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/542

Have you tried an iPhone?

runs away very very fast indeed

I’m not sure where you get the impression that the majority of OSM developers are working for companies. If it’s true (which I doubt) it’s only on a technicality - several are independent OSM consultants (i.e. they own their own companies), others are employed on OSM-related business but contribute code to OSM in their spare time, and so on. Very few people are paid to contribute code to the core osm.org site.

Nor am I sure why you think that OSMF has a “hierarchy” or a “development team”. It doesn’t. Generally the development of the site has very little to do with OSMF; the Foundation’s main function is to hold ownership of certain assets, e.g. servers, domain names etc.

As a matter of fact, routing (“directions”) is already being worked on and will be going live shortly: see http://jsrouting.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org and https://github.com/systemed/openstreetmap-website/tree/routing .

I’d encourage you to talk to developers and find out how things work at present before making radical suggestions as to how things should change. IRC is a good place to do this.

It’s great to have new cycle mappers on board but -

Wow. No. Please don’t do that.

Making up new values such as “compulsory” and “facultative” will mean that routing software and renderers have no idea how to treat your data.

In addition, tag values should generally be commonly-understood British English where possible, and “facultative” certainly isn’t that.

Please use the tagging@ mailing list to discuss your ideas for tagging before arbitrarily changing data. Please also revert your changes. Thanks.

Surely Wikimania should be considered a fringe event of the much more important OSM 10th Birthday party!

Brilliant!

Pretty much any kind of relation is not easily approachable for a newcomer.

If that’s the case, then that’s a UI issue in the editors, and eminently fixable. The correct approach is to improve the editors.

Friendly advice: your consistent shouting, boldcase and headline font in all this is seriously detracting from the points of your message, especially when you’re yelling at people who have more OSM experience than you do. Please calm down a little.

The route relation which gets the tag is what matters. Which is also my main argument why this is something that newcomers won’t be able to easily map.

There is no reason why routes should be difficult to map.

Put yourself in the shoes of a newcomer. All the roads in their town are mapped. The corner shop is mapped. The church is mapped. The pubs are mapped. But the bus routes aren’t and the bus stop isn’t.

Why should we say “sorry, churches are easy to map, but bus routes aren’t”? What sort of message is that to send out?

It is incumbent on people “designing” tagging schemes to make them approachable for the newcomer. If the scheme fails that test, it isn’t fit for purpose. Your insistence that the public_transport tagging isn’t suitable for newcomers is leading me to think it should be dropped entirely and replaced with something saner.

Why is a bus stop something that has to be easy for newcomers to tag?

Eating less spam is another good way to lose weight.

“Experts in biotech and antibody consultancy”

“Unfortunately a bit shit at spamming”

Still flooded:

http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/homeandleisure/floods/34681.aspx?area=112FWFEAS10A&page=1&type=Region&term=Southwest

http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/homeandleisure/floods/34681.aspx?area=112FWFSAL10A&page=1&type=Region&term=Southwest

But I do agree with the general point that OSM is not for transient events.

cycle.travel abbreviates “Street” and “Road”, and uses a condensed font for street names. But then I’m a “old paper street atlas” cartographer at heart!

http://cycle.travel/map?lat=51.5183&lon=-0.1056&zoom=16

As usual the wiki is full of nonsense! There is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t use highway=footway for a mountain trail.

That is not wrong. highway=footway simply means “a path which is primarily intended for walking”. You can use it with sac_scale=hiking if you like, or indeed a surface= tag.

I’m not sure that the problem here is “The hazard of relying on commercial implementations”, more “The hazard of relying on CloudMade”. It’s not necessarily endemic.

Aaaaaand done: highway=*