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Openstreetmap-Carto – Democracy Or anarchy?

At this point there’s zero reason the style doesn’t render vector tiles except for pure complacency and laziness.

Awesome. Look forward to your patch @Adamant1 given that it’s so easy.

The unfixable state of township boundaries

I’ll just leave this here… https://twitter.com/OpenCage/status/1473716907035574285

ااااا

This is OpenStreetMap, we have nothing to do with Snapchat. If you have a problem with Snapchat you need to talk to Snapchat.

Do not map like this (a collection of incorrect mapping practices)

If you don’t want to hear the awful sound coming from TTS saying “Turn right and then turn left” to “Continue”, then map like this.

I agree (and indeed I do generally map like that), but a halfway competent router will collapse the turn instructions in this case. For example: https://cycle.travel/map?from=&to=&fromLL=51.895321,-1.406647&toLL=51.896255,-1.405649

First week

I think this is enough for a diary entry; if there is demand, then I could write more about the following topics:

You’re welcome to, of course, but it wouldn’t be a very effective use of your time. OSM has plenty of people with bright ideas about how things could be improved. We’re less blessed with people prepared to put in the work to actually do it. If you have programming skills then you could try tackling a few issues on iD or the website; if not, you could perhaps put some hours into sorting out the wiki.

State of the Go Map!!

Oh wow. Having it in Swift will make submitting patches so much more appealing. Very nice work!

Smoothness and MTB_Scale tags on paths

smoothness is really not a great tag because it’s so subjective and its application to different surfaces is unclear. For example, there’s no clarity or agreement on how it should be applied to surfaces such as crushed limestone - common on cyclable canal towpaths.

I would suggest concentrating on surface, tracktype, and mtb_scale tags, which are less ambiguous.

Richard cycle.travel

A deep dive into the OSM Wiki for service=driveway, the proposal service=Driveway2 and lack of professionalism by one OSM Wiki administrator

There is so much bizarritude in this diary entry I really don’t know where to start.

service=driveway is predominantly used in OSM to mean a private, cul-de-sac access to a house or other property. That’s what driveway means in British English, and British English is the lingua franca of OSM. Californian highway codes have nothing to do with anything.

If service=driveway is being used to tag the entry to a public car park, that’s a tagging error. The entrance to a public car park isn’t a driveway so we don’t tag it as a driveway.

A routing engine should not need to consider service=driveway as a through-route. In practice, however, mappers make mistakes and sometimes tag through-routes with service=driveway. Therefore it’s sensible for the routing engine to just apply a large penalty to it. This is exactly what I do at cycle.travel, because I found that blocking service=driveway entirely caused occasional failures on the entrances to “trailheads” (as the USians say) and pedestrian/cycle ferries.

The end.

Having a tag called “driveway2” is on the scale of “I can’t even” or “not even wrong”. Please stop.

Big corporations are paying Openstreetmap mappers. Are you getting paid yet?

Yeah, you just put “last edited at n” like pretty much every single forum software in the world does. It’s a solved problem. :)

Big corporations are paying Openstreetmap mappers. Are you getting paid yet?

I think the issue is not a technical one, but an intent - the system creator wanted to prevent folks from changing their comments after they were made to prevent all kinds of communication-related issues…

Nope. I added the function to edit diary entries back in 2008: https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/commit/3b6d2c5336eac35912909c9102c77bf6472901e6 . I didn’t add the function to edit diary comments simply because I didn’t get round to it. If someone else made a good-quality PR for it I’m sure it would be accepted.

Big corporations are paying Openstreetmap mappers. Are you getting paid yet?

Was it really the goal of the license creators to use work of hundreds of thousands of volunteers to increase wealth of companies like Apple or Facebook?

It was expressly the desire of OSM’s founder and those who worked on it in the early days to allow corporate use, yes. Otherwise it would have started with the CC-BY-NC licence rather than CC-BY-SA.

I do not see a way that would allow me to edit a comment…

Maybe you could pay someone to add that feature to osm.org ;)

What’s in a name? What should HOT’s new regional hubs be called...

Entirely personal datapoint but I’ve never been keen on “hub” - it’s a very inward-facing word (“this is our organisational structure”) rather than outward-facing (“this is what we can do for you”).

But that might be because I’m used to the cycling world where everything is called “hub” for the obvious pun value…

“HOT Maps Asia Pacific” could work, I think. And there’s a nice interplay between the words there - “maps” as noun and verb, “hot” as proper noun and adjective.

It’s Easier To Contribute to OSM’s Website Now

That’s outstanding. 🎉

The use of Free and Open Source Software in the OpenStreetMap Foundation

If we want freedom for our projects, freedom for people to contribute to it, freedom from platforms monetizing our data, behavior and personal/professional networks, we need to do something, to move, to create alternatives

I’m not convinced that, as a project, we do.

“OpenStreetMap is an initiative to create and provide free geographic data, such as street maps, to anyone.” (First sentence of the OSM Foundation homepage.) “Welcome to OpenStreetMap, the project that creates and distributes free geographic data for the world.” (First sentence of the OSM wiki.)

If we can do that and use open-source software then that’s great. But our mission is open geographic data, not open-source software. If our developers find Github helps them build tools for open geographic data more effectively than Gitlab does; or if self-hosting Gitlab would divert our sysadmins from the core geodata hosting; or if paying for a third-party Gitlab install would divert funds from geodata initiatives; then we should stick with Github.

Potlatch 3 is here!

Not yet but it’s a high priority for future work.

Today Marks The End Of My Edits

Really sorry to hear that. I’ve noticed your edits a lot while fixing up old TIGER data and have always been impressed with your dedication. Take care.

Potlatch 3.0 beta

Brilliant - thanks for that info. I pushed a couple of small optimisations this morning which I hoped would improve rendering speed - good to know that they’ve made a difference.

I’ve encountered the missing parts of the map issue once or twice before… will see if i can find out what’s causing it. Good idea on build information - I’ll do that.

Potlatch 3.0 beta

Hm, interesting. Is that in a situation where P2 would cope? At (say) z16 for London then it’ll struggle, whereas at z19 it’d be fine. There are things I’d like to do in the future to optimise it but for now the focus is parity really.

Potlatch 3.0 beta

Indeed!

Potlatch 3.0 beta

That’s interesting - thanks mmd. I suspect there will be lots of ways to get it not to install, I’m just hoping that someone has the perseverance to find a way that it will install. :)