Last weekend I gave a talk about OpenStreetMap and biking at the Madison Bike Advocacy Meetup. This is a monthly meeting of people interested in biking and local bike advocacy. The purpose of the talk was to give a high-level overview of what OpenStreetMap is, how it can be used for biking and bike advocacy, and how you can contribute to OpenStreetMap. About two-thirds of the audience had previously heard about OSM. I think the talk was well received and there were many questions during the Q&A period. And in the days after the event I saw some OSM editing activity from new contributors.

The slides, notes, and resources are available in this Github repository under a CC BY-SA license. Please feel free to reuse it!

All mistakes and omissions are mine.

I love to ride my bike. Long distances. New roads. Usually starting from my home in Madison, WI. I also love mapping. And so whenever I’m out riding I try to do at least a bit of OpenStreetMap data collection. When I see interesting features, like a bike repair stand, or stop at a potential point-of-interest, like a café or gas station, I take a picture on my phone and add the data to OSM once I’m home.

Recently I became interested in improving the quality of surface tags for highways. Dane County is known to have a very high proportion of paved roads. Even small rural farm roads are almost always paved. But pavement data in OpenStreetMap is spotty. Therefore I was interested in developing a workflow that allows me to add/update https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:surface tags through my bike rides.

I asked for advice on this on the OSMUS Slack channel and got some good suggestions. Based on these suggestions, I developed the following workflow.

During the ride

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