Tom MacWright started a good discussion on the wiki about next steps and approaches to make improvements to OSM.
OSM’s architecture is powerful, yet can be way too intimidating to invite less tech-savvy newcomers to contribute. This discussion puts some things on the table that the OSM community at large isn’t talking about enough.
My Ignite talk about the OSM Tampa Bay mapping group at WhereCampTB last weekend — and what we’re doing to grow and improve OpenStreetMap in the Bay Area.
Ito World has created a tiled layer showing the status of the TIGER imported road data for the US on OpenStreetMap.
The layer shows roads that have been reviewed, not reviewed, and when they were last edited in the database. A surprising number of the major roads in the Tampa Bay area have been reviewed, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the geometry has been corrected from the error-prone original — there’s still plenty of work to be done.
If you’re editing transportation network data on the map, remember to check out the latest TIGER import documentation on the wiki to get a feel for how the data is tagged. It’s a fantastic data resource, but needs a fair amount of help to get up to a high standard of quality for routing.
A good resource for pure beginners to OpenStreetMap.
Particularly useful to newcomers is the manual (PDF) put together by the Humanitarian OSM Team.
New ways to look at OpenStreetMap data.
A new Transport layer has been added as a new renderer layer to OSM. The new tiles come courtesy of Andy Allan (of OpenCycleMap) and include things like bike routes, bus routes, subways, rail systems, and train stations.
Even though the Tampa Bay Area doesn’t have quite the vibrant public transit systems of some cities, rendering data for custom use-cases like this shows the real power of the detailed data beneath the surface of OSM. It shows the value of adding things like route information, bus stops, and bike paths. You can see from the map that Tampa has pretty decent coverage of route information, while Pinellas has hardly a thing.
Let’s get in there and change that!
Mikel Maron’s wrapup of the recent OSM Foundation board meeting:
Thanks to the 2012 Board. This is going to be the year.
OSM is so close to so many great things. Just a few hurdles to jump for some major progress. Respect to the Board members for their hard work and commitment to the project!
From Richard Weiat:
We’re planning the final stages of the switch over to the Open Database License for OpenStreetMap data. The OpenStreetMap Foundation Board discussed the license upgrade process and many other aspects of the project at their recent board meeting, and we’ll have more information about that from the board shortly.
One item that came out of the board meeting was the deadline to complete the license upgrade by 01 April 2012 and to publish the first OpenStreetMap planet file under the ODbL by 04 April 2012. The License Working Group supports this target date as a reasonable goal.
Raw Data Now — Open Data — Community data and OpenStreetMap
Great TED Talk from Tim Berners-Lee on open data. Featuring OpenStreetMap data and HOT’s Project Haiti.
reblogged from Adamantio
Last Thursday Zac threw together an unplanned OSM mapping party at the Spatial Networks office. We called in the pizza guy and hung out in our conference room, getting everyone setup to use JOSM. After a few minutes, we were all editing different pieces of the map that interested us.
We had a lot of fun indocrinating some of our fellow developers who hadn’t really committed to getting involved in OSM editing. The community continues to grow!
Check out the newly launched Meetup page to join and help us organize a series of regular mapping parties.
