Hi everyone! I have been trying to edit some locations but the changeset size is exceeded (cause i forgot to upload after moving to the other country). I have no idea which nodes are from Portugal and which from Italy. Can someone help?
Thank you so much in advance
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
got out of the house for a bit today and got started adding/removing some businesses on thames street south, and adding info like hours and contacts to ones that were already there. headed home when it started raining but i feel like i got a pretty good amount done for one walk.
i only really focused on one side of the street to start, i was gonna do the other side on the way home but due to the rain ive just left it for another time. here’s to better weather this week 💜💜
When assigning Dakota and Lakota names to map elements, I am mainly drawing on the (often lifelong) work of others; very few of my changes are based on personal local knowledge. I have focused on sources who are either directly part of, or at least worked closely with, authentic Oc̣eti Ṡakowiƞ communities. This is the language of nations that are alive today, and they have things to say! My major sources include:
I contributed by editing yay
FAWKES FUCKS WITH FLOCK. Student in Chicago, Il, USA have developed a program that makes micro changes to your image that perverts the data FLOCK is collecting. Can’t trace what they can’t see again... worth the visit if you’re serious about privacy.
hey! wouldn’t be shocked if im only one of a handful of new canadian users trying to take a step away from google maps. i downloaded comaps earlier today (which uses openstreetmap) and noticed a handful of stuff in my little town is missing or out of date. so why not be the one to contribute?
im short on time this week (and there’s some awful rain right now) but i think sooner or later im going to take a stroll through town and update everything i can. it’ll be a lot more fun than just cross-referencing another map.
so we have gotten a few questions about the project, mostly present in the first diary post we have made, but here we wanted to state a few basic things as a foundational- idk, statement so to say.
firstly, what are we actually doing and why?
so one night, at a random hackspace on the 25th of august, we were bored. and so with that boredom, we decided to fix something that had been annoying us for a long time; nearly every train station in germany that is not a transfer station, and honestly a lot that are!, are missing basic information about their track numbering, as well as generally just having a low quality of track and platform geometry (likely because most of that was put in automatically and no one bothered fixing it)
very quickly we realized, putting the exact sources (which, to be fair were more for reference than actual sourcing) into every single commit, of which there is at least one changeset per train station, was extremely tedious
so we made a post "hey we’re doing this thing", to then go and have a way to simply refer to that project in the changeset commits, instead of the exact sources every single time.
this, has already gotten the attention of a few others on here, which honestly is both surprising, and humbling, as well as very motivating.
we are doing this, we will not stop doing this until we are done :3
secondly, how actually is information being sourced?
so this is fairly simple, but also very important to mention; while we have listed Bahnhof.de as a source, which at the time we did not realize could even theoretically be an issue, we technically did not even use it as a source- it simply is a good way to double check our work and to shove a url into the source field of our commits
in reality, here’s our source (in a sense); https://umap.openstreetmap.de/en/map/arson-railing_57214#7/51.075920/11.107178
I’m supposed to write a full report about my attendance at State of the Map 2026. But there are so many materials to discuss, especially the technical ones, and I’m already still stuck on day one already.
If you check my latest OSM Diary entry in my State of the Map 2026 series, you’ll see that my writing stopped rather abruptly at Jake Low’s talk, titled "Sourdough and Layercake."
It was a very interesting talk. In fact, while watching it live through the Venueless platform, I had already started thinking about some projects that I wanted to build on top of Sourdough.
So instead of continuing to write that report, I started tinkering with Sourdough immediately.
The cool thing about vector maps is that they are so easy to customize on the client side. We can selectively show some data layers and hide the rest. We can emphasize one aspect while pretending that everything else is "not important" and simply not showing it at all. And I think that’s quite a powerful concept.
A researcher from Puerto Rico reached out to me with a question about sub-national population figures in Iraq. While trying to help, I realised something surprising: although Iraq had conducted its first full population and housing census in decades — the 2024 Iraq Census — those population figures had not been mapped onto the administrative boundaries in OpenStreetMap. The data existed and was public; it simply had never been connected to the polygons.
This diary documents the work of closing that gap, from the national level down to district (qada) level, and — just as importantly — it records why some of the numbers on the official Arabic source do not line up one-to-one with the population now tagged on OSM polygons. If you are comparing the source document against OSM and something looks off, this entry is meant to explain it.
The governorate and district figures come from the published 2024 census results:
https://alssaa.com/post/show/43032-iraq-2024-population-census-results-for-the-governorates
The page is in Arabic and lists each governorate’s total and a breakdown by qada (district). I worked from this document throughout. Where I refer to a name by translating it from the Arabic source, I put the translation in quotation marks — the official/authoritative spelling is the Arabic one, and I don’t want to imply my English rendering is canonical.
The single most important decision in this whole exercise: each population figure was tagged onto the OSM polygon that geographically contains that place — not necessarily onto the governorate or district the census table lists it under.
What an event.
The local community prepared a really nice venue with a surprising Guest as entertainment as well as really tasty snacks. Well done.
I should have asked on the first day so now it’s just some thinking: Was there no way of getting better ventilation into the rooms at the university? But as I said, it’s now too late and I won’t linger on that any more.
More thoughts are still to come.
After a few "shakedown cruises" with the Max2 I began collecting imagery in earnest in August, and learned a few lessons.
Massive 10Gb files overwhelm older MicroSD-to-USB card readers. I struggled to copy the .360 files from the SD card to my desktop computer’s SSD drive, and resorted to Disk Drill (sometimes worked) and Roadkill’s Unstoppable Copier (sometimes worked) to copy them when copy, xcopy, and the Windows copy utility failed. I asked GoPro if it could identify the problem. When GoPro asked if I had tried a different card reader, I blew 7ドル on a new one rated USB-2 and it worked without problem. Issue solved, and something learned–just because a piece of hardware worked flawlessly for a decade doesn’t mean it will work today with the larger file sizes inherent to 360-degree imagery.
The battery lasts about 2 hours or less and a 64Gb SD card fills up in about 2 hours. Letting the camera battery die while filming is a headache, because the file isn’t closed properly. This is where Disk Drill came in handy to repair it so it could be copied and uploaded to Mapillary. A similar issue appears if you run out of storage. I blew 99ドル on a 256Gb SD card to avoid running out of space and put my wife in charge of monitoring battery life on the Quik smart phone app. Her reward for this is lunch at restaurants we have discovered while collecting imagery.
The Max2 can be toggled between collection at 5.6K and 8K resolution. I have experimented with both. Mapillary recommends 5.6K video at 30 frames per second but I have found that this makes reading house numbers difficult to impossible, and signage of businesses becomes very iffy. When experimenting with 8K resolution, I found both house numbers and signage become clearer and thus readable for addition to the OSM database. The tradeoff is file size, which quickly becomes an argument for a larger SD card (the Max2 can accommodate up to 1 Tb if you are willing to spend the money).
According to my personal schedule, I was supposed to attend the Guadeloupe room at around 14:50, for a talk titled "State of Panoramax."
But in reality, the opening speech was still continuing at least until 15:02, and I had to sign out at 15:16.
I managed to finally come back at around 15:56, but by that time, the Guadeloupe room was already empty.
I managed to access the "traces of discussion about the talk" that were still left behind in the Venueless chatbox.
Someone asked this question at 15:21: "Question for Panoramax: What’s your take on privacy. Even with blurring, by having people take photos across a wide time range, AI will be able to deduct when someone was at home, where certain cars were parked and so on, revealing lots of personal info. Is that a good thing that we want to support?"
I have known Panoramax for a long time.
While editing WeeklyOSM’s entries, I frequently received news about their releases and updates. I also happened to learn about updates regarding Baba, a mobile app for contributing to the Panoramax project, because of my activity with WeeklyOSM.
But recently, I finally installed Baba and uploaded photos to Panoramax for the first time, thanks to someone’s suggestion on c.osm.org. I documented the whole train of thought behind this decision in this Mastodon thread.
The real reason was my realization that photographs uploaded through StreetComplete’s note feature are temporary and are going to be deleted soon. I wanted something similar, but permanent. Someone on c.osm.org – I forget who and in which thread – suggested using Panoramax instead. I tried it, and it worked.
Even so, at first, I had quite a hard time finding the right Panoramax instance, because most of them are limited to specific geographic regions, and my country is not listed.
Whenever I run, I carry a GPX device to track my route. Over time, I’ve collected a large set of personal GPX traces. It made me realize that this personal dataset isn’t particularly valuable when I look at individual traces, but it can be made useful once I’ve collected multiple traces over the same city neighborhood. The problem is that I have no idea where OSM ways are missing. This sounds like a great use case for aggregated personal data, because you tend to run the same streets most of the time. The basic idea is very simple: split GPX files into smaller segments, cluster them, and check whether each cluster maps to a known path or street in OSM. Then create an OSM extract for the new paths, along with the original GPX files, so that edits in JOSM are faster. It works! The slow part is making the edits, but at least you are aware of where OSM is incomplete in your neighborhood. The source code is on GitHub
– Portuguese below
Around the same time that the organizers of State of the Map 2026 were offering early-bird tickets for the OpenStreetMap global community event, I was approached by groups of mappers from Africa, asking my company to support (as a sponsor) the initiatives they were planning, focusing in mapping features that were important to them and their community, based on their local realities.
So, rather than spending our resources on a sponsorship for the SotM 2026 event and attending in person in Paris, we decided to support three groups of young mappers from african countries: Cameroon, Kenya, and Ghana.
CityMapper Externship: Urban Street Level Mapping by the UN Maps Community Ambassador Initiative Cameroun - Link
UN Mappers Kenya Youth Climate Mapping Externship 2026 by the UN Maps Community Ambassador Initiative Kenya - Link1 and Link2
First 2026 mapathon by the YouthMappers UEW (Ghana) - Link 1 and Link 2
The first time I became aware of the very existence of the "State of the Map" event was, I think, around 2022.
At that time, it was held in Italy. I think I heard about it somewhere online. All I remember is the group photo of the participants (there were plenty of people there) and the beautiful, cool-looking SotM 2022 logo.
That year, I had just recently graduated, so I could get involved in the OpenStreetMap movement more intensely than I had in the years before (before that, I usually only actively mapped during college holiday seasons. Once the holiday was over, I didn’t map anymore). That’s why at that time I started interacting with the community more, and eventually learned about this "State of the Map" event.
Even though I still don’t remember exactly where I first received the news about the event.
At that time, my first reaction was, "I don’t think I’m able to commute farther than either Jakarta or Bandung." So, back then, I thought, "I don’t think I’m able to visit Italy."
Fast-forward to after 2022. I gave several technical and/or philosophical talks about OSM sporadically, mostly online. From a technical standpoint, I talked about things like "how to map," "how to use this particular tool," or "introducing a tool that I recently built." From a philosophical standpoint, I talked about ideas and dreams about "how the OSM platform should evolve in the future," "how we should organize the people in the OSM movement," etc., etc.
I finally had a chance to attend an OSM-related meeting physically, rather than online, for the first time around 2025. In this case, it was still within the boundaries that I had defined back in 2022 (Jakarta), so I was able to go.
why does OSM have diray entries? i guess i’ll try to find out
My first diary entry. Testing 123
Bonjour, as our gracious hosts like to say.
The French community, together with the university, put together a fun experience. Keep in mind that this is my first (larger) OSM gathering of any type.
As an longtime inhabitant of the forum at c.osm.org I already read a few views on different types of members of our actually very diverse community. While there are quite some typical German Mappers on OSM (mapping away without ever interacting and kinda thinking of OSM as their personal project) there are so many different people out there working with and for OSM.
To all those "brickheads" out there: There’s so much more out there than just your personal interest!
In this first installment of my random musings I’ll just leave a link to a good talk I saw on day one that touches some frequent points of concern:
https://2026.stateofthemap.org/sessions/3GRKKJ/
To all you people in Paris: See you around :)
on 25/8/26, we were a combination of bored enough and annoyed enough to start cleaning up the metadata of german railway stations, so as the track numbers actually appear in clients such as OpenRailwayMap (ORM) ((which we use regularly))
today we are going to formalize the process, also so that our commit history is less tedious to write
–
anything we do which is to further the purpose of creating a basic standard of german railway OSM cartography will be simply marked as "DMC - [bahnhofname]"
and further, in almost every case unless otherwise specified, our information comes from the database within Bahnhof.de supplied by the Deutsche Bahn, and our own knowledge from living within and travelling across germany
Well The North Side Is Done For Now. But Due For School, The Edet’s Will Be Slower.
