User:Rtnf/Stories

A collection of random anecdotes from the world of OpenStreetMap communities.

Origin myth

“”Steve Coast started OpenStreetMap with Matt Amos and Tom Carden. Jo Walsh and Schuyler Erle started London Free Map (also 2004?). Nick Whitelegg started freemap (Oct 2004). I started Geowiki after hatching the idea with a bunch of friends from university (Sep 2002). We all coalesced around OSM because Steve went out and evangelised for it, speaking at endless LUGs and Dorkbots and hack weekends, whereas the rest of us essentially wanted to sit at home, hack on code or draw maps. What’s remarkable about OSM is not that it started, but that it thrived. Other OSM-adjacent projects from the same period didn’t. OpenGuides could have been the Time Out or Rough Guides to OSM’s A-Z, but petered out. OpenFlights too. Wikitravel got nobbled by a private buyer, re-emerged as Wikivoyage, but never really got traction. Why did it thrive? It didn’t, at first. In 2004 and 2005 OSM was still not much more than an idea. Events were still mainly Steve going out evangelising. The tech was an endless succession of false starts. The server was unreliable. There were 1000 users by December 2005, but they didn’t map much. It took until January 2006 before Britain’s (fairly few) motorways were mapped. But a community was slowly building around the idea. People were talking and a common purpose was being forged. From that common purpose, a handful of people identified pieces in the jigsaw they could fit. Imi Scholz wrote JOSM (December 2005), Artem Pavlenko wrote Mapnik (winter 2006), I wrote Potlatch (March 2007). Glue code like the openstreetmap.org website itself (rewritten in Rails in May 2007), and mod_tile/renderd (December 2007), held it all together. Add Yahoo imagery (December 2006), and OSM was finally at the stage where you could draw a road and it would appear on a map. We had a conference in 2007… and something to talk about.

—Richard Fairhurst (August 11th, 2024) "The early days of OpenStreetMap" blog.systemed.net

Why

“”OpenStreetMap benefits from having these hyperlocal efforts, where people map what matters to them, without trying to make sure it aligns with a global goal of OpenStreetMap that is too specific (OSM does not have such goals).

—Christopher Beddow

“”It was always exciting to see how many OSM beginners enthusiastically mapped their home villages and areas they had a personal connection to.

—Cidomo beruntung

The tyranny of corporate mappers

“”Local Community contact at █████ . I like to find and keep in touch with the local communities to learn more from their way of editing and also try to contribute with them by sharing the OSM knowledge I've acquired over time and though travels (while acquiring ground imagery).

—JAAS

I wish that every corporate mapper were as friendly as this one, instead of hostilely reverting the contributions of local mappers while staunchly defending their actions solely on an outdated aerial imagery and a loose interpretation of 'local tagging guidelines' :(

Tagging Proposals

“”It makes no sense to "approve" this tag - it has never been used. If someone wants to use this tag they can just use it; it does not need "approval".

—SomeoneElse

“”I don't see obvious problems with this key, but I think it's premature to stamp it approved. I feel that a tag should have some use over a period of time to understand how it's used by mappers and data consumers alike. Through that usage, we will discover the breadth of features that it might apply to and then better understand whether the scheme is sufficient to express the complexity of reality. I also think that as a general rule that we should not encourage proposals on low-usage tags. Discuss and document new tags, if they catch on, great! A proposal is better suited for a later time in a tag's lifespan after it's come in contact with the complexities of real world, which would result in a better use of the community's time.

—ZeLonewolf

“”This tag has not been used enough to warrant a formal proposal process. There's simply not enough examples for other community members to form an opinion with. Nothing is stopping you from using this tag and encouraging others to do so, but there is no reason to formalize it at the very beginning of its lifespan.

—clay_c

Why building matters?

“”While some people in the community see OSM essentially as a navigation database and consider buildings to be a secondary or even fairly useless object, for my part, I fully recognise their importance for various aspects, such as helping to represent (particularly with fences and trees) what in geography is known as the urban fabric, or serving as an approximation of the size of a population. I also taught for a few years InaSAFE for QGIS, which uses OSM buildings as vulnerability data, or coordinated the mapping of all the buildings in the prefectures and sub-prefectures of the CAR during the 2012-2014 crisis.

—SeverinGeo

No Mapillary for today

“”I´ve decided that I wanted to add mapillary coverage of Unterschleißheim using my phone attached to my bicycle. I spent about one and a half hours trying to duct tape my phone onto the headlight, making sure that nothing was in the way of the camera but I gave up realizing that I would just look like an idiot cycling around with a phone duct-taped to my bicycle headlight. So that means no mapillary imagery for my city until I´ve figured out a way.

—A35K

Did you know ...

• ... that on February 17, 2015, user sanderd17 suggested to the GraphHopper team that they should implement a bicycle routing algorithm based on the class:bicycle tag to allow mappers to indicate how pleasant it is to ride on a road? After further discussion, the team accepted this suggestion, and the implementation code was merged on May 25, 2015
  • This tag is used to describe how comfortable a certain way is for a cyclist (with class:bicycle=3 being great and …=-3 being really bad). The tag is mostly subjective and surveys are needed.
• ... that user A35K accidentally discovered the class:bicycle tag after a certain OSM-based router kept routing A35K over a secondary road where it was probably legal to cycle but rather dangerous due to heavy motor traffic combined with a speed limit of 80 km/h? After this unpleasant experience, A35K decided to modify the tag value, and the OSM router has now stopped directing A35K to use that road.
  • Immediately, A35K also pledged to improve the quality of cycling routes in the city of Unterschleißheim Unterschleißheim using this hard-earned knowledge.