YSK some unconventional ways you can contribute to OpenStreetMap - Lemmy.World
These are super disorganized thoughts. To clarify the title, I’m targeting
people who may be interested in contributing to a project like OpenStreetMap but
aren’t interested in the narrow focus of things like roads, sidewalks, bike
paths, houses, etc. I aim to capture some of the insane breadth and detail
OpenStreetMap accommodates, but without just throwing you at the wiki
[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page] and telling you to go nuts. That
said, here’s a list [https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_features] the wiki
maintains of some map features. Note that these are standardized essentially by
consensus/usage, so if you think something’s missing, you can bring it up in
forums like the wiki and try to gain consensus to formalize it into a standard.
TL;DR: We map everything*; if there’s some infrastructure or natural formations
you happen to have a special interest in, you can probably help. Obviously I
think it’s extremely important as a way of democratizing information and tearing
down corporate hegemony, so understand that bias. The bias, too, is that
OpenStreetMap in its ideal form is a fuckton better than something like Google
Maps. If you ever progress to mapping as a hobby, you begin to realize how
comparatively trash Google Maps actually is for very basic things like creating
a walking route, accessibility, etc. It’s not just that we can make it open –
it’s that we can do it better. Keep in mind, too, that you can add as much or as
little data as you want. If you want to map the species name of every tree, feel
free; if you want to trace over a building and just call it a “building” with no
other details, that’s helpful too. So don’t get intimidated; it’s about what you
can do, not what you can’t. — * Electrical – OpenStreetMap straight-up maps the
global electrical grid. It’s incomplete, but the tools are there, and there’s a
lot already done. By helping this, you’re creating an open dataset in an area
that’s otherwise often extremely opaque. Your data may be the literal best open
data that exists. There’s a whole grassroots project dedicated to this called
Map Your Grid [https://mapyourgrid.org/]. And here’s a well-made tutorial
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyO93zd30nQ] using the powerful tool JOSM. *
Micromapping – There are a metric fuckload of things that can be done here
[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Micromapping]. You can map where
garbage cans, drinking fountains, benches, street lamps, vending machines, photo
booths, defibrillators, life rings near beaches, ATMs, fire hydrants, even
manholes are. Benches as an example do show up on renderers like Carta (the one
on the OSM website) and can be genuinely useful to individuals. Benches,
waste/recycling bins, and drinking water are especially nice in public parks.
They fill things out visually, but they’re also really nice if you’re thirsty or
have an aluminum can burning a hole in your hand. * Directory – A huge reason
Google Maps sees so much usage is a feedback loop where users expect to be able
to find business information like hours, and business owners maintain that
information. So you’re fighting an uphill battle, and this is one of those
fields where Google – by nature of having an army of business owners waiting
hand and foot on their GMaps entries for free – is likely to remain dominant
outside of, say, a small town. Nevertheless, a good-enough experience (or even a
similarly premium one with a lot of coordination and legwork) helps dislodge
Google’s hegemony (and obviously, if you use it, to be useful to you). * Apps
like StreetComplete [https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete] are
designed to streamline this specific kind of editing. * If you know people who
manage businesses, let them know: they automatically have an edge in the niche
OpenStreetMap arena just by taking five minutes every once in a blue moon to
make sure their entry is up-to-date there. Especially when doing it alongside
GMaps, you’re adding nearly zero time and effort. * If you’re adding timely
information like opening hours, be sure to leave a check_date= parameter (on iD,
this is “last checked date”) saying when you last checked this information. This
helps others decide how worth their while it is to re-check a business’
information. * Edit: Okay, I guess this is “conventional”, but to me, it’s less
“stereotypical”. * Transit – this one’s maybe too far into the “roads,
sidewalks” etc. that some people aren’t interested in, but I figured I’d mention
it. You can create bus routes, add pretty specific information to airports (even
down to e.g. holding positions), boat infrastructure like slipways, railroads
and train stations, etc. You don’t have to care about cars, bicycles, or walking
to help improve transportation. (Although I would suggest bicycles are
underrepresented on Google Maps and OpenStreetMap and that you can do a lot to
help if you care about cycling infrastructure.) * Golf courses – Love them or
hate them, there are a lot of fucking golf courses. For people who hate golf,
mapping features presents data for environmental researchers. For people who
love it, it presents a clean way to quickly visualize a course. (Open-air
mini-golf works too, which can be nice if someone’s wondering whether they
should try out a course.) Either way, you can go into a decent level of detail
[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Golf], and it does look pretty on the map
regardless of its ecological destruction. You can also add disc golf courses
[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:leisure%3Ddisc_golf_course] if that’s
more of your thing. * Fluviological – OpenStreetMap maps rivers, but we do a lot
more than that. We map down the level of e.g. intermittent streams, ditches,
culverts, etc. There are tools like topographic map layers that can help you
with this in a more advanced way, but you know, if there’s a small little
insignificant creek that flows by your house, it’d still be really cool to have
it on the map. You might be pleasantly surprised to follow it and see where it
ends up. * Public bookcases – We do really map these. It’s the “take a book,
leave a book”-type. If there’s one near you, put it on the map so people can
find it – god knows when I’ve checked that Google Maps only captures a scant few
of them. (“Micromapping” too, but this gets its own thing because I like it.) *
Theme parks – Yes, we map these. Yes, you can go into a lot of detail, including
tracing out roller coasters and water slides and adding individual attractions.
You’d think these, being high-profile, would be picked clean of things to map,
but that’s really not always true, and it’s surprisingly satisfying to just
trace a waterslide. (To that end, local swimming pools are also ripe for
mapping.) * Fences – Especially in sprawling suburbs, fences can give a more
complete picture of the area, often giving a rough idea of where property lines
are. Overall they just give things more definition, and since renderers like
Carto show gates, it can help someone trying to find one. * Ballot drop-off
boxes – Some municipalities will have boxes where you can drop off ballots, and
we map these too. On a related note, library drop-off boxes are also tracked. *
Building entrances – Entrances tell the map exactly where people can enter a
building (and who’s allowed), which can help for larger, more complex facilities
like hospitals. With these, the router knows exactly where to walk you to for
your destination. * Agriculture – In addition to drawing farmland, you can
designate a specific crop. If you have one nearby and know what it’s growing,
feel free. * Public art – we track artwork
[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:tourism%3Dartwork] like sculptures etc.
We track names, artist names, materials, etc. The next time you see a
(semi-permanent) public work of art (including murals), feel free to add it to
the map. It’s really nice to just stop and look sometimes. — A bit of
philosophy: I think OpenStreetMap can be broken down in to four different sort
of overlapping “fields”, namely map, navigation, directory, and research data.
These overlap heavily, but by my definition (to reemphasize: these are not
entirely or even mostly distinct): * “Map” is the thing you actually see
rendered (by some renderer) when you look at OpenStreetMap’s data. It lets you
look with your human eyes at an abstract representation of the world in a 2D
plane. What’s especially useful if you care about this is to focus on the 2D
polygons that make up areas. Is there a courtyard in a building not being shown?
Make the building a multipolygon
[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Multipolygon] and add man_made=courtyard,
so now it renders more accurately. Maybe neaten up the boundary of a nearby
pond. For lines, you can do things like zoom in and better trace pathways and
waterways, which can often be very rough approximations nobody ever fixed.
Finally, for points, you can, as an example, do micromapping like benches that
show up at higher zoom levels. * “Navigation” is concerned with getting between
places. Obvious overlap with “map”, but here I mainly mean routing algorithms.
What’s the best way to get between locations? What’s the travel distance and
time? Are there obstacles to look out for? Etc. You can especially help this by
adding more detailed infrastructure like traffic signals, speed limits, etc. For
micromobility, it’s often especially helpful to find small things people missed,
like a new footpath that acts as a shortcut for the router to take you through.
Whatever you do, though, do not tag for the router
[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tagging_for_the_router]! E.g. while we do
map well-trodden “desire paths”, don’t put a crosswalk where there isn’t one
because you think it’ll make your route 30 seconds faster. * “Directory” is
concerned with essentially a business etc. directory – one where you can look
at, say, a restaurant and say what its hours are, if it does delivery, what type
of food it serves, if there’s free Wi-Fi etc. You can help this by keeping
information up-to-date if you see something is wrong or incomplete. * “Research
data” is there to be a giant heap of structured data for e.g. research. Not
looking at the map render, not individually reading entries for e.g. a nice park
to go have a picnic at, but just throwing the raw values into an analysis. This
obviously makes its way into all three of the other fields, but I keep it as a
separate entity because of how much of it is outside those common applications.
An example is infrastructure that people looking at a typical map, router, or
directory won’t care about like e.g. the electrical grid. Very few people are
going to care that a power line runs in front of their friend’s house or find
that worthwhile to map over other options, but somebody trying to analyze the
grid might very much care on a macroscopic level. The main thing to know about
contributing for this specifically is that, while your edits can help locally,
you’re mainly playing a small part in a much larger game that needs all the help
it can get. I think that some people may find a strong affinity for one field
over the others, which is why I delineate them here. Note that there are various
pieces of editing software to do all of these depending on your use case
[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Editors]. — * That’s public information and
relatively static. Don’t be a creep, don’t map the dog house that blew onto your
lawn in a hurricane, and you’ll be fine. — Anyway, this was just a smattering of
different ideas. Why YSK: Contributing to a project like OpenStreetMap really
changes how you look at the physical environment, and I think it’s for the
better. It just makes you consider so many things you never would’ve, and I
think it’s a worthwhile experience. As someone who never played it, I can say
that it scratches whatever draw Pokémon Go had to me but would’ve quite never
fulfilled. Especially for the built environment, it gives you an excuse to
explore new things.
Fmstrat
TheTechnician27
Universal Record