This week I’ve released the 2.0 version of Every Door, which irons out most of the inconveniences found within a month after its official release. Yes, the editor has been officially released, just a few days before two talks on it at SotM and FOSS4G (recordings pending). You should download the editor for your Android or iOS smartphone right now!

I absolutely love the experience it gives me. It has revived my love for plain mapping, going out and collecting things to put on the map. Pascal’s HDYC shows my mapping days went from 29 last year to over 120 this year. That’s because I again look around for unmapped things while outside, and making an edit no longer requires navigating a map on a small phone screen, or making scribbles to open JOSM later at home.

Looking at amenities mapped with Every Door, I feel that few mappers understand the power of the editor. My intention for it was to have most if not all shops and amenities mapped on OSM, to make our map better than proprietary alternatives not only wrt cycleways, but for everyday tasks like finding which flower shop is open at 8:30. This is a huge endeavour, as I see having mapped over a thousand shops in Tallinn and around Riga.

To do this, to have everything on the map, we need to adjust our mapping habits. “Record and map it later” would not work: later never happens. “Confirm this one attribute” does not work either: the map is missing everything, everywhere, always. We needed an ultimate tool to record as much as possible as fast as our fingers allow. Finally, there is one.

But to leverage its power, one must learn how it’s different, what to look for. Every Door is by no means simple. It’s not a novice-friendly editor like StreetComplete or iD: it needs getting used to. Training. Tutorials. I plan to maybe record a few videos on that. But today I’ll share the basics: how I use it on any day I see a shop or a restaurant.

On this picture you see the statistics for mappers and number of map changes made with Every Door in the last month. Estonia stands out: indeed, that’s where I live. Most of the changes are mine. But I’m not mapping every day: far from that. I’m not a hardcore mapper, I just like to add things to the map. I spend like couple hours a week on mapping. But there are two key things that enable me to collect data effectively.

First is time. There is always time. The bus comes in ten minutes? Great, let’s walk around the block and map building heights and entrances. Stuck at a playground with your child? Half a hundred micromapping edits for everything you see — easy. Have a spare hour returning from an event or waiting for somebody? Open the editor and walk into every shop and shopping centre along this main road.

And also dedication. Focus. When you’re mapping, it’s like learning a poem, or reading an article in an unfamiliar language. You do the same thing over and over, you look up new words and write them down. Mapping is getting to know your city over and over again. It’s learning it afresh. Every street and every building. Noticing and mapping every door.

You can see this on the picture again: that’s Overpass Turbo results for things I created or confirmed mostly on a single day, during my two hours of mapping. All offices in two office buildings, all shops around, everything in a shopping mall. Before Every Door, I just tried to remember or made a photo, to map at home. Photo mapping does not work. Mapillary mapping does not work. Your changes need to be done there and then. See something new? Open the editor, do a few clicks, and you’re amazing.

It’s simple, really: start with the “POI” mode, marked by a tea cup. Confirm or adjust your location with the map — do not zoom, just drag it if needed. And study the list of amenities below. Compare it with what you see around you. Spot the differences — and record them. Tap on cards to add opening hours or contact details. Tap (+) to add a missing shop. You can be sure what’s in the list is the 100% complete and correct representation of what’s in OpenStreetMap: if a shop is missing from the list, it’s missing from the map. Do add it.

Then it’s the same checklist: location, name, opening hours, wheelchair accessibility, payment options, optionally phone, website, operator. Should take you like twenty seconds. Save and proceed. Second, third, tenth shop. It took me 2.5 hours to map the second biggest shopping mall in Estonia the first time.

And it takes me under half an hour to walk it again to confirm everything. Confirmation is important. The check_date tag is important. Otherwise you cannot tell the probability of a shop still being there. Was it edited a week ago, or was it an automated edit for an object surveyed in 2010 and long gone?

In Every Door, when you see an amenity and you see that it’s mapped correctly and still there, you tap the checkmark. See these green checkmarks on the top picture? These are shops confirmed in the past two months. If a checkmark is black, and the shop is there, tap it. It’s a proper edit, it adds to your edits count and conveys important information to map users. When you’re not up to entering data, just confirm everything. It’s just a tap, and it’s as useful as answering a question in StreetComplete or clicking your way along a river in iD.

And that’s basically it: have the editor at hand, know how much time you’ve got, focus on mapping your city, use the POI list to validate amenities and fix the differences, and confirm POI that are mapped correctly.

I hope some of you would share my passion for mapping — not abstract mapping like collecting photos and not opening an editor, not automotive mapping, not tracing satellite imagery, but the mapping as it was done in early days of OpenStreetMap: just going out and adding everything you see with your hands onto the map. It benefits you, since you get to know corners of your city you didn’t know existed, and it benefits everybody else by having recent and correct info about all the shops and amenities in their Organic Maps or OsmAnd. Let’s get back that POI power from Google and Apple!