A big thank you to you and all the board members, those outgoing and the new ones. I hope y’all get an executive director soon, as it is clearly more and more demanding to do this as a volunteer.

Just for the record: our current use of the tool in Wallonia is just for field testing. While it uses the exact same tool as was approved for importing buildings in Flanders, we do still have to go through the formal import approving process (as is mentioned on our wiki pages about this process)

While https://github.com/osmbe/road-completion was built with road centerlines in mind, it might be adapted to your usecase.

Worth mentioning that Visit Flanders became a Corporate Member of OpenStreetMap Belgium during the process. They came to us with the idea to make a significant donation, because they thought it was the right thing to do.

Maps.me is (was) different indeed. From an analysis of Notes I made a few years back :

[if] the Note was made through osm.org or an unknown app, […] about 40% [of Note posters reply after another contributer commented to their note] . However, if the Note was made with Maps.me, response rate was only about 10%.

Source: https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/joost%20schouppe/diary/43057

That information was automatically queried from the osm api in the old tool. Code available in https://github.com/osmbe/osm-welcome-tool/tree/1.x I just got an updated dump of all the data for BE, if I find some time, I’ll process it into a simple file.

Mateusz, I did some statistical analysis of this in Belgium a few years ago. There was not enough data to conclude much at all. Hopefully a dump of all the data the old welcome tool collected still exists; maybe with more data a more full on analysis can be done. Would there be any volunteers to analyse this data?

Hi BC, Just post an issue on the repository then. Direct link: https://github.com/osmbe/osm-welcome-tool/issues/new If you can’t or won’t use Github, just send me a private message and I’ll follow up with you

Hey H4N5, This article is rather old by now. For a current status on the project, see https://github.com/osmbe/road-completion/ The missing segments are available somewhere there, you could download them - or just navigate them on MapRoulette We also have a bunch of tasks that were marked as “too hard to fix” in MapRoulette. It would be awesome if you could include some of those when you go out surveying. For now, we have focused on “core road network” because those can usually be fixed from your backchair. But we’ve been thinking about how to extend the effort to the paths that are also included in Wegenregister. That would also benefit a lot from people like you who want to hit the road. For Mapillary images: I used both Osmand and Brouter with the overlay you mention. It’s a little annoying that Mapillary broke the service they used, and that it’s still not fixed in these applications…

Just FYI, deelgemeente is indeed admin_level=9, but “division cadastrale” can only be used a s an “inspiration” when mapping. There is no perfect overlap at all between those two concepts. I’d say the closest thing to official data about deelgemeente is in admin vec, as provided by NGI/IGN - but not allowed for mapping, AFAIK. Historically, mappers have combined several old maps to guesstimate deelgemeente boundaries. I think using cadastre to “improve” this would probably make things worse.

After lobbying together with Waze Belgium, there is now an easy way to download all the traffic signs in one shapefile. URL:

https://wegenenverkeer.be/zakelijk/documenten?documents%5B0%5D=type_document%3AOpen%20Data&documents%5B1%5D=type_document%3Aopen%20data

Also see this post for a list of municipalities where the data is pretty much OK: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-be/2021-September/011322.html

@philippe, I posted an issue for that, and Pieter explained why he thought that wasn’t needed: https://github.com/pietervdvn/MapComplete/issues/137 Feel free to add more arguments there.

Hey Sven, I think I might have seen OpenCampingMap in an earlier stage, it looks really neat! I just picked camperspots because I wanted to try building a theme, and it’s something I need myself. The whole point of MapComplete is that it’s generic (pick a theme and start building an app), and that it’s an editor in itself (where you don’t have to learn iD or JOSM before you can begin). I’d love to see us expand MapComplete with something that looks as cool as your OpenCampingMap; or perhaps your tool could reuse parts of MapComplete. My hope with MapComplete is that it can bring people together who otherwise would need to start from scratch, and creating a codebase where all the themes profit from new features.

That kind of answers bryceco’s question too: I just started with what interests me most. Also campings have several other details that are mapped than campersites. And since I never go to campings, it’s a bit harder to those. But we can expand the theme or make one for campings.

If you’re not used to working with the command line, it can also be done through the web. Say you want to add a new channel for Belgium by going to this link https://github.com/osmlab/osm-community-index/tree/main/resources/europe/belgium and clicking the “add file” button. With careful copy-pasting from existing channels, you should be able to create a decent file. Save it, and create a pull request. The built in validation should tell you if you broke something. I know I broke some stuff doing it like this (sorry Bryan).

If you want to make several corrections (e.g. change all Riot links to Matrix links), then you can use Github Desktop to edit the files on your local PC and make a pull request with several changes.

Yeah, it should be simple to update this every once in a while. Though everytime I look at data like this, I’m inspired to do more/different analysis, and -boom- there go two days of work. Oh well. There is some data about “subcommunities” in the surveys the Board and the SotM teams did. But it would be interesting to do a full on membership survey (and repeat it every other year or so - I’m pretty sure the Board would support a project if someone offered to do the work). In the case of “actual mappers” it’s easy to get relatively decent country based statistics, but I wouldn’t know where to start if you want to compare to other parts of the OSM community. I’ve seen some neat statistics about mailing lists in the past, but I’ve been searching my archives and can’t find it anymore. As well as overall activity rate, I think the clustering of messages at specific times (the yearly election time explosion) and by specific people (sometimes it feels half the content is written by just a few people) would be interesting. And sentiment analysis of the actual content could be interesting as well. It’s almost like we have a whole research agenda :)

Hi Janet, All I can tell you is that there’s at least one member and less than six. One number I accidentally seem to have censored is that you’d need 17 OSMF members in total to be “balanced”. Also not a single new member it seems during the research period. As a matter of policy, MWG does not hand out small numbers. But if you do a campaign in Tanzania, I’m sure they can give you an update at some point.

Hi mavl, This is indeed the kind of pattern we would expect if people try to abuse the Active Contributor Membership! Of course, there’s plenty of other possible explanations, and they still have a long way to go before they have sufficient editing days. Good that you leave changeset comments; that way Membership Working Group will probably notice IF this person were to apply. But if you were to see this pattern emerge more often, please report directly to the MWG so they can investigate.

I’ve referrenced this article on the LCCWG ticket mentioned on the osm-in ticket. This is an interesting approach to welcoming new users! See https://gitlab.com/osmfoundation/lccwg/-/issues/8

(I got such a message myself, which was fun)

Talking about tree_stump, I haven’t found a good solution yet for “monumental trees” that have fallen over and are deliberately left in place. Example: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4307394008

Something local birders told me, was that older trees are particularly important for owl nesting. But old trees here tend to shed large branches from time to time, posing a risk to hikers or, oh no!, cars. Keeping track of the largest trees is really useful then.