Archive of posts with tag 'OpenStreetMap'

Weekend Reading: Looking Glass Politics, Enrichment, and OSM Datasets

July 18, 2020 • #

🐇 Looking-Glass Politics

On private emotions being thrown into the public sphere:

People escape the Dunbar world for obvious reasons: life there appears prosaic and uninspiring. They find a digital interface and, like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, enter a new realm that glitters with infinite possibilities. Suddenly, you can flicker like a spark between the digital and the real. The exhilarating sensation is that you have been taken to a high place and shown all the kingdoms of the world: “These can be yours, if. . . .” If your video goes viral. If...

Weekend Reading: Strasburg Tipping, RapiD, and TikTok Investigation

November 2, 2019 • #

⚾️ How the Nationals Fixed Stephen Strasburg and Saved Their Season

Strasburg tipping his pitches almost ended the Nats’ run:

He remembered the game Strasburg pitched in Arizona on August 3. The Diamondbacks pounded Strasburg for nine runs in less than five innings. The D-Backs knew what was coming. The Nationals broke down the tape and discovered Strasburg was tipping his pitches by the way he reached into his glove to grip the baseball near his waist, just before he raised his hands to the set position.

...

Weekend Reading: Summer Solstice, Zoom Learnings, and TeachOSM

July 6, 2019 • #

📺 5 Learnings from Zoom

Zoom is one of those admirable SaaS companies built on solid product and amazing execution. I love this — not relying on anything sexy or super inventive, just solving a known problem better than everyone else. My favorite bit is their retention; it proves what can be done even in SMB with lock-tight product market fit:

Zoom has 140% net revenue retention. This is similar to RingCentral from our last analysis and other leaders. Zoom also shows that yes, this can be done with smaller customers too, not...

Weekend Reading: RoboSat, the State of Security, and the Equal Earth Map

January 12, 2019 • #

🛰 Buildings from Imagery with RoboSat

This excellent guide shows how to combine take imagery from OpenAerialMap and buildings from OpenStreetMap, and combine to train a model for automated feature extraction. It uses an open source tool from Mapbox called RoboSat combined to compare a GeoTIFF from OAM with a PBF extracts from OSM. Very cool to have a generalized tool for doing this with open data.

🔐 The State of Software Security in 2019

An excellent roundup (with tons of ancillary linked sources)...

Video Mapping in OpenStreetMap with Fulcrum

December 16, 2018 • #

With tools like Mapillary and OpenStreetCam, it’s pretty easy now to collect street-level images with a smartphone for OpenStreetMap editing. Point of interest data is now the biggest quality gap for OSM as compared to other commercial map data providers. It’s hard to compete with the multi-billion dollar investments in street mapping and the bespoke equipment of Google or Apple. There’s promise for OSM to be a deep, current source of this level of detail, but it requires true mass-market crowdsourcing to get there.

The businesses behind...

Weekend Reading: Exploring Zanzibar, Singapore of the Future, & Watching Basketball

December 1, 2018 • #

🇹🇿 Exploring Zanzibar with Mapillary

A fun travel post from the Mapillary team after FOSS4G in Dar es Salaam. A drive around Zanzibar collecting images for OpenStreetMap mapping. Also check out part 2 of the journey.

🇸🇬 City of the Future: Singapore

Singapore is an interesting experiment: a benevolent authoritarian government, small population, and limited geography to leverage and nurture. This documentary is a bit of a commercial for their plans for the future. Still some fun ideas that (if successful) other megacities could use to maintain quality of life with population growth.

OpenStreetMap and TeachOSM

November 15, 2018 • #

I’ve hosted many OSM mapathons in the past, and today’s event with AGS and the Geo2050 conference was a huge success. It’s hard to create an engaging, productive environment that’s conducive to new mappers learning about OpenStreetMap. Today’s objective was to highlight how teachers can involve students in active work + contribution in a valuable context.

TeachOSM mapathon

Steve, Richard, and Nuala did all the work, I just showed up to lend advice to folks that had any questions while mapping. The TeachOSM group did an excellent job showing the tasking manager, with...

Teaching OpenStreetMap

October 26, 2018 • #

We’re heading up next month to the American Geographical Society’s Geography2050 again this year, which will be my 4th one, and the 5th annual overall. It’s always a great event — a diverse crowd in attendance and a chance to catch up with a lot of old friends.

The last two years the AGS has hosted and led an OpenStreetMap mapathon in conjunction with the event to promote OSM as a tool in education. It’s organized and led by TeachOSM, and they invite 50+ AP Geography teachers from around the country to learn how to...

Weekly Links: OSM on AWS, Fulcrum Editor, & Real-time Drone Maps

April 21, 2017 • #

Querying OpenStreetMap with Amazon Athena 🗺

Using Amazon’s Athena service, you can now interactively query OpenStreetMap data right from an interactive console. No need to use the complicated OSM API, this is pure SQL. I’ve taken a stab at building out a replica OSM database before and it’s a beast. The dataset now clocks in at 56 GB zipped. This post from Seth Fitzsimmons gives a great overview of what you can do with it:

Working with “the planet” (as the data archives are referred to) can be unwieldy. Because it contains data spanning the...

Bringing Geographic Data Into the Open with OpenStreetMap

September 9, 2013 • #

This is an essay I wrote that was published in the OpenForum Academy’s “Thoughts on Open Innovation” book in early summer 2013. Shane Coughlan invited me to contribute on open innovation in geographic data, so I wrote this piece on OpenStreetMap and its implications for community-building, citizen engagement, and transparency in mapping. Enjoy.

OpenStreetMapWith the growth of the open data movement, governments and data publishers are looking to enhance citizen participation. OpenStreetMap, the wiki of world maps, is an exemplary model for how to build community and engagement...

Pushpin, Statistics, and Mobile OpenStreetMap Editing

June 8, 2013 • #

In the fall of 2012, we launched Pushpin, a mobile OpenStreetMap editor for iOS. It’s now been used by thousands of people in over 100 countries for casual editing, mapping parties, and humanitarian aid projects. Pushpin has lowered lower the bar for mappers, making it simpler for newcomers to make meaningful contributions. This talk reviewed some of the experiences of Pushpin’s development, statistics on its usage worldwide, and how Spatial Networks wants to grow the app in the coming year.

Video / Slides

Grassroots Mapping

April 25, 2013 • #

Since OpenStreetMap is growing in leaps and bounds, I wanted to take the time to give a brief intro at Ignite Tampa. This talk introduced the project itself, the importance of OSM community growth, and the OSM Tampa Bay meetup group for locals to get involved and start contributing.

Video:

Creating New Contributors to OpenStreetMap

January 15, 2013 • #

I wrote a blog post last week about the first few months of usage of Pushpin, the mobile app we built for editing OpenStreetMap data.

As I mentioned in the post, I’m fascinated and excited by how many brand new OpenStreetMap users we’re creating, and how many who never edited before are taking an interest in making contributions. This has been an historic problem for the OpenStreetMap project for years now: How do you convince a casually-interested person to invest the time to learn how to contribute themselves?

There are two...

Fixing Geography in Education

April 10, 2012 • #

I believe our higher education system is not properly preparing students of geography & GIS for the workplace, especially when it comes to modern mapping technology. This was a talk from the FOSS4G Ignite session on my thoughts about the state of the system, and what should be done to improve it.

Watch the video here.

OSM Tampa Bay

February 10, 2012 • #

At the start of 2012, I started a meetup group (OSM Tampa Bay) for the local Tampa-St. Petersburg to get together and contribute to OpenStreetMap. This talk was from our first WhereCampTB event, to get our local mappers and geographers interesting in joining up.