Posts published in 2021

January

Surveying the Ouray Ice Park

Jan 13, 2021 · Sam Ley

This OpenStreetMap US Virtual Mappy Hour features an overview of how Sam Ley mapped the Ouray Ice Park in Colorado.

OpenStreetMap US 2021 Board Elections

Jan 18, 2021 · Maggie Cawley

OpenStreetMap US is excited to announce that nominations to the Board are now open! If you care about the future of OpenStreetMap and its community in the United States, please consider running!...

January 2021 Newsletter

Jan 30, 2021

February

Exploring Coordinate Precision with xkcd comic 2170

Feb 10, 2021 · Patrick McGranaghan

In this OpenStreetMap US Virtual Mappy Hour, Patrick McGranaghan explores geographic coordinate precision in OpenStreetMap through the lens of xkcd 2170.

2021 OpenStreetMap US Board Election Results

Feb 12, 2021 · OpenStreetMap US Staff

The 2021 OpenStreetMap US board election results are in! There were 6 nominees running for 5 open positions. Of our 276 members, 129 voted. This was an increase in turnout from the...

Thank you, craigslist Charitable Fund, for your generous donation!

Feb 16, 2021 · Maggie Cawley

Thank you craigslist Charitable Fund! OpenStreetMap US is thrilled to announce a generous donation of $80,000 from the craigslist Charitable Fund. For five years craigslist has invested in the mission of OpenStreetMap...

A Celebration of Black History Month

Feb 24, 2021 · Mara Cherkasky

Join us for a presentation about the Mapping Segregation project with Mara Cherkasky of PrologueDC.

Join OSM US in welcoming Nellie Blair to the team!

Feb 26, 2021 · Maggie Cawley

Please join me in welcoming Nellie Rose Blair to the OpenStreetMap US team. Nellie has stepped into the role of our first Philanthropy & Engagement Coordinator. She is working on a part-time...

February 2021 Newsletter

Feb 28, 2021

March

Mapping to End FGM in Tanzania - & How You Can Help

Mar 4, 2021 · Janet Chapman

This a guest blog post featuring OpenStreetMap community member Janet Chapman from Crowd2Map Tanzania. Do you have a story to tell? OpenStreetMap US news or info to share? Message us at team@openstreetmap.us...

International Women's Day

Mar 8, 2021

This is a Ladies Night Mappy Hour bringing together the women in OpenStreetMap. This event welcomes anyone who perceives herself as a woman. Expect to meet like-minded women from the OpenStreetMap community,...

Lightning Talks from Women in OpenStreetMap

Mar 24, 2021 · Bond Harper, Jess Beutler, and Valerie Anderson

This OpenStreetMap US Virtual Mappy Hour features lightning talks from 3 women in OSM. Hear Valerie Anderson share a few conservation-related mapping efforts, Bond Harper discuss OSM & public art and a...

Announcing Mapping USA! & Call for Participation

Mar 30, 2021 · The Mapping USA Planning Committee

Mapping USA: Spring 2021 - Mark Your Calendars for May 20, 21 & 22! Sidewalks in New York, to art in California. Everybody loves mapping, Mapping USA! OpenStreetMap US is excited to...

March 2021 Newsletter

Mar 30, 2021

April

OpenStreetMap Overview with Maggie Cawley at Geo DC

Apr 7, 2021 · Maggie Cawley

In this virtual Geo DC Meetup presentation, Maggie Cawley, Executive Director of OpenStreetMap US, talks about how her organization helps grow OpenStreetMap, the free and editable map of the world.

OpenStreetMap in Education with TeachOSM & AGS

Apr 14, 2021 · Steven Johnson and Courtney Clark

The TeachOSM steering committee and American Geographical Society shared how OSM has been introduced in classrooms across the country.

Join OSM US in welcoming Jess Beutler to the team!

Apr 16, 2021 · Maggie Cawley

Please join me in welcoming Jess Beutler to the OpenStreetMap US team! Jess has stepped into the role of our first Program Director and is working on a part-time basis to strengthen...

A Brief Paddle Through River Tagging

Apr 28, 2021 · Brian Sperlongano

We heard from Brian Sperlongano on river tagging in OpenStreetMap.

April 2021 Newsletter

Apr 30, 2021

May

Walking & Biking

May 12, 2021 · Dean Allemang, Lena Nguyen, and Daniel Solow

This OpenStreetMap US Virtual Mappy Hour features guest speakers Daniel Solow, Dean Allemang, and Lena Nguyen talk about mapping for walking and biking in OpenStreetMap.

OpenStreetMap and U.S. Government Committee - Investigating Public Domain Collaboration

May 21, 2021 · Jim McAndrew and OpenStreetMap US Government Committee

Background The mission of the OpenStreetMap (OSM) and U.S. Government Committee is to seek out mutually beneficial relationships between the public and open data communities. As part of this effort, OSM community...

Welcome to Mapping USA 2021!

May 21, 2021 · Maggie Cawley, Martijn van Exel, Jubal Harpster, Daniela Waltersdorfer, Diane Fritz, and Minh Nguyễn

Welcome session for Mapping USA (Spring 2021) with Executive Director, Maggie Cawley, and the OSM US Board: Minh Nguyễn, Jubal Harpster, Diane Fritz, Dani Waltersdorfer, & Martijn van Exel.

A Concise Introduction to the OpenStreetMap Project

May 21, 2021 · Steven Johnson

For those who know nothing about OpenStreetMap, this five minute introduction will feature a brief history of OSM, how it works, and the significance & impact of the project worldwide.

10 Years of OpenStreetMap in the Classroom

May 21, 2021 · Richard Hinton

In this lightning talk I’ll present the why, how and results of incorporating OSM in the curriculum of GIS classes at George Washington University. Introducing OSM into the GIS classes was part...

The Latest and Greatest from Mapillary

May 21, 2021 · Christopher Beddow

Mapillary is the platform that makes street-level images and map data available to scale and automate mapping. With nearly 1.5 billion images and waves of recent change, we have many new things...

Florida: State of the (Conservation) Map

May 21, 2021 · Valerie Anderson

Florida’s roads & cities are fairly well mapped, but the conservation lands, trails, forests, grasslands, scrubs, sandhills, & wetlands are generally sparse in OSM. From 1990-2008, Florida had one of the best...

Using high resolution topography to update OpenStreetMap

May 21, 2021 · Emmor Nile

In the last 20 years there has been a tremendous growth in the use of lidar technology to develop surface models of the earth and vegetation. The State of Oregon has a...

The Daylight Map Distribution

May 21, 2021 · Jacob Wasserman

The Daylight Map Distribution is the result of Facebook’s process to build an OSM dataset corrected for vandalism, profanity, and other harmful edits. We publish a planet PBF every 4 weeks to...

Using OpenStreetMap to Quantify Local Economic Disparity Resulting from Traditional Racial and Class Segregation

May 21, 2021 · Willem Lee-Stockton

Lubbock Texas’s history of racial and class segregation has modern impacts. Texas Tech YouthMappers and a local NGO apply OSM to further quantify local inequality and disparity. We hosted a 3-day livestream...

Microcosms in OpenStreetMap

May 21, 2021 · Brian DeRocher

Microcosms supports the activities of local groups of volunteer mappers. Learn how it can support your team and help you create one.

Mapping USA's History on OpenHistoricalMap

May 21, 2021 · Jeff Meyer

We will showcase the progress of the OHM platform for use in historical mapping, focused on US history-related topics. We can talk about any scale of project or focus, with an emphasis...

Supporting and Engaging Community Groups and Contributors to Leverage OpenStreetMap Data and Tools for Positive Social Impact

May 21, 2021 · Arnalie Vicario

We believe that an improved community is one which collaborates to achieve goals, and which fosters and supports the growth of other local groups around the world. In this lightning talk, we...

Welcoming New Mappers

May 21, 2021 · Clifford Snow

Studies have found that welcoming new users to OpenStreetMap help improve retention. This talk will demo a website that allows anyone to welcome new US mappers. The demo tool tracks who has...

Fostering a Mapping Community in St. Louis

May 21, 2021 · Matthew Gibb, Freddie Wills, and Dana Stuckey

In March 2020, Harris-Stowe State University partnered with Maxar and other organizations local to St. Louis, to introduce students to careers in the geospatial industry. At our event, we focused on mapping...

Integrating OpenStreetMap into an undergraduate cartography curriculum

May 21, 2021 · William Wetherholt

This talk provides a brief overview of introducing cartography students at Frostburg State University to OpenStreetMap since 2019. Attention is paid to rationale, initial lesson plans, student impressions, and future directions. A...

Road Quality Trends in the USA, 2018-2021

May 21, 2021 · Monica Brandeis

Critigen’s OSM team developed the Map Quality Measurement (MQM) process to rate and rank the quality of OSM data in cities throughout the USA. In 2019 we analyzed roads data for 51...

Mapping Community Connections: Hudson Valley Mappers' Work in Poughkeepsie

May 21, 2021 · Benjamin Bachman

Hudson Valley Mappers (HVM) is a local chapter of YouthMappers, a project of the USAID GeoCenter. HVM is based at Vassar College, and most of our projects focus on mapping in our...

University Education and OpenStreetMap: Creating Service Learning Opportunities

May 21, 2021 · Tom Mueller

OpenStreetMapping is easy and requires little GIS knowledge. This makes it the perfect tool to incorporate into classes. This presentation will examine OSM at California University of Pennsylvania (CalU) by describing the...

Mapping History in the Pacific Northwest

May 21, 2021 · Nathan Proudfoot

In this talk, I plan to talk about mapping history on OpenHistoricalMap where I have been working on mapping time within the northwest. I would also like to go over how to...

OpenStreetMap Standard Layer: Who's using it?

May 21, 2021 · Paul Norman

Mappers see the OpenStreetMap Standard layer every time they view OpenStreetMap.org, but who else is using the layer? With usage logs, who is accessing what is broken down for this important OpenStreetMap...

Teen Maptivists

May 21, 2021 · Celeste Reynolds and Greg Hill

Maine: State of the State

May 21, 2021 · Alex Hennings

An update on recent history, current status, active mappers and work in progress in the great state of Maine. There will be a focus on mistakes, lessons learned, and hopes and dreams....

The YouthMappers Network: Broad and Narrow Perspective

May 21, 2021 · Dara Carney-Nedelman and Sophia Rapp

YouthMappers is an international network of 264 university-student-led chapters in 58 countries. We organize, collaborate, and implement mapping activities that respond to actual development needs around the globe - creating and using...

How Could OpenStreetMap Data Help City Agencies Manage Their Curb?

May 21, 2021 · Daniela Waltersdorfer

We always think of the curb as just the minute space that separates a road to a sidewalk, but what really is the curb? My talk will go over how the curb...

What's new on OSMCha?

May 21, 2021 · Wille Marcel

The last months have been very active on the OSMCha development. This talk will show some main new features and what we have in mind for the future of OSMCha.

YouthMappers Validation Hub

May 21, 2021 · Katherine O’Byrne and Noelle Dwyer

Since 2014 YouthMappers has been teaching university aged students about OSM and generating lots of data. In 2019 YouthMappers formed the Validation Hub to address potential data issues with YouthMappers projects, provide...

Mapping Campus Bike Infrastructure with Students

May 21, 2021 · Innisfree McKinnon

Working with the campus sustainability office, I have been working on mapping campus bike and transportation infrastructure with university students using OSM. UW-Stout is a small university campus without a campus GIS...

2020 State of the States

May 21, 2021 · Jennings Anderson

A quick, data-driven overview of OpenStreetMap mapping activity in the United States throughout the year 2020.

Birds of Feather: Sidewalk Semantics

May 22, 2021 · Ariel Kadouri

Come talk about the quirks of sidewalk mapping in your area! After mapping the sidewalks in a neighborhood of NYC we’ve learned a few lessons. Discussion to form around those who attend....

Spatial Poetry Workshop

May 22, 2021 · Hua Xi

Using high resolution topography to update OpenStreetMap

May 22, 2021 · Emmor Nile

Workshop: JOSM, First Steps

May 22, 2021

Facilitated by members of the YouthMappers Validation Hub.

Light base map by Switzerland’s federal office of topography, Swisstopo

May 22, 2021 · Dominik Käuferle

Community Mapping with OpenStreetMap: A Workshop on Civic Projects

May 22, 2021 · Diane Fritz and Steven Johnson

This workshop will share a complete model for engaging with OpenStreetMap on a community project. The session will lead attendees through a pre-built example highlighting the design steps and tools needed to...

Workshop: Railway Mapping 101

May 22, 2021 · Clay Smalley

Workshop: Getting your Microcosm created on OSM US

May 22, 2021 · Brian DeRocher

Workshop: Mapping USA's History on OpenHistoricalMap

May 22, 2021 · Jeff Meyer

Silicon Valley POI Mapathon

May 22, 2021 · Minh Nguyễn

Birds of a Feather: Railways

May 22, 2021 · Nathan Proudfoot

Workshop: Landuse from Wisconsin to Wherever: Using Parcel Data to Accelerate Landuse Coverage

May 22, 2021 · Grace Novie Stolen

Modeling How To Use OpenStreetMap in the Classroom

May 22, 2021 · Greg Hill and Celeste Reynolds

Using RapiD to Map Open Data

May 22, 2021 · Jeff Underwood, Yunzhi Lin, Ben Clark, and Deane Kensok

We originally built RapiD with solely AI derived data in mind but we pretty quickly realized that the framework would be useful for other sorts of data as well. Adding external datasets...

Birds of a Feather: OSM in Government

May 22, 2021

Facilitated by members of the OSM US Government Committee.

OpenHistoricalMap Welcomed As An OSM US Charter Project

May 26, 2021 · Maggie Cawley

OpenStreetMap US is excited to announce our latest Charter Project - OpenHistoricalMap! As a project, OpenHistoricalMap has existed in some form since 2012 and is well-known in the OSM ecosystem. We had...

May 2021 Newsletter

May 27, 2021

June

Disaster Response & Resiliency

Jun 16, 2021 · Nicole Martinelli and Russell Deffner

This OpenStreetMap US Virtual Mappy Hour features guest speakers Nicole Martinelli (Resiliency Maps) & Russell Deffner (Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team) talk about mapping for disaster response & resiliency in OpenStreetMap.

OpenStreetMap for Emergency Preparedness in the US

Jun 24, 2021 · Jess Beutler

Nearly 60% of buildings in the United States are located in a disaster hotspot1. If a disaster were to strike your home, what is in your emergency go bag? Extra food, water,...

June 2021 Newsletter

Jun 24, 2021

July

Parks & Recreation

Jul 14, 2021 · Elliott Plack and Colleen Coyne

This OpenStreetMap US Virtual Mappy Hour features guest speakers Elliott Plack (volunteer with Friends of Patapsco Valley State Park) and Colleen Coyne (Senior Analyst at KABOOM!) discussing mapping for parks & recreation...

Mapping for Playspace Equity in Philadelphia with KABOOM!

Jul 30, 2021 · Kevin Paul and Jess Beutler

KABOOM! is a national nonprofit that works to end playspace inequity, the systemic lack of access to quality spaces for play along racial and economic lines, through community-led playground builds. OpenStreetMap US...

July 2021 Newsletter

Jul 30, 2021

August

HBCUs in OpenStreetMap / Safe Routes to School

Aug 12, 2021 · Harrison Cole and Thomas Baumann

This Back-to-School-themed Mappy Hour features two guest speakers: Harrison Cole on mapping Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs), and Thomas Baumann on mapping for Safe Routes to School.

From Sandbox to Construction Zone to a Beautiful National Network of Bicycle Routes

Aug 24, 2021 · Steve All

This a guest blog post featuring OpenStreetMap community member Steve All on the US Bicycle Route System project. Do you have a story to tell? OpenStreetMap US news or info to share?...

August 2021 Newsletter

Aug 25, 2021

September

Food Access + Opportunity

Sep 8, 2021 · Alex B. Hill

Hear from Alex B. Hill on the Detroit Food Map project and mapping food access.

Geo-Ladies meetup

Sep 14, 2021

Join us for a Geo-Ladies meetup bringing together women+ in the OpenStreetMap US community.

Back to School Night with TeachOSM: OpenStreetMap for Education

Sep 21, 2021 · Steven Johnson, Greg Hill, Celeste Reynolds, Jess Beutler, Tom Mueller, Richard Hinton, and Courtney Clark

What do students love about open mapping? Why is open mapping one of the most effective teaching tools? In this series of short lightning talks, you’ll find out how you can connect...

Trails in OpenStreetMap

Sep 22, 2021 · Keri Nelson

OpenStreetMap US hosted a public discussion on the role of OSM trails data in protecting our national parks and helping to keep tourists on safe, well-maintained paths, with Keri Nelson, Backcountry Coordinator...

State of the Map US 2022: See you in Tucson!

Sep 28, 2021 · OpenStreetMap US Staff

OpenStreetMap US is delighted to announce the 10th anniversary State of the Map US has been rescheduled for April 1-3, 2022 in Tucson, Arizona! Be ready for a mapping packed event! There...

September 2021 Newsletter

Sep 28, 2021

October

State of the Map US 2022 Call for Proposals

Oct 15, 2021 · State of the Map US Organizing Committee

State of the Map US 2022 - Help OpenStreetMap US Celebrate 10 Years! You’re invited to propose a session for the annual State of the Map US 2022 conference being held in...

OpenStreetMap: The Community Behind Your Open Map Data

Oct 21, 2021 · Jess Beutler

What motivates over 1.5 million people to add details to a single map? From improving Lyft user experience to saving lives during humanitarian crises, OpenStreetMap is an open source project with almost...

Apply for a Scholarship to State of the Map US 2022!

Oct 27, 2021 · State of the Map US Organizing Committee

Applications are now open for State of the Map US scholarships! This year we’re looking to bring in our largest cohort yet, from a diversity of communities, professions, geographies and associations. OpenStreetMap...

OpenHistoricalMap: Mapping the Erie Canal

Oct 27, 2021 · Richard Welty

This OpenStreetMap US Virtual Mappy Hour features guest speaker Richard Welty presenting on OpenHistoricalMap, showcasing the process behind mapping the Erie Canal.

October 2021 Newsletter

Oct 29, 2021

November

November 2021 Newsletter

Nov 29, 2021

December

Mapping Our Local Economies

Dec 15, 2021 · Willem Lee-Stockton

Mappy Hour is back! Join us next Wednesday, 12/15 to hear from guest speaker Willem Lee-Stockton on using OSM to quantify local economic disparity resulting from segregation.

Announcing the OSM US Trails Working Group

Dec 22, 2021 · OpenStreetMap US Trails Working Group

In recent years, many more people have come to rely on mobile apps such as Gaia GPS, AllTrails, and CalTopo to navigate in the outdoors. Many of these apps display maps that...

December 2021 Newsletter

Dec 22, 2021