Mapping USA 2021

Thank you for helping to make our second virtual conference a success!

This virtual event was a celebration of all things OpenStreetMap and our community. This year, we took a virtual road trip through OpenStreetMap across the United States. Friday talks were recorded and can be viewed on the OSM US YouTube page. We hope to make this an annual gathering that enables people from across the country to learn about OpenStreetMap and network with fellow mappers through a combination of curated and community-led dialog.

Program

We had three fun days packed with talks, workshops, hacking, mapping parties and networking all around OpenStreetMap. Find more detail about the event schedule on the Mapping USA Wiki page.

Thanks to our Mapping USA Sponsors!

Surfs Up Level

Hang Ten Level

Coastline Level

University of Arizona Libraries

Acknowledgements

OpenStreetMap US would like to thank the following for their support and participation in making this virtual event a reality:

All of the volunteers of the Mapping USA Organizing Committee for planning this fantastic event - you are amazing!
Critigen for donating the logo design.
OSGeo US for the use of their Airmeet platform and continued support.
All of our supporting attendees that made a donation when registering for the event - you rock!

We are grateful for your support!

Still Interested in Donating?

Your financial support helps keep events like Mapping USA free and accessible. Is your company interested in supporting OpenStreetMap US? Email us at connect@openstreetmap.us or donate here.

Recorded talks

Times are given in Eastern Daylight Time.

Friday, May 21
Time	Session
2:00 PM EST	Welcome to Mapping USA 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.
2:15 PM EST	A Concise Introduction to the OpenStreetMap Project 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.
2:20 PM EST	10 Years of OpenStreetMap in the Classroom 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 passion for the instructors and part exposing students to a non-proprietary means of data creation and application in the context of humanitarian efforts. Many of the initial challenges have been abated with...
2:25 PM EST	The Latest and Greatest from Mapillary 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 to discuss in 2021: the new API, an updated website, improved OpenStreetMap tools, expanded focus, and upgraded camera compatibility. Join us to learn more about the current state of Mapillary, whether you...
2:30 PM EST	Florida: State of the (Conservation) Map 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 land protection programs in the state & has protected ~2.5m ac, most publicly-accessible properties of high recreational value. Since 2008 the program has been basically defunded & existing conservation land is facing...
2:35 PM EST	Using high resolution topography to update OpenStreetMap 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 WMS service that can be used as a base in the OSM iD editor as well as JOSM. This presentation will cover how lidar surfaces are created and how to use them...
2:40 PM EST	The Daylight Map Distribution 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 S3 for anyone to use that may be worried about exposing their users to these harmful edits. This is the same dataset Facebook uses in its widely published basemap. We also release...
3:00 PM EST	Using OpenStreetMap to Quantify Local Economic Disparity Resulting from Traditional Racial and Class Segregation 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 map-a-thon, part of our twitch.tv mapping series. We are also mapping disparity in our greenspaces on OSM. Inaccessibility to greenspace has lasting social, biological, and economic impacts to communities. We are identifying...
3:05 PM EST	Microcosms in OpenStreetMap Brian DeRocher Microcosms supports the activities of local groups of volunteer mappers. Learn how it can support your team and help you create one.
3:10 PM EST	Mapping USA's History on OpenHistoricalMap 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 on supporting storytelling and enhancing and building a larger historical dataset.
3:15 PM EST	Supporting and Engaging Community Groups and Contributors to Leverage OpenStreetMap Data and Tools for Positive Social Impact 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 will talk about initiatives and projects of local communities and contributors that the Community Working Group support, such as promoting and celebrating community/contributor achievement and successes, and conducting community webinars to provide...
3:20 PM EST	Welcoming New Mappers 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 been contacted and if they responded and makes sending welcome messages easy as copy and paste.
3:25 PM EST	Fostering a Mapping Community in St. Louis 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 several neighborhoods in downtown St. Louis, identified as priority communities through St. Louis’ GeoFutures Strategic Roadmap. Future opportunities to improve the map and utilize OSM data in St. Louis are in the...
3:30 PM EST	Integrating OpenStreetMap into an undergraduate cartography curriculum Bill 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 warm reception by students has the potential to mitigate Western Maryland’s OSM deficiencies as well as provide students that struggle with more technical lab exercises an inroad to mapping that resonates with...
4:00 PM EST	Road Quality Trends in the USA, 2018-2021 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 major US cities and published our findings on osmquality.io. Building off this work are using the MQM process to analyze trends in road data from 2018 - 2021 in a select number...
4:05 PM EST	Mapping Community Connections: Hudson Valley Mappers' Work in Poughkeepsie 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 community, the City of Poughkeepsie, NY and the wider Hudson Valley. For this lightning talk, we aim to share some of the work we’ve engaged with in the last year. In particular,...
4:10 PM EST	University Education and OpenStreetMap: Creating Service Learning Opportunities 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 author’s integration into classes. He will also highlight local and international work and discuss using this technology to push GIS Service into the classroom. CalU hold mapathons within classes and a collaborative...
4:15 PM EST	Mapping History in the Pacific Northwest 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 map with enough time. I would showcase some of the work that has been being done the Seattle area with the results from a 1936 data set and more details from today....
4:20 PM EST	OpenStreetMap Standard Layer: Who's using it? 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 service. This talk covers the goals of the service, it’s history, how it’s designed, and dives deep into how it’s used. Using improved logging functionality, we’ll get answers to these questions specific...
4:25 PM EST	Teen Maptivists Celeste Reynolds and Greg Hill
5:00 PM EST	Maine: State of the State 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.
5:05 PM EST	The YouthMappers Network: Broad and Narrow Perspective 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 geospatial data and information that is made publicly available through open platforms. This presentation will be an overview of the YouthMappers network with a direct example of chapter activities from Clemson Mappers...
5:10 PM EST	How Could OpenStreetMap Data Help City Agencies Manage Their Curb? 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 that barely anyone paid attention to (other than parking meters), to a prime real estate area with a myriad of uses and assets. So, what actually makes up the curb? How could...
5:15 PM EST	What's new on OSMCha? 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.
5:20 PM EST	YouthMappers Validation Hub 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 leadership and training to the YouthMappers network and deepen our commitment to the OSM community by being conscientious stewards of the data we produce. This talk will focus on the origins, work...
5:25 PM EST	Mapping Campus Bike Infrastructure with Students 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 database, so OSM provides a user-friendly way to map sustainability infrastructure. In this talk I discuss my first attempts to teach novice students how to use OSM to document biking, transportation, and...
5:30 PM EST	2020 State of the States Jennings Anderson A quick, data-driven overview of OpenStreetMap mapping activity in the United States throughout the year 2020.
11:30 AM EST	Light base map by Switzerland’s federal office of topography, Swisstopo Dominik Käuferle
1:00 PM EST	Community Mapping with OpenStreetMap: A Workshop on Civic Projects 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 present an issue & proposed solution to stakeholders with the help of OSM data.
2:30 PM EST	Modeling How To Use OpenStreetMap in the Classroom Greg Hill and Celeste Reynolds
2:30 PM EST	Using RapiD to Map Open Data 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 to OSM has always been a challenge as the data prep and conflation can be onerous steps. To simplify this, we partnered with Esri to integrate OSM compatible datasets directly into RapiD....