There's something a bit weird about OSM. We have the infrastructure and the idea to have a wikipedia-like map. It's insanely cool. But it's super hard to make any edit except through StreetComplete and people get asked the type of bushes they see in their street. I think the biggest priority would be to map all stores, their type and their opening hours. Right now there's nothing more reliable than Google Maps for this which forces people to use the Google Places API if they want a reliable product. I think we should have an app somewhere that is more user-friendly and focused on what most people need from a business perspective.
I started contributing to OSM recently after a bike trail was built near me. The arial imagery typically takes years to refresh around here so I walked it a few times to capture GPX tracks and then drew the new path. It was exciting to see my contribution percolate out to various apps that depend on OSM, and meanwhile Google and Apple have both ignored my edit suggestions and deny the path exists.
So I have a fairly fresh newcomer's perspective and here's what I suggest to get started: keep it simple and start local. As others have noted, skip the complex mapping app and go straight to the website for feature edits, or download a simple mobile app like Every Door and focus on businesses and landmarks near you. Go on a walk around your neighborhood and look for old/incorrect/missing businesses. There may be errors near you about places you actually care about, and it is really gratifying to fix those.
There were restaurants near me that were missing, shops that had changed hands, etc., that were easy fixes but years overdue. I captured some basics (names, posted hours, the phone number posted on the door, etc.) with Every Door, and then later logged into the main OSM website and fine-tuned the entries. I got into a pattern of fixing one or two entries every evening when I went out for a walk and pretty soon my walking route was all up-to-date. Then I started paying attention to things like stop signs and cross walks and found a whole new kind of little, incremental edits that nobody else was doing.
It's been fun, I've made useful contributions, and my laptop is still Java free.
Every Door is definitely one of the easier ones and I like it but dang I wish the dev could get more funding to make it a nicer UX. Between the glitchy raster tiles and need to click load data all the time I feel it gets tiring fast.
I've considered building a separate app that's similar but oriented around the idea of using voice of pictures to update things (with AI extracting and formatting the data for you to review). But alas making yet another tool isnt ideal.
Isnât that a door (haha) opened by our supreme new AI coding overlords: that now itâs possible to take the Every Door source code (itâs on Github), and throw it into a coding agent with the instruction to âimprove <ux shortcoming of your choice> without breaking functionalityâ, and with some iterations and human validation that yes, the UX is now indeed better, play the changes back with a PR?
UX is one of the things AI isnât good at. You can ask it for specific changes but just âmake it nicerâ is unlikely to work.
I can improve the UI to my taste but if the maintainer doesn't have time/money to maintain a big ol vibe coded PR for some very opinionated change isn't going to do much.
That would appear to leave me with the choice of just using it for myself (lame) or I then have a public fork to maintain :(
If there's basically no shot of it getting up streamed I think I'd rather make something from scratch to suit my needs without the extras.
Anyway, I hope the AI overlords help us fund more maintainers soon!
In a lot of areas the sidewalks and crosswalks aren't mapped even though they show up clearly on overhead imagery. I try to fill them in when I can, although this should probably be an AI task now.
It doesn't help that there are multiple ways to map sidewalks in OSM (as a property of the roads themselves, or as standalone paths parallel to the roads).
I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.
There's usually a reasonably clear consensus within a region or country.
That's less true for niche stuff (vs stuff where two different ideas are in wide use), but there probably isn't all that much of it either.
One way to approach it is to not worry too much about it, consistency can come later.
At least in urban areas I've seen it's almost always better to define the sidewalks separately. The routing for pedestrians is often significantly different than for vehicles. This matters when the data is fed into Strava or Garmin for running routes.
I highly suspect Apple and Google maps are auto tracing satellite images. Apple maps has perfect coverage of every road marking on their maps that exactly lines up to the satellite images.
I believe most consumers of OSM just discard data like buildings and crosswalks and layer on top auto traced data which has 100% coverage.
Every Door is pretty cool but for iOS I prefer GoMaps more.
This seems to be a very powerful way to contribute to OpenStreetMap, but I'm not sure if it's the right option for a new user.
I have over 2k contributions and most are from the Every Door app ( https://every-door.app/ ) on my phone.
If adding new data is too "scary", then maybe use StreetComplete ( https://streetcomplete.app/ ) which essentially asks questions about missing or existing old data.
I've added buildings, fixed layouts, etc, but that came later, after I better understood how things work.
I've taken StreetComplete with me on walks around my neighborhood and on a few vacations. It was really easy to submit data for missing items.
Oh dear.
Using JOSM for your 1st edit is definitely not recommended.
Doing the same with iD (the editor embedded in the OSM website) is faster and there's even a tutorial that will explain a bit about how things work.
That's a fair point.
I mainly chose JOSM for this tutorial because of its filter. As a beginner (just a few weeks ago), I couldn't figure out how to use iD's filter to show JOSM's equivalent of `name=* ((amenity=* "addr:housenumber"=*) | shop=*) -website=* -"contact:website"=*`. For this tutorial I wanted something better than than "click around the map until you find a place without a website." That felt like it'd be a frustrating and inefficient first experience.
Is there a way to make that filter in iD?
I think your tutorial would have more impact if you had a super short intro making a quick mod using the web page. The existing stuff is excellent for those who get a surge of dopamine from updating the map and want more power and control. The web editor is far from ideal but the app has a greater learning curve. Even installing it can be onerous.
I used the web editor recently to add a street and path and to fix some names. It was about as clunky as the Google Maps web editor which I used for the same updates.
Yeah, I got as far as "Search for an Official Website". Didn't know what the hell I was looking at or for, and uninstalled JOSM.
Tried to run JOSM, it tells me that "This app cannot run on this machine you have macOS 10.14.6 and it requires 10.11".
Just use the web page. It works, it's not hard to use and it's immediate when you have the urge and motivation to fix something on a map.
https://streetcomplete.app - basic task-based, on-the-ground, app for Android
https://every-door.app - intermediate on-the-ground app for smartphones
https://rapideditor.org - AI-assisted mapping in browser
https://www.hotosm.org - task-based mapping in browser
https://josm.openstreetmap.de - advanced editor for desktop (this post)
https://www.comaps.app - actually use the map with ability to make minor changes
I wish Streetcomplete had an ios app. The ios editors are all far too cluttered and hard to use on mobile. I've almost been considering making my own editor like streetcomplete but as a web app so it's cross platform.
There's progress being made on an iOS app for StreetComplete.
https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/5421
Oh that's awesome, Looks like I'll just wait and see then.
After you create an OSM account, there is also https://maproulette.org, which has tons of little tasks to fix, grouped into challenges, and many of them can be done using just the aerial photos, from the comfort of your seat.
Then there is also mapping for humanitarian purposes, https://tasks.hotosm.org/, which has mapping projects prepared by disaster response teams, and you can help by updating maps of areas recently affected by disasters. E.g. recently there was a lot of mapping in the area hit by the August river flood in Nepal.
JOSM is great when you get really into, but if it's really your first edit, just use the editor on openstreetmap.org.
If it's something you end up enjoying, one really satisfying thing to do is pick a small rural town and improve the map. With a few hours, it's not hard to make the OSM data more detailed and better than any other publicly available map.
Boy, the UX is horrible!
> The area you tried to downlaod is too big or your request was too large.
And no indication whatsoever of how big the area should be, I'm at my fifth attempt so far.
The limit is imposed by the OSM API itself, and it's a matter of how much data is already mapped in the area you're requesting -- a max of 50,000 nodes according the API docs. Of course data density varies wildly across the planet, so you can expect to fetch a lot more acreage in rural areas than in urban ones. But there's no way to know if a particular bounding box call will succeed without trying it out.
Editing software could be generally aware of high and low density locales and advise accordingly. And it could subdivide a large request into smaller ones. But the JOSM developers prefer to offer a closer-to-the-API experience.
[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6#Retrieving_map_...
As a beginner use the editor built in on the website instead (called ID). JOSM is a great power user tool, but this article's recommendation to use it for your first edit is misguided.
It's actually OK compared to your typical GIS desktop app, but naturally not the thing to recommend a beginner.
Sorry you're having such a frustrating first experience. I'd recommend trying just 1-3 city blocks max
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