 All right, so welcome everyone. This evening we shall be talking about OpenStreetMap in Belgium, some of the projects we've been working on, some of the issues we've been struggling with recently. This is brought to you by Jonathan Berrier, a member of the OpenStreetMap Belgium board, Pieter van der Venet, who will be assimilated, resistance is futile, into the Belgian OpenStreetMap board at some point, but who is also a very important member of our community, of course, and myself, Joos Schupper, also a member of the Belgian OpenStreetMap board. Let me see. So we have a bunch of topics that we prepared a bit about. Feel free to add more topics at the back of the shared notes. So you have some shared notes and on the left of your page you see people talking, the list of speakers, and you should see something with the shared chats and shared notes. So feel free to add suggestions under shared notes. And if you have any questions, you can ask them at any point in the chat. And for every topic, we will stop a few minutes to allow for discussion. So the idea is that we talk about this. So we didn't prepare fancy presentations. We're going to do this the OpenStreetMap way, which is fun and chaotic. So topic number one is the OpenStreetView. That's what we named it. So what is this about? So everyone knows Google StreetView and Google StreetView is really awesome. So if you can go to any point in the world and look around and see what reality looks like. Now, we're making a map of the world and so having the ability to from our desk be able to look around and see what the reality looks like is pretty awesome. Of course, Google Maps needs to make money and they don't allow us to use their data. And then you would say, well, the government also needs that stuff and they collect this data as well. So maybe they can share it with us. And that was a large frustration in Flanders up until a few years ago that the local government in fact did invest in such imagery. So there was a Google StreetView alternative with very good quality images, but it was completely close to us. And the main reason is that they they didn't buy pictures. They bought access to a system that has pictures. And so the cost could be lower because a company making the pictures could sell them to several people, which is awesome for them, but less awesome for us. So a year and a half or so ago, they decided to stop that system because it was getting too expensive. And a lot of people who came to be dependent on that data suddenly had a problem. So we did a campaign with OpenStreetMap Belgium to talk to as much people as possible about open alternatives. So for example, we use Mapillary intensively ourselves in Belgium. It's quite popular. There are several million images available there with an open license. So one way for governments to adapt to this new problem is to simply share imagery there and then everyone benefits. So the pictures only have to be taken once and then everyone can consume them. Another alternative is that you say, okay, we need more than just images. So the government likes to do fancy things with these images. For example, the car is driving around taking the images. They have equipment of $50,000 or something on the roof, probably euros. And they also make a LiDAR, a sort of 3D model of the environment, which afterwards allows you to measure the exact width of a sidewalk, for example, on top of the pictures. And that makes it a lot more expensive to collect the data. And that's one of the reasons why it needs to be sold to different people to be worth collecting this data. So considering that that was needed for a lot of partners, our suggestion was like, hey, if you have a big project like that, we totally understand that you can't be the owner of all the data that's collected. But why don't you make an agreement that just the imagery itself can be shared in an open way? And so we did have some success. So there are some inter-communalists, some cooperation groups between municipalities that are doing experiments with Mapillary and do-it-yourself solutions. There's Van Steyland, who is one of the providers of a typical 360-degree imagery who is contributing to Mapillary, I suppose, when they get paid by a municipality. But most of the investment seems to be going in the way of closed solutions again. So there is a big project by Fluvius, if I recall correctly, where anyone can like join a group of people who get access to imagery and so they have to buy their way in. And the imagery is never available for anyone outside it. So basically it's a continuation of the old system without anything better for us and the rest of the world, which regards to access. So that was a little painful when that news struck. So we're still working with local players to show them the flexibility of DIY solutions, where you buy cheap equipment and just collect the data yourself, be it 360 degrees or a simple GoPro. But it's been challenging and a little disappointing. So we tried to build a campaign, we also did a press release, but I would say that we kind of failed. So one of the reasons to bring this here was to see if anyone has ideas on how we can improve that and also we can show a little what is possible now with existing tools. I don't know if you have anything to add. I see Debo is typing up something. Cameras back. Yeah, my camera is hiding. Do we know the status of OpenStreetCam project? Is it still? Yeah, it's changed names. So it used to be from Tillenove, but then it was sold to Grab together with a lot of the software from Tillenove. So and Grab is a large taxi company based in Southeast Asia. And they do all their routing based on OpenStreetMap. So that's hence the interest. And they renamed it to KartaView. So far there are just keeping it alive and being shocked at how much it costs them to be running. Oh yeah, quite an important detail about maplery. So the one that we are using most, it's neatly integrated into OpenStreetMap tools. But maplery has been sold to Facebook. And of course, Facebook isn't exactly popular in the world of open source. Some other worlds need it, I suppose. So far, the impact has been positive in the sense that it used to be, you used to have to pay a huge amount of money to be able to use data that was generated on top of the images or to even have access to images as a private company or as an organization and municipality, for example. And from the day Facebook took over, they totally made everything free, which is pretty fun. So now you can just go to maplery, make an account, and start downloading machine generated data about where the traffic signs are. Do we know the one Facebook about maplery, the impact because I know of some other users that decided to remove all their pictures. Do we know the percentage of pictures lost, let's say, in the process? I've never seen anything indicating that looking at the evolution of the coverage and so on, I have the impression that the impact is relatively minor. But I don't know if anyone has tried to quantify that. I see Stan is still typing. Do feel free to just speak up. We do not bite. Occasionally we do, but yeah, as Stan is commenting, IEV right now. So IEV is the part of the Flemish government that used to run the imagery and they are in, I suppose they're not in a financial position right now to revive such a project. So it's basically their decision to stop it. And it's a bit of a shame that no structure was put in place to replace it with a different financial model. I don't know what, why not? I've heard that IEV has certainly no plans to make a new set of street view images. Yeah, that's correct. Jean-Marie shared something about the thermography again. I don't know how to say that in English. That's also something we noticed that there is, there's related products that are also, that also raise a lot of interest like oblique views. I actually have a Liche fan, how do you call that in English? I don't know. Whatever. The person in charge in the municipality is a professor at the ULB in what do you call it? Chemophysic. I don't know that in English. She is working with infrared satellite images to analyze the composition of the atmosphere. She is working for the IPCC, GIEC in France in France. IPCC. I don't know if you know the acronym. The GIEC, International Group on Climate Change. IPCC is the International Climate Change Panel. Climate Change, exactly. She's working on that too. She is also here. She more or less knows what it is all about, I guess. They say the resolution is 45 centimeters and as they measure the various wavelengths, they can, they could spot animals in the woods. Right? Chevrolet, I don't know what that is in English or in in in Dutch. Chevrolet is kind of, I don't know, it's something like a meter, meter, meter 20 high. Yeah, like a small deer. So it's not a Chevrolet in Dutch. Okay, so they say they could count them as a on the side if I may say so. Alderman. Oh yeah. So I and one one more thing perhaps to mention about the about Mapillary is that we made two organizations on on Mapillary. One is this one. So that map should show you the coverage of images that we made with a single sponsored camera. So they they donated a GoPro to Open Stream at Belgium, which has been with me most of the time, but it's traveled a bit through Thierry from the Fietzelsbond. And you, better known as Polyglot around here, did all the cycle, well all the proposed cycle highways with that camera. So it's about a million pictures that we took with that and a little over over a year. And in an effort to get them to donate more from more cameras to us. We also have the second organization where anyone who is a member of Open Stream at Belgium can join. And then we have a neat little map of all the images taken by people who are well who consider themselves a member of Open Stream at Belgium. And that's also quite an impressive amount of images already uploaded there. The statistics aren't loading right now, but the coverage is pretty neat. And these images of course help your daily mapping. Right, anything else related to this topic? I didn't look at the shared notes if anything's coming up there. Oh, nice. So in Holland or in the Netherlands, they have a bird's eye perspective. So this oblique kind of imagery. That's pretty awesome. Cool. Thanks for sharing that. That's something we can use when people say, yeah, but you can't share this. It's like in Holland they can. All right, next topic then. It's the battle of the paths. So a few years back we had a first kind of battle of the paths where suddenly we saw an influx of people interested in Tragewegen, slow roads as we like to call them. So basically any path or trail or road where cars can't go. And that was really fun because the people who are interested in that stuff, they used to make Excel sheets and paper maps and Google maps, their own projects and all sorts of stuff to collect this data about the little trails. And finally they had like a common database where all this information can be shared in a structured way and where it actually helps to preserve these paths because a path that is mapped is a path that maybe will be used a little more. There were some small issues from the start because what's a path to someone is not always a path to someone else. So for example, a typical example of something that causes controversy is if there is a path that goes through a field and you can only see it sometimes if you're lucky. So there's people using the path maybe sometimes a little and then you can see that the crops are dead there but most of the year you don't see anything. So we had lots of cases like that where we started getting a few complaints from people with their mountain bike using OpenStreetMap to find ways and saying, hey this path you mapped really doesn't exist. So we had a few issues there but then Corona happens and suddenly everything changed. So before Corona we had an occasional complaint as well from people saying, hey this path is really my path and no one should be allowed to use it. But that was really rare. I think one or two cases before Corona and really from April, May it went up to one or two complaints per week from people saying, hey this path you really can't use it and it's my private property and making complaints sometimes threatening with lawyers. We laugh a little. But then in a later phase as well we got complaints from occasionally from Natuurpunt because people use paths which are within nature reserves and sensitive areas and from from Gert Forestière, Boswachters I have no idea in English, who try to keep people on the proper paths within the areas they manage. So we really had a huge influx of that sort of case and it's been a challenge to deal with it. So one of the things we did was over time standardize replies so that we don't have to write a whole letter every time. So we started with one letter and then rewrote it and in the end it turned out to be something we can reuse most of the time. The important thing there is that usually people will ask us to delete this path. But we can't do that because we well sometimes we can but in most cases we can't because OpenStreetMap maps everything that you can actually see. So if you can go somewhere and there is nothing blocking your passage to go there is no sign that it's private and you can actually see that there's a path there then we will map the path and if you say it doesn't exist then we say our eyes tell us differently. So what we do instead is that we mark the path as private if we believe that the people making a complaint are correct and that's very hard to do. So in most cases we just accept what they are saying. But often we find we look for some input from people from the Agri-Vegen or from the local municipality or from Balnam for example in Valonia to get some input about whether or not a path is actually legally accessible or not. But it's still it is it is murky it's it's I the people I see so Vincent is from Tragerie and I believe so perhaps you can tell a bit about how hard it is to to sometimes find out that the truth of whether or not a path is publicly accessible. And so over the year so Janik if they are we do if they are private we set them to private but if so for example a path that has existed for 30 years or at least 30 years and has been in de facto use for that time is legally accessible. So you can't just change it. I mean it would be wrong to map it as private even if the owner suddenly decides that they don't want to allow access anymore. So there are some some rules and regulations in place there. The most interesting part to us was that suddenly we were relevant. So before no one cared what was mapped in OpenStreetMap and and now all of a sudden apparently people are using our data to find their way. They actually know that they are using our data to find their way so they they're using an app that makes it clear to them that they use OpenStreetMap and the people who see them passing by so the owners the ones who have the property they they ask people and they get to know like oh yeah they'll be find the way here because it is an OpenStreetMap. So that was an interesting an interesting experience this year. It does mean a lot of work a lot of discussion and a lot of working together. I wonder if Kevin here is from RootU. There's a Kevin at RootU. I don't know if it's the same. So we're hello Kevin. So we are talking to RootU. I'm a little slow to respond to your mails Kevin sorry to see if we can if we can standardize our policies a bit to better work together because a lot of people also go to RootU to complain about the underlying map. So they have the added problem that people will create tracks of where they hiked or biked to and upload them and of course if someone uploads a hike that someone else can then go follow it's a little annoying if that's over private property. So to answer Natal so some parts are limited use for example only accessible for pedestrians not mountain bike and yes a lot of that is unclear on the map. It is pretty hard to show all that level of detail on a map. There are some good attempts to do that for example the Wanderreitkarte does an excellent job if you happen to ride a horse. I haven't seen an equivalent for cyclists but any rooting application will do a good job. So if you trust your router then you will get a route that avoids parts where you're not on out. One of the issues also the way apps or websites render the private because for some apps it's really clear it's even written access private on the default style it's great so it's quite clear if you know it but on some apps they just map it the same way just pass it do not map the way that's private or not so I think for the user it's not clear enough on the app that the path is actually private. Perhaps something about the limited access in the nature reserve areas which are managed by not different or INB. I tried to follow those access restrictions whether on foot or on mountain bike and I tried to add them or I tried to add them to open street map but I stopped doing it because it's just impossible because you have parts which have a sign that's forbidden on one side and on the other side it's not access only for hikers on the one side and on the other side not mountain bike routes together with a sign only except only pedestrians and all those things any impossible combination you can imagine you find on the field so I stopped doing that and I have wanted to send an email to those organizations about them but I know better than them where the signs are so I use that information to go where perhaps I shouldn't go but I don't I just still follow the signs which are there and I know that from which side I can enter an area without without doing something that's forbidden but yeah that makes it impossible to add it to the map and those people can say what they want from the nature of INB but as far as I know the signs count and I've tried to find some information on the internet about which parts are accessible to which users but I haven't been able to find anything about that. We recently had a meeting with ANB mostly we can blame peter for that so there was a someone deleting a lot of forests in the arboretum in the fredeswanje in the zone about and while we started on deleting and no wait we started complaining like hey please don't delete bots if they still exist and so finally we went there and we talked to several of the people at ANB and they talked about what Kevin just posted that apparently there are detailed plans and they said they were reworking all of them so that they should become better in the future and in theory we should be able yeah so there's okay right now I don't know what they I don't know how useful they are how how hard it is to use them in practice but so in theory they should become a lot better soon I've also received already a data set from the the Brussels part of the fredeswanje and about the first case I checked said cyclists only and pedestrians were allowed in reality as well so yeah everyone thinks their data is correct and it never is well all they are correct obviously yes no they're not they're as correct as you want them to be or as as you make them yeah so the what stan was also also mentioned was the like all the wrong traffic signs so we even started a sub a little subgroup of osan belgium people who like to be annoyed by that to to see if we can make a sort of database of wrong traffic signs to to keep track of them and to report them to to local government and and to have like a structured place to collect all of that we were we tried to fix my street platform but we didn't have enough developer power to to keep eye to keep that going it's a little too complicated to set it up so we're thinking I'll post the link stan and let me see what was I was I yeah so we're thinking we're thinking of maybe just doing something on github with a linked u-map that shows the the github issues on a map or something like that so that we at least have something and to get them actually fixed it really depends on on who you ask it's in one municipality they fix it within days and in others you never get any response at all separate that looks like an interesting video so uh kevin now that we we have you here uh perhaps you you can talk a bit about how how things are going on the rutu site some might be interested to hear how it how it is in practice yeah sure um corona happened also um but but I think it's been a constant since the beginning of rutu that people have remarks about the routes going along private roads but I think so I have to put a number on it I think before corona we had one a week I think and now it's approximately four or five a week um and previously there were most of them were objectively uh in in in a sense that it it was um obvious what the solution what the solution was for example um something is private or it's said by the the owner of the road it's private in other cases it's more a subjective kind of remark and it's sometimes difficult to to analyze um for us what we use is we we have a a plan which we follow step by step actually where we try to evaluate the the remark that is made by just one thing is checking all the routes going along these paths and checking the score we have a score per route and then the stars and if you have three four or five stars it's actually a verified route so so actually the the distribution of scores of the routes along these paths also tell us something about the the the the quality of the remark made um and then then we try to use other sources or or um partnerships we sometimes contact Trajavigen if it's really a strange case um to just get a good solution for the for the people making the remark but also for the users making the routes it's sometimes a combination and finding the right balance between them because the on the on the side of the the the problem reporter it's it's often a story of a lot of frustrations and it's it's sometimes very difficult I think you you you see the same when you get the mails probably um there are often a lot of frustrations about we um probably uh or or sending everyone along these paths which is most often not the the the case but um yeah it's it's it's finding the right balance between between helping the the problem reporters and and helping the users making the routes and then finding the right solution in that case um what we also do is if we if we verify a problem report um if it's in our eyes uh true that the path is is private we also uh proactively go and check all the routes and remove them from our public platform and and notify the the authors of the routes to to um to the fact that that their routes is along a private route and they should avoid it in their route so we can yeah we can't uh how do you say it um make sure they don't follow the route but we can try to give them the necessary information to to avoid those paths um that's probably the story of of what we do and and how we try to handle it but it's it's it's increasing week by week the the reports um and we we we try to solve them as good as possible and then try to um input everything in open street map if we're sure about to remark and then we have enough information to to to verify it because uh we can't just go um to the the the street and check everything but if we have enough of it enough information i wear 99 99% sure we're changing open street map to to to solve and fix it and most often for example in in cases of private routes it's like like also mentioned earlier it's setting it to private and that's most often the the solution to it and uh something we did recently is also but it was also mentioned already is is trying to visualize it more clearly on the map which is which roads are are private to try and and and help users uh see where where there are private roads the the routing engines avoid these roads but in some cases people still try to manually plan a route and and try to take roads which are not really uh accessible so we try to to improve the visibility of private roads but it's you know finding a balance and and trying to to make it clear and obvious what's happening it's probably uh yeah my story yeah and at some point your own responsibility ends and it's the and it's the people who actually go out there that have their responsibility right yeah that's yeah but but a lot of people who use uh route you or another app um just refer to us as the responsibles or the just avoid their own responsibility and just say all the app uh showed me along that way so it's their problem it's not my problem um so yeah it's it's a it's a it's a a battle of the parts yeah as as supper mentioned uh it's also because of uh of people uh abusing uh parts so um yeah so i think when you're using the public domain it's not just about not leaving a negative impact but actually leaving a positive impact so if you go walking on a nice little path and you see some idiot left a um uh a red bull can there that's usually what it is or just take it along and if you think what that's crazy well you also accidentally have dropped garbage in the past so maybe you're just compensating for your own accidents people make mistakes yeah it's really a good remark of supper it's it's there's a lot of frustrations and you have to try to find the a positive story in it and try to yeah try to find the balance between yeah and then since corona uh it's more frustrating probably like yeah i don't know well during my experience uh if you go somewhere where you can really only go on foot it's usually clean like people leave a mess when you can access with a car and you can only access all food but yeah depends of course very hard it's really different one i had a another nice example of a path in i think it was in mele in mele which was accessible i think it's it's um i don't know how you say it's a it's a permissive use of a road but we got the remark of the farmer um his land is near the road but the road is actually in such a bad quality uh that that people start to um go around the path or or go beside the path and then go over his crops and and start destroying the crops and and he was looking for a solution for it like that that's a case where i am i don't want to to to block the path because it's it's actually public domain and it's it's permissive use of the of the other path but yeah and that was a difficult one to find an actual solution for it i don't really know if if there is a good solution well if if it's an officially i at some point the municipality is obligated to to take care of the path so if it's in a really bad state maybe they they should fix it i think i think the the path belonged to electra bell or it was part of a near a railroad i don't know for sure yeah and so and the the if it's electra bell they they allowed to the use of the path but i don't know if they if they if they really um maintain the road yeah well we're also just talking about the cases that get to us um so there is also uh some some that's a little weird in the case of open street map because anyone can just delete everything they want and so fortunately people aren't doing that very much but it does happen and we're fortunate enough to have a jacka who that's one of our contributors who sends a welcome message to every new mapper in belgium and meanwhile checks what first edits they have made so if you come to open street map specifically to delete some parts then we will notice um and so we now have a policy to just revert it uh if it's if it's clear that they should have been marked as private and and set them as private and then sort out the details later and of course there's still a lot of parts and tracks which have been armchair maps uh which have never been checked what the status is and they are there they're in the database and everyone and it looks as if they're public parts yeah it's often they aren't yeah yeah what what adds to the to the murkiness there is that if you so one of the sources i use myself to to check the age of a path is is the ngi base maps um but those don't have any information about accessibility they don't visualize that at all so it's really hard to uh to do that and yeah yeah there's a lot of roads out there that are mapped uh based on on official data on imagery without a survey and then pretty obviously private roads get mapped as just any other road and that that isn't either a nuisance yeah and i guess a lot of the reason we have so much issues right now is because of this little virus thingy that's going around um and and so probably once that all blows over in the next decade or so uh then then the pressure on the paths will will get a little lower again and maybe we will have less problems um i hope the people who find their way to open street map will keep finding their way to open street map though at least we have now more information about that about how many people are using open street map one of the interesting cases but i think should not all follow that up um was where the the the department of defense asked us to delete some roads uh because they were on uh on military domains and before we complied uh we looked at how it is mapped on the official government data and it had more detail than than what we offered so we were like why should we delete it if you yourself offered i don't think they they ever followed up right no no but it was really a really legal document from the minister of defense so that's pretty scary at first but it was about mapping and also air imagery because somewhere else it has to be uh blood but we do not provide the air imagery so we're like so it was pretty scary but i i don't even think we replied i don't exactly remember but i think they just heard about open street map they checked once in the in the base somewhere they noticed something mapped and and then send send the whole legal department but no as far as i know there was no no follow-up on that all right anything else on paths um all right then we can go to the map complete section um peter i feel like i've talked enough for three days so over to you yes okay so uh good evening everyone so um we also wanted to use this uh gathering to introduce a new editor that i've made together with the help from some other people um so um first of all let us start with showing what it is so um for a project a while back i'm going to start screen sharing so for a project a while back uh people wanted to have an editor to make an inventorization of parks and forests and stuff and it had to be really good and it had to be really simple to use and so i built them that thing that was pretty cool uh but i thought so if we want to show the original one uh so it was with corona and it was uh the party the green party and they wanted to make an inventorization of parks so people could go walk and they wanted to do sourcing stuff and and it had to be open um so i made them that and then uh you could oh this is broken you could like answer questions about the parks and the playgrounds and stuff so for example about a viewpoint you could like add a few questions but then i thought okay this was really cool but what if we could make it for more so i set it up it was that it could be really general in the summer uh at open summer of code we made a team for uh cyclists for bicycle pumps bicycle shops all stuff and like that for example uh there is a bicycle uh oh it's all hanging for a minute so for example there is a cool bicycle tube fanning machine here or there is a bicycle pump over there if it wants to open why is everything always broken when you team with so you have the bicycle pump here um so and that's even that wasn't enough so because we felt there there's a lot more that could be done with it so for the open people themselves we also made a way that it's really easy to extend it and that it's really easy to make your own team and that was a success because right now there's already like 15 no even 20 teams which are there but there's also people who made their own team so these are all teams that were created just by people like you and me uh so yeah we have a very flexible and easy to use editor now go on and use it um you can make the presentation from screen by the way i don't think that's for me but i also already shared the link so um for map complete uh so in general what can you do with it you can visualize the other it's both a map viewer and an editor you can easily show very in depth what the data what data is there for a specific topic um it's generic well it's a single team is not generic but you can make a team for whatever you want and furthermore it's a single html page you can open it on your computer you can open it on your phone uh so it's cross platform and furthermore uh what's even more important it opens the door for new people to get editing it's built specifically to be really easy for new editors to use for people who had never ever touched yes software closely it's also built that if the team is good it's really hard to fuck up so if you answer a question and yeah you're not lying it should have the right tagging it should be correct by default um and the idea is also that that it's embeddable in other websites the idea is that a government website or a website for a certain niche of or a certain community just embeds the map like they do know with a google my maps thing but that instead of making 10 google my maps for every municipality one that there's one single shared instance based on open street map so that all the data is um kept together and all the data is stored in open street map together um yeah you also already shared another team of surveillance cameras which is pretty cool too no um there's also some stats uh so I didn't really prepare my talk as you could have noticed but I compiled some stats to post over which is pretty cool as well um and the past nine months because it only was deployed first in like june last year we reached or rather map complete reached um all right no stats reached around 300 or 400 different contributors so that's already quite a lot the stats from last year uh and in 2020 there were a 350 unique contributors with map complete that's more than map contrib which was pretty cool uh furthermore there's also I think your screen is not shared anymore Peter yeah I know uh but I'm gonna compile some stats um so in total there were 368 unique contributors up to this point the most active contributors with around 460 edits was well myself which is quite logical because I that's constantly and I use it a clue a second most active contributor as you used with 74 contributions uh yeah um I also have to admit that uh at the beginning of map complete the change set handling was different so if you made a change you waited 30 seconds and you made another change it was it would be two different change sets and as yours was already involved quite in the beginning yours made quite some changes and I made quite some change sets that way too handling is no different I still use it though I mean when I see a bicycle pump then I grab map completes because it asks me the questions and it's just click a click and it's ready and you don't have to think what what's the tag again or yeah and then there's also another few contributors there's also a certain contributor uh yeah so lots of people from the belgium community because the belgium community knows it all best um then another fun overview and uh I'm gonna open up the screen share and then you can see how slowly I've been making the the stats um so another really interesting one is of course which teams are most popular uh so the most popular team is null which is basically the first team when there wasn't no team reporting yet then cyclofix which has been heavily promoted and we've done a mapathon for it so it seemed 187 edits on the cyclofix team then 62 edits on bookcases I was a little surprised to see such a high amount there but that's a very fun team and there's a few bookcase and adjusts who discovered the team and when I check every week just like one or two edits on the bookcase team the defibrillators were quite popular as well then ghost bikes uh which is an other surprising one lots of people don't even know what the ghost bike is so that's a memorial uh as a a a bicycle which is painted white and it's placed where a cyclist has been killed in a a traffic crash uh then benches uh birnatur the original map complete team which should be uh added together with this one so that was the team causing the most changes it's up till now artworks the personal team which is very hard to say exactly what it was trees was also pretty popular uh shots to toilets and then there's a whole list a long list of small teams which so with few edits uh most of them were like little experiments or like one of like I want to make a team for that and then quite some so like one edit so I've added the ping-pong table one once I've added the picnic table ones stuff like that so uh there's even this thing I have no idea what this team is but you catch the drift and then at last I have another fancy thing for you the number of edits over time so here you can clearly see a few time frames so here you have December holidays at this point so the original one was birnatur was about forests and parts here the first communication the first email and I would like hey uh dear people we have a a new tool and you can map some information about nature near you so that's why we see a first spike here and then it goes on then there's this huge spike here this is when we did a map button uh for cyclophics within open sum of code so people went out and mapped bicycle pumps bicycle shots but mostly bicycle parkings we put in the bicycle parking specifically to let people do stuff and then it went on we had we have a second spike uh somewhere in august I think it's this one where another mailing went out from birnatur and then it just goes on and I see a few edits every now and then especially on on uh weekends we see that there's like the periodic uptick because people go out in the weekend and people at the weekends they map benches and they map all the kind all the the kind of small stuff that's fun to map so so yeah we see that adoption is coming and people are getting interested more and more furthermore I'm also trying to do more stuff to find some funding for it for example if there's a project which would fit map complete well I try to be part of that project one of these projects I'm doing now is for the province of antwerp where they want a map completing for like playgrounds and sport pitches so that one is coming up within the next few weeks uh we're also in running for another one for cycle safety again so we'll see where it goes and if you have a very specific team you want to have worked out then you can contact me so so yeah so the question is where mapping stats past projects where the sequel fix the beer nature the planned project is the uh the playground thing uh and then the official team you can find on the website and another question was what is the roadmap for now the roadmap is maintenance and if there is a cool project then I'll jump the project but sadly I don't have the time available to invest a lot to make it bigger and that's of course there's a someone funding some of my time are you looking for some help for the for the code the code source source code if you want to I can well if people want to or if people want to I can show you around I do think the most interesting thing right now is the documentation on how to create your own team I'm going to post that in the chat but there's a little document and people who are who know open street map who know the taking scheme and who aren't afraid of of some Jason they can follow the documentation and they can step by step create their own team with their own visualization that there's also a custom team generator available so it's a website where you follow what you want it's very buggy it's very broken it's good to get started it's good to get the basic team but there's quite some features which are not available via there and then you just draw make the rough outline you grab the source Jason and then you edit it in an editor to add a few missing touches and to finish it off but it's good to get started there's one caveat top you need at least 500 edits to make a team that's capable of editing and at least 200 edits to just generally make a team which is read only why is that that's because I feel that at around these numbers you have enough confidence and enough knowledge of open street map to create your team you have enough confidence to realize oh this is public shared for everyone and I can't just make a team for like tourist spots I want to visit with my friends when I'm going on holiday on Paris or yeah another reason is like otherwise if you do not have the technical confidence people will start making a team and then they'll get stuck and then they'll spam my issues and sadly I don't have the time available to help out every beginner with like oh you can do it like this and like that so that's why I yeah one of the one of those spamming beginners is me so I've made three different teams by now the first one is I hope can can be adopted as an official team so it I mean I'm not a programmer at all but I do have I mean I'm technical in the eyes of most people of most normal people I mean when I'm in the USM it's like yeah you know something anyway and it's it's it's difficult but it's definitely feasible and it's it's a lot of fun to to suddenly be able to do things that were totally impossible before so just I for the one I've been working on most was the company sites sort of places where you can dump your garbage specifically for campers and that's that's the kind of thing that you really need to visualize to to actually let people know that it exists at all and I think that's where a lot of added value of map complete comes from that it it really shows you the data and in all its glory it's not just like here's a map no no here's here's 20 000 details about some certain POI you didn't even know existed it shows the strength of having a flexible data model and so to expand a bit on on what Peter has been talking about so we just the existence of map complete has made it a lot easier to talk to municipal governments because it fills a gap that they have so they have the they have the tendency to map all the things that they want mapped in their own environment but then it's all locked up and if you're lucky you can get a PDF sometimes even a nice little web interface for the kind of POIs that they collect but it sits on the data island and they have a lot of work with it and so here and then we come along and say hey you just have to like have this one html page written together with us and then you have a global database where you can put that little bit of data in and you can say use the same html to make it a nice little web map on your website and you maybe you don't have much work because we might have mapped most of the stuff you're interested in already anyway so we're the so there's for example most probably we're going to do a theme about garbage disposal so I think glass containers textile containers which is the kind of stuff that people ask their municipality about but the municipality doesn't even always know where all of them are because for example textile it's not their their responsibility to organize it at all so there's there's fun things going on there another really fun anecdote or so to say is that the Fizan basade in Ghent so it's like a cycling NGO in Ghent they made a little map of all the bicycle pumps they operate and then I said oh yeah your map is cool but this map is cooler and then they switched over and then it happened like already two times that I showed the map and somebody said oh but there's a bicycle pump missing over there and then people effectively go out to edit so it's also really cool that people want to contribute and people take the time and effectively do it and even more funny is that that today that the Fizan basade Ghent adopted it onto their website somebody went out and copied all the bicycle pumps in Osmont and uploaded it again so suddenly there were like two versions of every bicycle pump online so yeah that was also one of the fun experiences and at last another thing is that it's really easy to make pictures of points of interest and that's also a gap within the OpenStreetMap community that up till now it was a hassle to first upload the pictures somewhere whether it's Wikimedia or Mapillary or some other host whereas and then you have to open some OpenStreetMap editor at the imaginary link whereas with map complete I made it so that you just click a button you take your picture and it's uploaded to image guru and then it's automatically linked so it's like really really easy to add pictures of specific points of interest it's not perfect though I the current host is like image guru it's free it works but I'd rather have it on on Mapillary or on Wikimedia Commons but I haven't come around to integrating with their APIs yet so if there's some programmer out there who's feeling like figuring out how these APIs work or have experience with it and can point me to some of the effectively working code I know I've spent like a day digging through the Wikimedia APIs and I I really couldn't figure out how it works because there's 20 endpoints and you need this endpoint for credential and then that endpoint to log in and then the third endpoint to do a pre-flight for an image upload and then a fourth to actually upload the image and then a fifth to add metadata for the image so yeah and then I switched to image guru and I was like oh here's your token here's API and I got it working in like 20 minutes so that's a bit of history also so adding images to POIs is now just a click on a button and if you're on mobile it's a click on the camera button and it just adds the whole thing for you so it's never been as easy the same goes for opening hours so there's a neat little interface that actually works on mobile as well which is a drag to ride by hand and lastly which I find as I've been dreaming about this for years so sometimes I want I don't often want to hurt people but in this case so it actually has an integration of reviews so there's a new open review platform called mangrove where so where anyone can leave reviews about anything and Peter just made a little integration and it seems yeah I'm gonna I have it open so you can take a peek the reviews are a little broken at the moment oh yeah so you can click on the stars and then you can make a review and the opening hours interface is like you just select you click and drag it's like Monday from this over and then Tuesday Wednesday from these hours and then Saturday this and then during the holidays it's closed and that's it for inputting opening hours which is I think it's really so this is pretty nifty widget and then there's of course also visualization of the opening hours from like from which hour to which hours it's actually opened so so I try my best to to make everything really user-friendly and really as easy to use as is possible but but it can still use a ton of polish and there's still a lot of the one who and too little time to actually do it and too much bugs cropping up left and right but but yeah it already works yeah Ben said he can't switch on the camera but he was very grand old locked so I I'm going to and a very grand old both of the Ben Abel's houses in the room so yeah it should work now there's a lot of people locked yeah I don't know how that's happened that's yeah I have no idea what happened there yeah I have a button turn of meeting mute oh so you locked everyone accidentally or something I think it's a default setting for the meetings I can press it if you want yours do I let everyone talk sure what could go wrong Ben could start talking so okay but then you wanted to put on your camera just because or well no but that was just wondering why it wasn't possible okay and then then I thought well now I cannot not turn on my camera so then I did that makes total sense thank you for your intervention anyway everyone is unlocked so if you want to be visible or if you want to say something it should be possible now so I like Ben's suggestion to to do a quarterly project with it with with map complete the nice thing is that you can like you have a little part where you do all the data modeling and then you have an interesting part where you have to actually go out into the street to to collect data so it's really a survey tool so that's an interesting idea and as it grows in teams so I don't think you showed that Peter there's a simple way to combine teams so if when you say make your own map complete map then it actually just allows you to combine questions and layers from different players from different teams so after a while all the things that interest you will be available within map complete and and you can start using it to easily add all sorts of different points of interest when you're out there are you talking about the personal team uh yes yes the personal team yeah I always so yeah you can take a peek so there's the here the personal team it's only available after 20 edits but then you can like mix and match you can like say oh I want all the bicycle repair stations and bicycle tubes but I don't want to drinking water and I want the bootcases and the toilets and and and then it shows all the things you selected and then you have a like a a la carte uh a surveying tool so if you pass by the the vibrator here you can open it and you can see the picture of it and you can answer the questions while passing by where then if you pass the pump a little later you can just like have a look at the pump too so this gets it flexibility this was actually specifically added for the the hardcore open street mappers which wants a street complete like uh experience so so yeah if there is any more questions then please ask our suggestions can I ask an annoying question about uh the yes because I noticed it encourages people to add uh accessibility to for example forests but what does excess is yes to a forest mean does it mean it isn't private or is it does it mean that you can wander freely through the forests like you have the the free to go on us in the forest of uh i n b this excess is yes mean that or just that it isn't private and you can use some parts most of the parts in the forest that is actually a really good question um i'm gonna have a look on who it was rodent on pure nature um because accessibility on land use is not described in the wiki pages of open street no no well it shouldn't be used there well actually we should reverse the question what does excess equals no mean and excess equals no for a nature reserve means that you cannot enter it because it's fenced off uh because it's for example very vulnerable or if the conservator doesn't want people going in so that means that excess equals yes means that you can just enter and you can roam around normally that's on the parts uh but that doesn't imply that the forest is uh owned by public uh instance so if that's a suitable answer to your question um yeah but i was really thinking about just also because of your question about the spale zones there are also those free the free to go on which we could map to and that feels a bit like a piece of forest with excess is yes but then a free to go on as a as an area where you can walk and you do not have to stick on the parts right yeah indeed yeah that's uh maybe something that we should bring up on the tagging mailing list and we should discuss on the the osm be talk a mailing list or the tagging mailing list because i i didn't think about that i just the main reason for the excess was like to inventorize which forests and which which nature reserves are not accessible whether it's on the parts or in general so excess is no or excess is private on the forest that it's that's quite clear but excess is yes it's a good time dubious yeah indeed know that you mentioned it uh it's all yeah it's point is also that if you let people answer something you have to record something that it's answered so that they don't get the same question over and over so uh so so this excess equals yes not default setting uh that's what yannick uh asked i'm pretty confused about that but uh on roads it's it's implied if you have a road and there's no access tag then you say okay then it's excess yes on land use it's not really defined it's so it's yeah unknown unknown by default yeah yeah i have uh i'm i'm working on a theme myself to map uh stay out here will turn use uh which is like miniature gardens to uh in front of of houses and i just built my own data model and i documented it but i i didn't go through the whole tagging proposal uh system because uh yeah we all know why um uh so maybe some people will complain about it and then then i i i do think if you create a map complete team then you should take responsibility for some of the things that happens with it because you are really enforcing a data model much like the id developers should do that which they often do but not always um so yeah there's a certain kind of responsibility there but it's also very hard to do it right and it's very hard to um like to to actually get something done um well it's it's very easy to get lost in endless discussions uh and not ever be able to finish something up so there's a certain balance there and i think it's always going to be hard uh to find the best balance when you create your own team is there a risk to make tagging mistakes sorry yes when you make your own team is there a risk to make errors well yes but only structural ones so no accidental errors but if if you as a team creator created uh invent a tag then that's the tag that the thing uses uh yeah so uh yeah for the user there is no or very little chance of accidentally making a tagging mistake but if you pick up in the team creator then every user will make a tagging mistake so there are a few at the beginning and then i fix them all at once another trick that you can apply is for example with the defibrillator team there's like the whom is this defibrillator accessible to and then it's like it's uh public or it's like for students or customers or it's only for people in the building so it's private and then there's a freeform field and then if someone fails out the freeform field a fixme tag is applied also and fixme tag reads like hey this has been filled in uh what this field has been filled in with map complete you'll probably want to double check it so uh and and that's one way where you can like safeguard and then the team creator can like once in a month query all these things check the values and remove them i've done something similar for the original build nature so every time someone added a forest or a park or a a playground there was a fixme attached like made with map complete geometry still to the row and then i checked up on them and know as build it not here itself is completely dead i've cleaned them all up and i've removed all the the stuff that was like questionable or was like looked like it was someone's garden or or stuff like that but on the other hand quite a few nature reserves were added that way which really had an outline and then i also did some uh some mapping of them and i i discovered some new nature reserves or some weird gardens like futzeltanem or like kind of open gardens which aren't really a park but yeah so we saw quite some some interest from quite some people for like these weird things that are very difficult to map always um another thing i noticed especially with with build nature is that people used build nature to describe like access conditions for slower roads it was like a little piece of forest with a a a track through and then the the access description would be like it used to be accessible but it has been closed off by the farmer sounds familiar doesn't it uh so that was uh that was visible too and then yeah i i fixed that up it should be on the road but that also means that there is quite some interest for uh for the other teams especially the slow roads so uh yeah i see that vincent already left but uh it could be very well fitting for a track week or something like that too yeah talking about leaving so according to the agenda that existed in my head we have until eight but according to some other agendas it's until seven thirty so we have two more things on the agenda if you have other us do feel free to leave us we will be only slightly sad but at that yeah so in the official agenda was seven thirty but i think we always intend to eight but anyway uh if you can say please to stay because next up i'm gonna cut you short peter because we can talk about this forever um yeah uh i'm kind of finished so okay yeah okay perfect then my timing is good um it's also to stop myself um uh so next up Jonathan um who will uh talk a little bit about um uh road completion and uh and uh perhaps we can give a little more context about the other uh government data sets that we're using uh yes so road completion project so that has been a project on north mind well on osm belgium mind even one before i joined so before 2016 uh so the the idea was to compare the road network in osm to the uh well to the official road network so well in belgium it's each region has its own uh official road network so basically to make sure we have all the roads for in belgium in in in open street map that was the first goal the main goal and the subsequent goal was to give some feedback about the quality on their data to the to each each region because we well we have a quite active community so we are pretty sure that we have roads that are maybe not in the official uh networks but also that we know that there is in official uh networks probably roads that do not exist anymore and that have been deleted in open street map meanwhile so the idea was really to improve uh open street map data set but also improve uh well the three official data set for each region um yeah luckily in belgium the road networks are available as open data which is quite convenient um i'll try to share my screen peter i will still use the presenters right sorry um there we go that's the agenda we do not really care uh so yeah so the idea is every week there is a little process well there is only the yeah i can send the link so all the documentation and code is on is on github uh so the idea is each week we download the the road network data sets from uh flanders and brussels unfortunately for wallownia it's a bit more complicated so i have to download it manually and then it compares uh well all the roads that are in the official data set to all the roads we have in in open street map and it gives a little summary so well for brussels we only and yeah so we we only compare the geometry so no if the name is different we do not make those kind of well at least for now we do not not do not make those kind of uh of checks so basically we just check if there is a line at the same spot well almost at the same spot in in both data sets uh it could be a road that's drawn differently or it could be a piece of the roads missing at the end of the road uh yeah it could be really small small mistakes so for brussels well as you can see it's almost complete we only miss uh four roads of pieces of road and yeah i checked we do not miss any roads so i need to make the the update uh for flanders as you can see it's going really nicely uh down we have someone that's actively uh mapping the roads in uh in flanders so we not only miss less than 5000 roads or pieces of roads uh so yeah we started yeah we don't have the old story but i think we started around eight or nine thousand so that's going uh that has a a nice space and then yeah for wallonia it's a data set book province so you have the data per province so yeah uh bravo wallonia is almost complete uh i know that's going down quickly as well uh and yeah i don't think we are working on those two uh well i started to work on those two so the well the next provinces will uh will follow uh and then yeah the or friends from uh kosovo also gave it a try yeah i i didn't i didn't run the the update uh recently but yeah they wanted to give a try so yeah the the the the tool is uh is available basically if you have any open data road network you can uh send it to the to the tool and it will run the comparison so it should work for anywhere in the world basically uh yeah the the process is also split in really small pieces so even for a country that's way bigger than belgium or of course over that should work just as well um yours here for the luxembourg uh yeah for now the well the update is well still waiting for them to to finish the yeah the pull request to to make to make it happen for luxembourg so i don't have any news from uh from our friends in in luxembourg so yeah that's a little yeah some statistics to basically see the line go down because we like to see numbers numbers go down um and how it works of all the users can uh well how you can help the the work is for each region there is a challenge in in ma prolet so if we take uh wallonia for instance so that's a little tool with where each piece missing piece of road well each road that the process considered as missing is the task also i can see i already cleaned the west of the west of belgium um and if i want the red if i take a little task randomly then you see the missing piece of road so here currently at some point it was a straight road and now it's a it's a roundabout so that would be considered as not an issue well i need to check on the ireal imagery that's probably not an issue but from this tool you can edit uh that will open well your default editor in my case it's id you see indeed that apparently seems to be a new roundabout uh but in the case it was really a missing piece of road you just had to draw it or extend the piece of road that missing save it to open street map and then you can mark mark the task as fixed and so on so i'll mark it says not not an issue and then you can choose the the next task to be completely random in belgium in this case in wallonia or continue to work on the nearby task well in this case it switched to the task next to it so not an issue as well well and so on again i guess you get the you get the point um but those not an issue uh that's the roads that we plan to send back in this case to to service public the wallonia to say hey well at this spot in uh where i am uh for for lui uh we notice that in your official data set it's it's still a straight road but we know that well for my real imagery more recently real imagery we know that's it's uh that it's uh it's a roundabout so well we know that all roundabout it is the correct version and you should update your uh your data set it's still not that that part of feedback to the to the to the tree regions is not active yet but we do keep somewhere all those uh false positive uh to at some point when we have enough or when we have a contact there um we can we can send that information information back to them uh so that for wallonia for flanders it goes quite well as also quite well so you see that the the coast is quite cleaned already uh apparently this region as well probably someone lived there uh i know someone living there uh and probably someone living in that uh round leader uh so some of us decides to map around there to fix the task around the house which obviously makes sense uh and yeah for brussels it's it's only uh yeah those are not really missing roads uh but yeah you can well if you want you can uh join the task force it's quite well i do a few a few a few dozen of off roads once in a while in wallonia it's quite relaxing just to see uh i really major and draw lines because it's really that easy you just have to draw lines um yeah well i see that there was a question from tibaud uh for yeah for marpoolette uh you can leave a comment if you want uh there is no plan at the moment to do something with those comments uh so the process just take the the the old task mark not as an issue just as not an issue we do not do something with with a comment but yeah if you want to leave a comment to explain why you think it's not an issue uh feel free to do so at some point it will probably be be useful but for now considering the number of roads we still have to fix uh i think yeah you can do as quick as you as you can or as quick as you want do not you don't well if you have extra information feel free to to to write those but yeah we just got a bird from the flamish government that they do intend to finally start using our feedback and these these not an issue metadata can be can be useful in that case i think uh because not an issue can mean um someone already mapped this and i mean you should hit uh already fixed then but or if you don't understand why you saw it at all then you also use uh not an issue uh but also when the data is wrong so some yeah like ben i sometimes did it and not always i mean at some point you stop caring but if you care please know it's so yeah and there's also the sorry the the two hearts uh can't see button um which in the next phase we should probably turn into maybe a map completely complete challenge to check it in the field so yeah so there is really to mark well i fixed it if you really fixed it not an issue like in this case well it's not an issue because what's in open street map is correct and what's in the official data set is wrong which because now it's a it's a roundabout uh you can decide it to skip it because you don't like it for any reason but you sometimes it's it's a path in the middle of the forest and then on the on the area imagery you only see trees so obviously you cannot fix it so you can just mark it as too hard can see and that it will be uh skipped the next time uh yeah it will be skipped and if it's for some reason already mapped in open street map but that hasn't be detected by or to yet uh you can mark as already fixed so for now we only take the not an issue as well not an issue so as false positive um all the all the others are uh you consider as uh fixed yeah or or fixed or or or skipped um yes uh yeah there is a little instructions please do read the instructions it's quite small uh because yes uh that in Rolonia not so much but apparently in the flanders data set there are quite a lot of private driveways so please well skip it if you don't want to mark to two more driveway driveways but if you map it well map it tag it correctly with the driveway tag and and and private because usually uh driveways are private um yes did I forget anything um yeah if you like more information about the story of the project uh you can find it in the repo um yeah also uh well you can go in the in in the code we only now uh process from the official data set the roads that have a name uh because they are well a lot of roads that do not have a name and to make a reasonable amount of roads to to process we decided to only take the one that have a name but so that's why you you see a big peek at the beginning of well if I take a bravo alone you see a big peek or or even worse for eno uh at the first time I ran the process so there was almost seven thousand roads considered missing in in eno in open street map which was way too much so what I filtered to only take the road with a name went down to uh a bit more than one thousand uh and well in those cases it's apparently in uh in the big data set for Wallonia there are a lot of uh well what they consider roads but in the middle of the fields that well are really not existing in on the on the field uh so yeah for for this first uh first batch we only filter on the on the roads with a name hoping that we when we go down to almost zero road missing in in open street map uh and well if we if we get there at some point I guess we'll switch to all the roads or other a bit of filter a bit broader to to tackle a bit a bit more roads but that could be missing um yeah so well feel free feel free to give it a try uh yeah feel free to ask questions if you have questions um yes exactly set not if we get there but when we get there because yeah as you saw the well it's a nice little curve going down and down for for each region so well we're getting there and so when we get there so we will never stay there uh so the end goal is that the number goes to zero and then at the weekly updates uh we have a few new cases and those are then actually new cases that were mapped by the government before they were mapped by open stream map and and when we reach that point then we can say that we are uh as complete at least as the government data and uh almost as up to date as the government data yeah um so that's yeah well not here but yeah if I take back so when I run it in January there was 30 482 roads and a few a few weeks later there was yeah a few roads more in the official data set but there were also more roads in open street map data set so yeah the idea is since it's it runs every week and usually uh the well I don't know how often the each region updates its data set but as soon as there is an update in the official data set will the weather process will download the last version and so if there are new roads in their data set it will be compared with the open street map data set so since it runs every week we'll we should be able to indeed go to down to zero and then a little peak if there is a new neighborhood let's say with a few new streets that for some reason are not marked in the same yet and then back to zero and that little peak a few a few months or years later that's yeah well we I hope we'll get there at some point we're getting there slowly yeah and as I said it's really relaxing I do that yeah it's nice we're clean yeah we can use some help it's perfect if you have a lot of meetings well yeah you can start now if you want but yeah yeah um yeah no I don't know if there is any questions or suggestions so we do move on to the new something's coming from Robin uh Jean-Marthe maybe I missed it but did you mention the um the micro grant you probably didn't no you didn't indeed so they nicely stole tools was uh well a prototype was built in 2018 during open summer of code by some students and then well we are the yeah kind of a working version but no one to to maintain it or to to to run it so when the osm open super foundation yeah open the micro grant program last year we do we did apply to have a little budget of uh I think it was 5000 euros um to while someone in this case me to want to revive the project and to try to build uh an improved improved version of the tool with the idea of running it well that would run automatically uh as well as often as possible uh and yeah thanks to the well in this case thanks to the open sweetmark foundation uh we were able to to get to to the point we are now with that process running automatically every week uh as I as I show you perfect Robin here I would be more than happy to to assist you to to add a new a new data sets to to the to the tool uh so yeah feel free to open an issue an issue on the repo or a pull request and and we'll work together to to yeah to make that happen for for for the Netherlands but yeah yeah as you saw the I think the pull the Luxembourg pull request oh no it was an issue maybe yes but no it's still open but uh I don't have any any update on on that data set but yeah as many well each new data set is well interesting for the well also to improve the process uh because now as I said the comparison process is quite simple it's only geometry um but yeah each each new data set as its own uh particularities so it's also interesting to have data set I do not know anything about to well also to improve the the process and the way the the tool the tool works yeah well I guess we can switch to pick and well I think you know more about it than I do uh yeah I'd keep it short so on on so Brussels buildings were added years ago and are basically a solved problem both in Flanders and Valonia were now slowly importing buildings with addresses from the official data so there's there's tools in place to to make it easy and there is a lot of work left to be done because we don't just copy paste preaching to the choir here I suppose but we don't just copy paste we do integrate them into our data set and that means that it's a lot of work and it can be rather fun if you also look at the addresses well depends on your definition of fun but I personally enjoy checking the addresses and comparing the and then looking if there's probable mistakes in the government data sets and reporting those errors and stuff like that so you're improving two data sets at once and that always feels productive um if if you're interested in that please just join one of our channels and and we'll talk about it it's not something you can really do uh on yourself without uh at least some introduction and working together so if anyone is interested in doing that kind of work please pick up now and then we can go into it in a little more detail um if not I'll go to the next topic okay uh so um oh Ben is typing but Ben knows what he's doing so uh Boo building CA roads I couldn't agree more um I'm also importing buildings as well as to well um all right um so uh let's uh as a final session I'll try to keep it short news from the open street map foundation um and I was supposed to talk about how it's relevant to Belgium too but I didn't really get into that um so um what can we say about that in uh so 2020 was a pretty productive year um in the foundation um so the the the open street map foundation is is the very tiny organization that keeps open street map afloat uh it's the owner of the data uh it's the owner of the central infrastructure and it isn't very much more than that so there's a few working groups where uh where people make sure that service starts running keep running uh that some minimal communication is being done um that data issues are being solved uh you have the data working group um and and things like that um but there is not even one real employee there's about one uh well there's two full-time equivalents by now but they work uh on their contract basis um so it's pretty small um but it was also cracking at its seams um so the the project had been growing for a long time and it's growing ever faster um and the the foundation didn't really um there was a sort of a backlog uh building up uh and 2020 has been pretty good on that uh on on uh on clearing some of that backlog so we had um three new board members at the start of the year um uh Alan, Guillaume and Rory um especially well Alan does deserve a special mention because he's uh basically giving a half time to the job so so most people do a few hours every week but he's he's almost like we are working it so he's a recently retired american diplomat um i used to think diplomats were diplomatic they just get the job done um it's it has little to do with each other um and Guillaume and Rory were also really nice additions to the team um and they and and they replaced uh some more radical members so we had Fredrik Ramm who is known as not as quite outspoken and and has very specific opinions about stuff um and on the other side you had um uh Heather uh who comes from a humanitarian background and also was pretty radical on some other stuff so somehow the tone softened a lot and it became a lot more easy to to all work together with this new team feeling so i was part of that team myself but i retired at the at the end of the year so this is a little bit of self promotion in a way but not really because i'm so happy to be uh more free now uh so um it's the year started with a lot of of listening um so traditionally the OSMF would just listen or oh well it would feel like it would just listen to one mailing list uh with relatively few people and even fewer people who actually interact um so there were a small group of people who seem to dominate everything that happened and that that really changed uh over the last year um there was an active outreach to to individuals to people with a certain standing within the project um also reviving uh relations with corporate members and local chapters um an interesting thing was that the um the one of the corporate members mentioned like yeah and all those years we've been around the project no one has ever asked us to talk about anything so they were really very surprised and and that's a little weird because a lot of i mean we have to be careful with corporations um and in a way but often their interests do align so at least you have to keep talking um and uh even internally within the board so the the meetings used to be all audio only and and we took the revolutionary step to to add video to the mix um and and that yeah it was really special because then we could see each other's expression and not always be listening to ferrik all the time um so it it was a large improvement uh and corona also made a life easier in a way uh because it was a lot easier to do all kinds of impromptu meetings some of the independent workers could free up their schedule because they had no work at all so they they could do meetings during the day um so that that's a bit of context for that um and that allowed us to address some of the core problems that had been uh building up like a technical backlog um so fundamentally the one of the most obvious signs of of the cracking of the foundations was that the the tiles were the tile servers were getting slower and slower um and and it just became untenable to to do all the technical core the maintenance by just two volunteers who also had full time jobs so that issue still isn't fixed but it's it normally there should in the short term be a full time sys admin to to make sure that things are running um and around their work there's a lot of new energy in the operations working group to to support core development um and uh similar uh in the same topic of the technical basis so id development used to be financed entirely by the by the corporate sector and while they were in independent than what they did uh it's a bit annoying that it's the whole process of the main editor being developed by entirely outside of the foundation was a bit risky and so when that became suddenly became a problem then the the board found financing from a lot of people in the corporate sector um who then pay to the osmf and and osmf pays for the development so instead of of being dependent on one company uh paying the wage it's suddenly an osmf uh run project which i think is a huge improvement um there were also some experiments with small funding uh for example one of the examples is a bit silly perhaps but they um uh we we we kept potlatch alive um which why not why not i like potlatch um and uh um so doing those kinds of projects makes it more interesting to to be part of the working groups because now they're actually working um so when when you have a few projects that are actively going forward it becomes more interesting to to join these working groups at least that's what we hope because it's still a challenge to to get people involved there um uh and then uh so OpenStreetMap at at its core is a is a community and not the technology so we need people above all else and uh so there was a lot of work um on on that there's a lot left to be done uh so some steps to uh making it the the osmf environment and and hopefully OpenStreetMap in general a more uh diverse and inclusive uh organization where people from all sorts of backgrounds feel at home um and where hopefully people one day will realize that if you communicate in a global context everyone has to change how they communicate it's a very tough message to a lot of people apparently um then uh we also made it more interesting to join the OpenStreetMap foundation by making it um a condition for uh receiving a micro grant so suddenly there was a potential uh if you're a member then you can get like freebies you can get actual money to to do your projects um and it also shows that the osmf like cares about the small things that are happening in in uh in communities around the world and and these little so there were there was a budget of 50 000 uh euros uh for i think in total 12 projects or something like that um who with that small money could could really make a difference so that was i think it's a good investment um then the uh so the OpenStreetMap foundation until 2019 only had local chapters in europe um so the official rep that so local chapters are official representatives of the OpenStreetMap project within their country like OpenStreetMap Belgium is for Belgium um and it's a little tough to join um and it's uh well it was always challenging and so in the last year uh we managed to guide excuse me we we managed to guide chapters from four new continents to uh to join as a local chapter so suddenly we have people or organizations from five continents instead of one in there so that was really great and significantly also the United States chapter which i mentioned separately because there was always a huge cultural bridge between the foundation and the open and the US community which is weird because the foundation should be global so and and so i i think that bridge is is now finally getting um that gap's getting bridged sorry um similarly there's talks going on with with HOT to find a more productive relationship together that also has it's it's complicated but i guess we'll get there in the end um and the last aspect of that uh of that widening of the community is that there is finally a clear and easy uh pathway to costless membership so it used to be paid it took us years to get uh sorry Ben um it took us years to get some sort of exception in place for people to join without having to pay but now we finally have like a very clear program where we say hey if you contribute to the project we want you to be part of the foundation because that's what i mean it's obvious it should be obvious it should always have been obvious um so with that we had an influx of hundreds of new members uh which is like a 30 percent increase or something um because of of that new program and a lot of that helped to to diversify the kind of countries that our members are are coming from um so that was a fun ride uh now after all these changes and and i didn't even mention them also a lot was changed in a short time period and and as things go in in open stream map um people are involved in very different ways and there's channels all over the place and it's impossible to keep track of stuff um so um i guess the new board uh was a little afraid or or was interested to see are people still following and so they did a large survey a very large survey over 2000 people participated um uh and to to see if if people are happy with the direction that the board is going and i i think i i posted the link in the in the shared notes uh i i think the results are generally uh positive um so do have a look at that and finally i posted the link with a more detailed yearly report for last year so and in general i i do feel that in the last year a lot of the backlog was was closed and some foundations were laid to to to keep supporting the open stream map uh project um because really the the base was getting too small for everything that's that's built on top of it um there's a lot of work left to be done and it's easy to make an impact uh if if a fool like me can get elected there then people like you can absolutely help the project along in a significant way i should go into politics or perhaps not um okay so if you have any questions do speak up or put them in the chat um and uh that's the last agenda item unless someone has something totally different that they want to discuss yes i know ben i didn't i don't know is there anything specifically for belgium i uh i have yeah i wasn't my mind to talk about that but i am no i yeah no is there something very belgian about this we almost got a belgian bank because the bank kicked us out the u k bank well and we had a belgium uh on the osmf board so that's that's also something yeah indeed we do also have uh so ben is the third board member and is yeah part of the advisory board inside the osmf ben i don't really get your point maybe you should just speak up no i was just saying there are any anything to news related to the foundation that is related to belgium the only is the only thing i think is that that they have started listening to the advisory board and i think that's the only right yeah only change yes yeah so the yeah so the local chapters within the foundation it used to be a totally empty i like it didn't have any real benefit and that's a little better now but i think there's still a long way to go to to make the those voices here heard a lot more so several of of us here are active in the local chapters and communities working group which is a working group within the open street map foundation that um that focuses on how all the lessons learned in the in the different parts of the international community can can influence what the open street map foundation does so one aspect of that is that everyone's building the same tools over and over again and maybe we can help standardize that and and offer tools to the global community so that they just can pick what they need so in nary uh the japan is now has now applied to become a local chapter but it's really it's an official process so it it's not enough to to have an active local organization to become a local chapter you have to actually sign a contract with the foundation which comes with with a few conditions and a lot of discussion and thinking if it's a good idea or not um so japan doesn't have to um doesn't have to be a local chapter to be able to do a lot of the things the local chapter does so it's just it's more like a formal recognition but in the the application is open and there was a there was a copyright issue with uh japan like in japan they registered the trademark as well and that made everything very complicated and now we have in the new contract the for local chapters that's that's uh there's better rules in place to to deal with that so that's why it was revived now finally okay i would say this is the time for beer and to switch off the recording so as as ben is saying uh being a local chapter means that you can now legally and officially do what everyone is doing anyway which is nice oh sap is already having beers that's not fair should have waited for us okay um i'm going to uh turn off the filming and consider the meeting officially closed so welcome everyone