I've been hosting mapping parties in cities around the US and meeting mappers from Denver to Detroit, Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and Tampa to Toronto.[1] Traveling the country has allowed me to meet many wonderful mappers and OSM contributors at mapping parties and has allowed me to share my enthusiasm for OpenStreetMap with new mappers through speaking engagements at Linux User Groups. The US OSM community is really starting to take off and I'm pleased to be helping with that.

The problem

Did your josm Yahoo! WMS plugin break when you upgraded to Firefox 3? Firefox 2 was just fine. What happened?

I dunno. Must be something serious.

You are not alone. Here's a quick hacky workaround to get you going again.

Disclaimer

This is a dirty rotten hack and should not be considered by anybody. On the other hand, it is a relatively quick and easy dirty rotten hack. Use your judgment.

Short answer

Use Seamonkey instead of Firefox 3 for the josm YWMS plugin. Use Firefox 3 for your browsing.

Longer answer

The Denver Mapping Party was last weekend (Hi Everybody!) and was a lot of fun. One of the interesting sights that we tagged was a bridge with a helix at one end. It is a pedestrian bridge and at the south end it has stairs but also has a helical ramp to get up to bridge level. It was a little interesting to tag so here is how it was done.

The helix looked like this from the bridge.

The steps were essentially a straight continuation of the path, and they are rendered as such.

The feedback from the campus map competition post has been wonderful. Lots of other great campus maps are in progress. Perhaps we need to formalize a friendly competition? Nominate your campus soon so that I can add it to a poll in the next little while.

Andrew sent this note,
Hi there, it's still a work in progress, but our map of the central campus
at the University of Melbourne is coming along!
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=-37.79646&lon=144.96166&zoom=16

Which university campus is best represented in OpenStreetMap? It is a question for the ages like, "Michigan or Ohio State", "The Leafs of the Habs", and "vi or EMACS"? So which campus is best? And which are the campuses to look out for?

Nominees for best OpenStreetMap campus map

University of Toronto, St. George Campus

This densely packed urban campus map includes mail boxes, walkways, building outlines and names. And pubs.

Part two of our look at the Universities of the Big Ten Conference. But not the football. Nope; that's boring. We're looking at their online campus maps and how the OpenStreetMap community is progressing in their area as well. Part one covered Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan,
Michigan State and Minnesota.

Now we look at the remaining five schools of the Big Ten.

Northwestern University

Ohio State University

So who has the best campus map of the Big Ten? How do their web site campus maps compare and how is their OpenStreetMap campus shaping up? We look at the Big Ten Conference and OpenStreetMap. Where are the OSM hotspots and where shall we map next?

The Big Ten Conference are
• University of Illinois
• Indiana University
• University of Iowa
• University of Michigan
• Michigan State University

The Software Freedom Day Mapping Fiesta was last weekend and here is a summary of the results.

Elmira, Ontario (pop. 11988) - one new OSMer had to put his own town on the map. He started the map of Elmira on his own, then headed to KW to join the team there for socializing. He even went out and mapped more on Sunday. Excellent start, Bob!

Kitchener Waterloo, Ontario (pop. 560,000 combined) - Five teams and individuals, including some first-timers, joined in mapping various parts of K-W. There is talk of another party before the snow flies.

Several projects are popping up around route planning for OpenStreetMap. The most important project might be "The proper pronunciation of Route." Or maybe that is just me.

So here is a quick photo of a Garmin hand held, giving turn-by-turn navigation instructions based on the OpenStreetMap data loaded on the Garmin. I'll update the photo when I have my tripod handy. The route selected by the Garmin is shown as a purple-ish highlight on the map.

Here is a route planner that shows the elevation profile along the selected route.

OpenStreetMap allows people to map their community and show the things that are important to them. It is a collection of tools and data to collect information and create beautiful maps that you can use in creative and unexpected ways. There are more people contributing maps data to OpenStreetMap every week. In September of 2008 there were over 60,000 contributors world wide.

Many of those contributors are cyclists and are active in their communities. Why is that?