2023 quarterly projects ideas and feedback

We want to announce all the quarterly projects for 2023 in advance.

This will be in early December.

Tell us what quarterly project ideas you have or think are good! Here's an email sent to talk-gb earlier this month:

We had a call on 1st of November to discuss potential topics. Here’s a digest of what was raised.

I’d appreciate it if you could:

• Add to these any other topics to consider with potential data sources, metrics, outcomes etc.

• Add to the already mentioned topics ideas that could make it a good quarterly project.

We referred to https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:UK_Quarterly_Project as a starting point to the conversation.

There was a recap of what a quarterly project should be or achieve.

Easy to measure metrics can make it much clearer to monitor progress and success of a QP.

Some quarterly projects are to bring in brand new mappers, or get novice mappers to map more.

Other quarterly projects are to focus on enhancing a particular subject area on the map, resulting in more detail, coverage and/or tools.

Buses and public transport.

• Are all bus stations mapped in detail (or at all?)

• Are bus stops in the correct location?

• Maintenance on bus route relations

• Is there a better way we can present the NAPTAN dataset to mappers to help identify misplaced bus stops or missing bus stops? There was an idea floated of having an overlay that could be shown in iD/rapiD/josm etc. that could do a diff of where NAPTAN thinks a data point is compared to if/where it exists in osm and indicate that visually. This wouldn’t necessarily show the exact location of it as recorded in NAPTAN but just highlight a square on the map to direct in person survey, aerial use, streetlevel imagery etc. Added stretch goal doing a diff within NAPTAN itself so it would highlight where something has moved in that database since last update.

• There was additional discussion on detail mapping other transit stations (like railway stations) though surveying these and tagging for these can be quite complex.

Places of worship.

• Adding locations that are missing.

• Enhancing existing datapoints with religion, denomination, wikidata links, etc.

• Are there compatible 3rd party datasets which could help measure progress and direct surveys?

• What other adjacent mapping activities could be included?

EV charging points

• A lot of discussion on this as there are many databases that are all partial.

• A guide to clearly identify and record the capabilities of common chargers in the UK (compatibility, power delivery, etc.)

• The government has lots of plans about making this more open in the future using ‘OCPI data standard’ however this looks unlikely to be implemented in 2023.

• Possibility of scraping through planning applications to direct surveys

• Including H2 filling stations

Galleries, libraries, archives and museums + public art

• Could we compare with local authorities lists for libraries (even with more libraries being volunteer run)

• Public art installations, compare with wikidata and link to node in osm if possible.

• Verify art installations still exist

• A lot of metrics would need to be calculated up front.

Notes and fixme’s

• The forever project. It can be worthwhile to focus on resolving notes to ensure they retain utility.

• Latin America have done ‘notathons’ to great effect. https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2022/10/26/the-evolution-of-notathons-in-latin-america/

• Lots of tools already exist to help monitor progress and help solve them.

• Despite the usefulness, it can be difficult to get excited about.

Meta quarterly project

• Nothing to do with the company

• Focus on improving the wiki or other documentation sources

• Collate and share data sources for the UK in one place.

• Where to find the dataset, how you could use them – Think how many times you find a useful data set later than you’d like.

Welcome new mappers

• Focus on welcoming new mappers in the UK using the welcoming tool https://welcome.osm.be/

• Enhance tools, faqs

A road and motorway corridor detail + motorway gantries?

• Using the ample streetlevel imagery, enhance the detail along the corridors of A roads and motorways.

• Include motorway gantries as they were reportedly under-mapped in 2020 (need to recheck current state)

• Difficult to measure any metrics on this.