Challenges, challenges... Being sucked into OSM while conscious I am getting deadlier looks and head-shakes by my partner every day. "You are too sucked in your GPS and you end up missing the lovely scenery!" she says - and is of course right.

But how can I let go of the opportunity to enrich/improve OSM in places we travel where there is no or little map information? It´s too easy to record all this new information, and a bit harder to actually then pass it on to OSM.

I catch myself spending too much time in Internet Cafes offloading my GPS and tracing, tagging etc, but what can you do, we are traveling by bicycles & don´t carry a computer.

The trip blog has to wait. My other interests (security/usability/online freedom) also have to wait, even though traveling and using Internet Cafes exposes many harsh realities about the sad state of affairs modern computing has reached...

But that´s another story.

I wish I could travel for a longer time in places OSM is poor in information (like Bolivia - huge mapping potential) and map them. Alas, real life has to catch up.

Over & out

PS: Donating to OSM is not that easy while on the road... Not because of OSM, simply because of the dismal state of technology & prevalence of malware nowadays. http://thinkingspaces.org/2011/12/11/how-i-managed-to-donate-to-openstreetmap/

I've read a little bit about it and it still sounds too good to be true, but it appears it's okay to use Bing maps as a source to do street naming in OSM. So I did a little bit of that last night, you know, the part of the night when you're already tired and should really be in bed but your brain just needs its OSM fix?

Results should be soon visible at http://osm.org/go/xxSuRYvv

Naming streets brings up interesting questions about splitting/joining ways, as the same street name might be used for a way, part of which is a secondary road, part of which is a tertiary road - certainly a lot of that going on in Athens, Greece. Due to local knowledge (and the primitiveness of OSM data) that's where I started my little naming stint.

I still find it surprising how easy it is to contribute to OSM. I remember that it looked like an insurmountable challenge not long ago... I believe we need more short HOWTO videos like http://vimeo.com/24992100 and http://vimeo.com/24984085

The stuff under http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Video_tutorials is great but a lot of practical advice relates to JOSM which is yet another tool to learn before one can contribute. I like the tool-free simplicity of Potlatch. I think P2 and a mobile app (Android/iPhone/etc) are the way forward to engage more users. Focusing on power tools for the few power users is a mistake and leads to bitterness and burnout - OSM will benefit from harvesting the 5 days of enthusiasm of the crowd.

In any case, I'm hooked and my biggest challenge now is finding a model to capture data and then upload it to OSM while travelling light (i.e. with no laptop).

Phew. Data collected from last three excursions finally mostly uploaded & tagged in OSM. Cornwall should have some more useful POIs now (notably campsites, ATMs etc), some Catskills mountain trails are up, gas stations etc, as well as Afan park gates and some forest roads.

Got a grudge with our network people - they must be doing something funky that gives P2 constant "couldn't load the map" hiccups, so I have to do most editing from home.

Was proselytizing a friend into OSM the other day when I noticed OSM is a dreadful user experience on the iPad. (presumably the iPhone too)
The map doesn't scroll with the usual finger method, and zooming also doesn't work as expected with touch-screen gestures. One has to use the 1980's style scroll arrows and zoom bar, which makes OSM less than a joy to use on the iThings. I wonder which forum to use to suggest that as an imminent development goal. I'll say from the safety of my ignorance: "It can't be that difficult..."

Other than that, I'm still struggling to find a good model to work with my GPS when I'm on the road for prolonged periods of time. I'm not happy with the way it handles recorded tracks, and with how POIs seem to be burned into ROM forever. It always logs too much data or too little and I have to do a lot of manual sorting/renaming/remembering afterwards. It's a good unit (Garmin GPSmap 60CSx) but not perfect. Oh well.

Onwards!

Got the chance to do some hiking trail mapping last week, and am now in the process of figuring out how to properly draw/tag everything on OSM. Take a look at my latest traces and please let me know if I'm doing anything wrong!

e.g. http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/AlexandrosPapadopoulos/traces/1003235

I'm beginning to get the hang of the basics of adding POIs to the map and enjoy adding stuff to OSM. Potlatch2 is my tool of choice (as it seems much easier to use than JOSM etc) but it's giving me grief with frequent errors (couldn't load map) and Flash crashes that make it a challenge to use.

I'm documenting whatever I understand, to help other newbies, capture POIs whenever I cycle around and comment on bug reports on Potlatch2. Not much more I can do at this point.

Just hope everything is usable again soon!