As I heard from CloudMade top-guys, great battle between Google, Microsoft, ESRI and some other cartography companies begins. There are MapQuest, Yahoo among others. These companies will invest a lot of money in map and mobile services in the nearest future. Hence they have decided to hire a lot of GIS professionals. As OpenStreetMap is one of the best GIS-related community, they are interested in many of us.
What I know for sure is Steve Coast was proposed to lead one of the Google Map Maker department.
Meanwhile other companies wants to hire as many OSM people as they can, so Andy Allan, Richard Fairhurst, Frederik Ramm and Simone Cortesi already has propositions.

Please Steve, if you read this, remember all these minutes you've spent for OSM, remember people you've worked with and make the right decision. You are the face of this project and we will do miss you.

Please everybody, retweet it.

When mapping a lot in Kyiv (Ukraine), I track new edits on http://itoworld.com to fix them and to talk to new mappers.

Month ago I found that user with nick ***** mapped really a lot in Kyiv. I also noticed that he/she did it with Potlatch, but the buildings were rectangular; all tags were used properly. "Nice" said I, "I found another good mapper from a few OSM community members near me". And I tried to communicate with him/her.

Today I knew, that this OSM community member works in the room near me, here in CloudMade. :) The funniest is that this person is very nice girl. Surely I set up JOSM and Merkaartor to her. She showed me some tricks with relations.

Dear OSM community ladies & gentlemen, If you don't afraid that CIA tracks you, please show your real name on your profile pages. It is always good to know.

Sincerely yours,
Igor Shubovych

The OpenStreetMap community grows too fast. In few years we will have 1 million registered users.
We should think now what to do with this tremendous crowd after every meter of Earth has been mapped.

The Ukrainian community proposes to continue mapping on the Moon. We will make bulk import of crude Moon map. that we have for free (LEOPARD0). I suppose this could be done till the API 0.6 start.

After that every you could map the Moon using Yahoo images or tracks, provided by astronauts.

Please read more on http://www.openstreetmoon.org

Last weeks I worked on creating/fixing/cleaning relations of Ukrainian regions.

The whole work is almost done.
Here is the page for it
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Ukraine_regions

I am planning to finish the part of Odesa region till tomorrow.

Mourner and me finally got it, the map of Ukraine.

Mourner contacted TravelGPS.com.ua, they are guys who do similar as we do, except one thing: their do not open data. However these guys gratefully give us some old variant of their map from Spring of 2007. Still better than nothing.

Then we met wonderful guy - wildMan, it is one of the best Belorussia's mappers. He actually imported 99% of Belorussian's OSM. wildMan came to Kyiv and helped us to make OSM file and split it to different parts, select different layers and all this stuff we are not familiar with.

For now we imported more exact borders of Ukraine; places of ukrainian cities, towns, villages.
Boundaries of cities, towns, villages are still importing.
After we will import all roads and points except those places where we have many mapping (Kyiv, Lviv, Odessa, Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk and some others).
This can take 1-2 weeks (server often fails, scripts needs restarting). Then will be long cleaning process trying to merge data. But we will do it! Do with pleasure!

Long live OSM!

Several days ago I noticed that many buildings mapped by me, are shown wrong. For example, schools, shops, kindergarten not shown on the mapnik layer.
I review the "Map features" page and found that the most amenities should be mapped as node, not as building.

Previously I added way, mark it with "building=yes", then add something like "amenity=school". Now I put node inside the building and add amenity type. In this way I have to duplicate address information, otherwise amenity is hard to find by address.

Have to review all my commits.

I remember my first steps in OSM. I drew buildings using Yahoo images. How ugly they were! I spent hours, but they did not look like real houses, just some strange, crooked figures.

With JOSM it is much better!
Now I draw similar shape quickly and very approximately, press "Tools/Orthogonalize shape" and that's almost it. Sometimes it's needed to widen or to narrow the house.

Great thanks to JOSM community!

Today I looked at the map we did 6 months ago during our Kyiv Mapping Parties. Looked and a bit disappointed, because many roads, buildings, POIs tagged with mistakes.

Mapping this area was our first investigation of OSM, so we made a lot of errors. The sad thing is nobody of us reviewed that and check the mistakes. Personally I did not do that, because main part of it prepared one of best Kyiv's mappers - Vladimir Agafonkin (Mourner). I just did not expect there are mistakes. However, this was his first task too. Everybody does the mistakes, especially in beginning.

Learning this I backed to my first good map - residential district Poznyaky (Kyiv), and found that parts which I did first are not as good as later parts: many houses where ugly, not orthogonalized, streets tagged wrongly and so on. Kudos to JOSM: it can make buildings rectangular, find warnings in your map and do a lot of job for you.

So two conclusions from my story are:
1) Everybody makes mistakes
2) Look back and check

During last month I prepared crude map of Poznyaky district (near Poznyaky subway station) of Kyiv, Ukraine.
There are several issues, which I gonna solve in January-February 2009:
* add more POIs, despite it is residential district, there are not too much pubs :)
* add schools and kindergartens (with names and numbers)
* add service roads
* check out the number of houses, many of them I just guessed
* ensure all roads have Ukrainian, Russian and English names

However this all is better to do with GPS. Unfortunately I lost my E-Ten X800 this year, so I got to buy some new GPS thing. The easiest way is probably GPS receiver, better with MTK chip.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everybody!