Kickstart using StreetComplete

Around 2 months ago I started my OpenStreetMap involvement with the StreetComplete app. After solving all questions in the neighborhood I live in, I was looking for the next area. During this pandemic period I’m working from home, and like to go on a walk during lunch time. Usually I take a stroll through the park close to my house, the Nelson Mandelapark. Therefore that was a nice area to continue with StreetComplete quests, adding road surfaces, lighting and details to the sport park in the middle of the park.

Adding iD and JOSM to the mix

After just a few lunch time walks I got through the StreetComplete quests for this park, but I noticed a lot of objects were still absent from the map. That is when I started with the iD editor at first, swiftly followed by installing JOSM. Now my lunch time walks had transformed into taking as much pictures as possible of my environment to be able to map all missing features of the park. Each lunch hour I would either take a stroll to make more pictures, or use the editors to add features based on my pictures of the previous day.

Community support

Later I also started to read the forum more often, joined the Discord and even joined a virtual meeting of Dutch OpenStreetMap contributors. Because of these communities I discovered resources like the BGT imagery layer, learned more about tagging practices and got to know more and more use cases of OpenStreetMap.

Outcome

All the above has lead to a much more detailed map of the park, and my neighbourhood, and gave me a nice hobby during this pandemic time :) I already started working on updating additional locations, and mapping even more detail, more updates about that later!