Today was quite the accidental milestone! I've edited OpenStreetMap over a thousand times! For those who don't know, OSM (OpenStreetMap) is like the Wikipedia of maps. Anyone can go in and edit the map. This isn't a corporate-controlled space where your local knowledge is irrelevant compared to the desire for profit. You can literally go…
For those who don't know, OSM (OpenStreetMap) is like the Wikipedia of maps. Anyone can go in and edit the map. This isn't a corporate-controlled space where your local knowledge is irrelevant compared to the desire for profit. You can literally go and correct any mistakes that you find, add recently built roads, remove abandoned buildings, and provide useful local information.
Editing the full map is... complicated. For simple edits like changing the times of a postal collection, there are simple forms you can fill in. There's also an aerial view so you can drag and drop misplaced locations. But for anything more complicated than that, you'll need to spend some time understanding the interface. There's a friendly community who are happy to check or correct your submissions.
I'll be honest, I don't use the web editor much. Instead, I use the Android app StreetComplete. It's like an endless stream of sidequests. As you travel through the world, it will ask if a shop is still open, or if the highway is lit, or how many steps there are on a bridge, or whether a playground is suitable for all children, or if restaurants serve vegetarian food, or if a bus-stop has a bench, or... the list is almost endless!
I use it when I'm walking around somewhere new, or on holiday, or waiting for a bus. I used it so much that, for a short while, I became the #1 mapper in New Zealand!
So get stuck in! Make mapping more equitable and more accurate.
As the enmuskification of Twitter continues, I've set up an account on LinkedIn. I'll be posting updates to martinfowler.com on there too. However these are the same as my posts here, so there's no need to move unless you prefer it over there.
I really like this article from Rohan D "Every Phone Should Be Able to Run Personal Website". In it, they make the convincing case that phones are perfectly capable of hosting websites and - if we want more people to escape the walled-gardens - this could be a good way to get people back into […]
🆕 blog! “How do you decentralise emergency alerts?”
Twitter's decision to hobble its API has meant that a number of useful alerting bots might no longer function. Your local subway might not be able to Tweet each morning about delays on the line, nor will a tornado warning be displayed as you scroll through photos of brunch, and forget about …
🆕 blog! “What would a decentralised Uber look like?”
Uber are undoubtedly a company engaged in extremely dodgy activity. But, on the other had, they're ridiculously convenient. A few months ago, we landed in a foreign country, opened the same Uber app as we used back home, and booked a cab. It just worked. I didn't need to register for a different version. I […]
Twitter's over, my dudes! And now everyone is on Mastodon! But Mastodon isn't a site, it is a federated network running an interoperable protocol! Yay for ActivityPub1! Anyway, that means there isn't one Mastodon website. There are many. There is only one Twitter. There is only one Facebook. There is only one In…