Hello, fellow mappers!
I hope you’re all having a wonderful day. We are pleased to announce that we’ve begun creating a series of OGF-specific tags that can be placed on your country’s territory relations as a way to help with our world-building. A complete list of tags can be seen here, on the wiki.
Some of the highlights are the ability to declare driving side, economic policy, elements of infrastructure like electricity and standard rail gauge, time zones, and more. Elements of governance, history, and language are all being developed also.
The tags you place on your territory relation help populate maps on the wiki, to share what your territory is like with neighbors and friends. We hope that this helps with collaboration and better understanding of what each territory is like. We encourage everyone to take a few minutes and add what you can to your territory relation!
If you are a member of Ardencia, Deodeca, FSA, or Suria, we are working on subnational tagging, also. More on that at a later date.
Please do remember that all tags marked is_in:continent, ogf:area, and ogf:id, must not be removed. Also, these are OGF-specific tags and are not designed to be used on other mapping projects. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.
Happy mapping! Saħħa!
Hello, everyone.
I hope you’re having a wonderful day. More and more work on the wiki is continuing, and we’re hoping for a full launch in the first half of October. There are still a few bugs to iron out, and we’re gradually getting things set up.
If you are a coordinator of an official collaborative, we need your help! All existing collaboration pages have been brought over, but not every collab has a page. If you are a coordinator, please take a look to see if your territory has a page. If not, we need you to create the page! Every collaborative project must have a page that lists the pertinent information (see below).
What if your collab has a page already? Even if your collab does, please take a close look at it and make sure it contains all of the following material clearly indicated at the header:
If you are a collab coordinator, please send me a message to get wiki access. Thank you very much, everyone. Happy mapping! ~A
Hello, everyone!
It’s February, and things are heating up in our OGF world. There was some creative and really well-done work on the last challenge with landuse types. If you requested feedback during the last couple weeks, I have replied and tried to offer a couple thoughts.
For this month, the challenge is simple: participate in the City Sprint. Louis has done an amazing job getting things rolling, so please send some acknowledgements his way for his hard work. Given the success and enthusiasm, it was decided to role the monthly challenge right into the sprint. Best of all—it’s a create-your-own-adventure-type challenge. The goal is to map as much as you can, as often as you can, and at the highest quality you can all in a single location. You can read more about it on the wiki page (linked above) and the corresponding discussion page. Oh, and for those on the wiki, PortCal has created a cool template to keep track of your work.
Best of luck to everyone! Happy mapping.
Hello, OGF community!
I hope everyone is doing well this fine January day. As you all know, we have a community with a lot of diverse interests and areas of expertise. And, in the spirit of collaboration, learning, and continuing to become better-skilled mappers, I offer a two-fold challenge for the month of January: a focus on the OSM keys “landuse” and “natural;” and a collaborative response or tutoring.
Be advised: This challenge isn’t just about showing off your work. I want this to be a good learning experience for everyone. So, whether you have a territory or not, you are invited to learn more and hone your skills!
We all want the map to look beautiful. Did you know, for example, that there are a whole host of landuse values to use? Do you know about the numerous natural values? Some, like natural=beach and natural=wetland are rendered differently depending on the additional tagging? There are a lot of hidden gems in here to help make the map look great and communicate details.
Beginner challenge:
Easy challenge:
Medium challenge:
Hard challenge:
We all want to see OGF be a great community of mappers with the goal of producing good-quality work. All users from newest to most senior can participate! This is a theme of all my challenges, but I really want to emphasize that it will be most successful this month with as many users contributing and offering feedback as possible. At the same time, please be civil and professional with one another; avoid needless drama. Remember that a good-faith critique of your work is not a personal attack. Be a good neighbor, even if others aren’t always that way.
Happy mapping!
I hope everyone is doing well this fine December day. The last couple challenges (school sites and national days) seemed to strike a positive chord with some users. There’s some fascinating things people are doing!
For December, I want to turn our attention to sporting events and games. What kind of sports are in your country? What kind of games are popular in the schoolyards or streets with your children? There are a lot of ways to go with this:
Remember that sporting venues are often multipurpose facilities. Arenas and stadiums can be used for concerts, political rallies, conferences and trade shows, religious events, or even as educational settings. Smaller places like individual fields may be used for picnics, local gatherings, or even just as open green space. Don’t forget to think about transportation, parking, and other amenities. Hunting and fishing grounds are another creative idea!
For example, I created a sporting facility a little while back called La Esportiqa in Salda with football pitches, fields for a sport similar to softball, tennis courts, sand volleyball courts, ice rinks, running paths, and amenities such as a clinic, fast-food stand, and grounds maintenance. A golf course is just to the west.
My plan for this month is to do even more with Salda’s winter sports facilities in the Terraura neighborhood. What do you think you will be able to create? I look forward to seeing what you come up with!
Have a great day!
Hello, OGF community.
I hope everyone is having a good autumn so far. I apologize for being largely absent of late. Now that I’ve finished with a conference I put on every year, I finally have some free time.
This month’s challenge is in some ways a mini-challenge: special days. What are the special dates in your country’s history? Are there fun religious, civil, or social holidays? How are these commemorated? For example, are there gathering places for military parades, oversized Christmas trees, or annual religious pilgrimage? Are streets or buildings named after events or the crucial people in those events?
I can’t wait to see what people do this month! Say hello to your neighbor, and happy mapping. :)
It’s time for this month’s mapping challenge. I know a large percentage of our OGF members are either back in school or fairly recent graduates, so it seems fitting to have this month’s theme be about education!
Your challenge this month is to create an educational institution and draw it in high detail. This will require some thinking about how education is structured in your country. It could be a primary school, a gymnasium, technical training facilities, a university, a religious school, or even something creative and unique. Maybe you need a testing facility for university admission (like ACT/SAT testing sites in the US) or for certifications for graduation (like an off-site Bac?). The choice is up to you. The key here, however, is to map things in detail no matter how small it is.
As you complete your new work, share it for the community either below or in the forum. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask a friend! As always, I’ll do my best to provide feedback where I can. Good luck, everyone!
It’s time for this month’s mapping challenge. The focus this month will once again turn to culture and tourism, but with a different spin.
Imagine you’re walking through your favorite bookstore in another country. You stop at the travel section, and what do you see? A travel guide from Sociable Planet (or some other company) about your country! What does it say inside?
Your challenge is to create a few new places that would be highlights in a travel book about your country. The possibilities are almost endless: museums, religious buildings, historical sites, nature walks, parks, abandoned buildings, unique sporting events, concert venues, restaurants and hotels, unique architecture, fun beaches, etc. How detailed you go is up to you. As you complete your new work, share it for the community either below or in on forum page. But, I’d encourage you to post more than one creation! If you’d really like to play along, go ahead and give it a rating or a cost below, too.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask a friend! As always, I’ll do my best to provide feedback where I can. Good luck, everyone!
Hopefully this will be a fun challenge for people. I already have a ton of ideas and things in the works. What about you?
I apologize that various things kept me away from mapping the last three weeks. As a result, I’m late. My apologies. I want to also mention that last month’s entries were amazing! I still have yet to reply to all of them, but I’ve seen them. Quite great work, everyone. Now, for this month I have a simple challenge that can have far-reaching ramifications. For the rest of June, the challenge involves both mapping and the wiki, for those that use it. It can also be a continuation of the previous month’s challenge.
It has long bothered me: where do the OGF denizens get their food from? Your task will be find a small area and begin cultivating an agricultural industry of some type. The level of complexity and size will be up to you, but try to be detailed where possible. This is more than a “place-a-farm” challenge this month. Certain crops also require certain planting patterns. Can this be reflected in your mapping? What about livestock? Are there fences, pens, stables, or barns? If you are a seasoned user, this gives you the chance to show off; it’s also designed to be a practice run for all level of mappers to solicit feedback and improve skills. We all can better, right?
Where does the wiki come in? I’m glad you asked. As you begin placing the agriculture, put a note on your country page. You may also wish to add your locations to the world map of agricultural production. Things that may influence your industry are culture, climate, and even soil types. Don’t be afraid to address why your country specializes in a particular thing.
As you complete your new work, share it for the community. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask a friend! As always, I’ll do my best to provide feedback where I can.
Now, I have to get caught up on all the great entries from last month! Good luck, everyone!
Sorry for being a couple days late with this month’s challenge. Our monthly challenge for May is something simple for mappers of all levels and can be done on your coffee break! I hope you’ll take a few minutes and pull together something to share and show off to the community.
Your task will be to find a small area and map it in extreme detail. The level of complexity and size will be up to you, but try to keep it under two square kilometers in the interests of being hyper-detailed. If you are a seasoned user, this gives you the chance to show off; it’s also designed to be a practice run for all level of mappers to solicit feedback and improve skills. We all can better, right?
I’m not sure how many new (or even old) users are aware of the OSM wiki, which houses a wealth of resources related to key and tag lists. Here are a few lists that might be of interest for this task:
Obviously there is more to build than mere buildings or roads. Construct a park, or a historical site! Maybe work with water more, like last month’s challenge. Did you do a railway station two months ago? Maybe it’s time to spruce up the station and its environs. The options are up to you.
As you complete your new work, share it below or in the forum thread. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask a friend! As always, I’ll do my best to provide feedback where I can.
Now, let’s get mapping! Good luck, everyone!
It’s April, and our monthly challenge, courtesy of isleño, has to do with water! The results of last month’s challenge, rail, was wonderful. If you didn’t get to work on rail during March, don’t fret; you can always go back and review Eklas’s wonderful bliki posts about how to design a rail network. If you did work on railways, feel free to your work to the challenge page over on the wiki.
Inland waterways, such as lakes and rivers, are an often overlooked aspect of mapping on OGF. I know that most users are not hydrology experts, and I definitely do not profess to be one. I do know, however, that we have a pretty good primer for how to draw rivers. One thing that gets overlooked, however, is the detailing of the riverbanks or lakeshores.
For this month’s challenge, there are three tiers:
As you complete your new work, share it below or in a bliki. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask a friend!
It’s the first weekend in March, and that means it’s time for a new monthly challenge! The results of last month’s challenge, Healthcare, was wonderful. I saw a lot of people posting in the comments, in blikis, and elsewhere about all the fascinating health-related places they’ve mapped. Awesome work, everyone. On a personal note, I’d like to thank everyone for their well-wishes and heart-felt comments. I am recovering quite nicely, and I’m grateful to you for your kind words.
This month’s challenge is going to be a bit different, because it involves a partnership with the user Eklas, affectionately known around these parts as “George.” George publishes a weekly bliki and has decided to do a four-week tutorial through the month of March about mapping rails. He was gracious enough to let me merge the challenge into it. The hope is that we all can learn something about rail mapping to make our countries look more realistic.
The four topics that will grace the Eklas-bliki will be (links forthcoming):
There are two tiers to this challenge: beginner–intermediate and advanced. The beginner–intermediate level is intended for either those with no knowledge of rail or those with only moderate levels of rail infrastructure. The advanced challenge is intended for those with a very high level of railway knowledge and designed to better the site over-all.
As part of a super-advanced challenge (that everyone can participate in), we are going to do a community-driven effort to improve the making railways wiki page.
Each user on OGF should determine how much rail works for them and within their country. There are a lot of factors that play into rail usage. Terrain is the most obvious, as rail becomes more of an impossibility as terrain is rougher. Mountainous terrains require some very creative engineering. But, density of people and commercial goods also plays in. Dense cities typically rely on rail as a part of their transit network. In much of northern and central Europe, rail is a way of life for passengers and commuters. Countries without large cities or less dense population centers may not see this. Economics are also a factor. Developing nations may not have as much rail, just as they may not have major highways. Large countries with great distances to traverse between resources and ports will use rail more for commercial and industrial uses. North America’s rails are primarily used to transport goods and raw materials. Passenger rail there is almost exclusively found in dense urban environments, especially along the Atlantic coast. Small island nations like this are probably not going to need rail as an essential means of transportation. On Malta, for example, rail is essentially non-existent. The culture, history, and economics of a country will determine how the rail system develops.
Lastly, users on OGF have a wide variety of interests. George (Eklas), for one, is fascinated with rail. Others are not. Some, such as myself, see it as one tool of many. There are a variety of reasons for this. Some people live in countries like the UK or Germany, where rail is a primary means of personal transportation. More rail exists here per capita than anywhere else on the globe. Others live in places like the US or Canada, where it is essential for cargo and not as much for people. This all shapes how each of us views the need for rail. Let’s please respect each other’s culture and views.
I trust you all had a wonderful beginning to the new year. As you may have (or may not have) noticed, there was no January challenge. The reason is the impetus for this month’s challenge: healthcare.
Quick backstory: at the beginning of the new year, an incident happened through no fault of my own, and I was quite heavily injured. I’m about 75% recovered, and things are getting steadily getting better. The result of the injury took me away from everything for a touch more than two weeks, including OGF. Hence, no January challenge. When I came back, the whole ordeal made me think about how we do healthcare on OGF. Every country is different, and each culture is different. I thought it might be time for a challenge here!
For this month, your challenge is to do something related to healthcare. It could be a hospital, clinic, outpatient practice, pharmacy, surgery center, spa, or even something else. If there is a cultural medicine tradition or a naturalist practice, go ahead and add that! Be creative and have it fit with your country’s culture.
This is a surprisingly hard challenge, however. Remember that not every small town of 3000 people is going to have a hospital. Clinics and urgent-care centers (as they’re called in North America) are often fairly evenly spaced but clustered around population centers. Emergency vehicles need to be able to easily get in and out of many of these facilities too. Consider your traffic flow and where accessible junctions are. Pharmacies are easier to place, but it also depends on how much that country’s government regulates the industry. In other words, placing healthcare facilities means that the community it’s being placed in is relatively planned out already.
If you’re looking for something even more advanced and have a metropolitan area to work with, try to build an entire healthcare network: a couple hospitals, scattered outpatient practices, a surgery center, some pharmacies and clinics, etc. Remember that these places will need to be spaced enough to not compete with each other but close enough together to cover the population. If you are in a heavily-regulated country or one with nationalized medicine, you won’t need to worry about competition from another network. If you want a free-market medicine environment, you’ll need to account for another network in the same area to at least some degree.
Don’t forget to share things below with your fellow mappers. I can’t wait to see what happens!
Good luck on the challenge! And, a belated is-Sena t-Tajba (Happy New Year)!
Hello, fellow mappers.
Last month’s challenge had some very creative submissions! I could never have imagined the results. For this month, we have another interesting topic to tackle even if it isn’t all that creative. So, yes, how do we power all those obnoxious holiday lights that our citizens put up? This is a broad challenge that can range from quite easy to quite hard. More importantly, it fills in a huge gap in our map right now. The theme of this month is “Power! Unlimited Power!” The idea for this challenge is to launch your country’s electrical grid. This can range from a simple power plant to the transmission lines.
I don’t purport to be an expert at this by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve been doing my homework on it for Mauretia for some time. For most of us, the OSM documentation is going to be invaluable. There is a pretty good write-up there about how things work (not just how they’re tagged). Obviously, electricity has to be generated somewhere. This could be a hydroelectric dam, a coal plant, a mine, etc.
An easy version of this challenge might be to simply build a power-plant. Most power plants generate some type of pollution, so you’ll want to keep them away from most development other than some industry, like this coal-powered plant. If you’re wanting to do something like solar power or wind power, you have to carefully consider your climate. Mauretia is probably not going to be a big solar-power producer. The sea gives it a wind-power potential near the coast or in shallow waters, however. Countries like Spain have a great potential, and can capitalize on it. Those countries with volcanism like Iceland can maybe tap into geothermal power. Be sure to carefully consider what is available to your country and not a pet project that you think is better. Cost and development of the country also matters.
To get more and more difficult, add the transmission lines. Standard wooden poles in North America (Canada and United States) are generally placed about 45–60m apart on flat terrain. Tower distances can vary based on height and regional windiness. These towers, for example, are about 245m apart. Remember that transmission lines sag so they can sway in the wind. If they’re too tight, they snap. Your citizens will then snap if they can’t play that silly candy game on their uPhones. Also note the wide easement needed for those four transmission line complexes. Next, all that has to relay from somewhere. There’s a transition substation just south of where I linked above. These lines extend for miles upon miles, so the complex here needs to be large enough to handle that amount of electricity.
I hope all this makes sense! Good luck tackling this important challenge!
I apologize for being a few days late with this month’s challenge. For this month, we have something quite simple—a type of micro-mapping. The idea here is to come up with more localized services in your country to make the place more realistic. There are a few guidelines for this challenge, too.
The theme is “keep clean and stay pretty.” What does this mean? Find a small community or two in your country and put grooming and hygiene places. These could include barbershops, hairdressers, salons, stylists, boutiques, beauty-supply shops, etc. Think about the culture of your country a bit. Are there communal baths? Are manicures or pedicures a cultural expectation? Are there religious attire vendors or groomers that need to be near houses of worship? There are a lot of creative ways to go here, and I’d love to see something interesting.
Now a few guidelines:
What am I going to be doing? I don’t know yet. I have a couple ideas. What do you think you might do? Show your fellow mappers below.
I hope you had a fun time taking on last month’s challenge, which focused on culture. The comments indicated some cool projects were being considered. I’d love to know how everyone did.
Unfortunately, different things in life limited my ability to finish work in Iola as I would have originally liked. I was able to finish the streets and pedestrian areas in the old city of Iola and begin building work around the ancient amphitheatre. There are a couple things like a café called “La Ekterra” (The Underground), which is right across the plaza from the entrance to the catacombs. A few streets are named after former monarchs or important saints, too. I’ll try to keep working on it this month, as I’ve enjoyed working in this area.
The challenge for this month is to work on an air or sea transport option in your country. For this, airfields, airports, seaports, ferry terminals, and other air or water-based transportation hubs are welcome. There are quite a few major airports in the OGF universe, but what about smaller commuter airfields or agricultural-based landing strips? As for the water-based transportation, seaports are always an option. Don’t forget about commuter routes like ferries or recreational places like marinas. Even if your country isn’t on an ocean, river transportation is just as important. Major trade can be done by navigable river, too. (Just ask Vienna; or for an even smaller town with 3.5 times the tonnage, check Huntington, West Virginia in the United States.)
So, for this challenge, try to determine what the needs are for your country right now. There is a great guide for building airports over on the wiki. Seaports are definitely going to be a bigger challenge and require some more advance mapping, in my opinion. Once you’ve decided on your task, go for it! Give it a try and see what happens!
I’m personally going to attempt work on a seaport for Iola. It might be a bit ambitious, but I’m already planning to do coastline work on the western part of La Kaufama. I’ve received some great feedback from a couple users on the coastline, so it’s part of what I’d like to tackle. We’ll see how it goes!
All the best, —A
Hello, everyone. Today I would like to reintroduce the Mapper’s Challenges to the community. Luciano granted me permission to revive the concept, and I will be running with it for the time being. We’ve had some great work done over the previous twelve challenges, and I think it is worth putting the effort into encouraging good mapping. For me, the Mapper’s Challenges were a great place to experiment, get private feedback, and observe more skilled mappers at work on larger projects. While not every topic will appeal to each user, I would still encourage everyone to give these a quick try. As before, post what you have in the comments below; do not be afraid to provide feedback on submissions also. This is a great place to learn and have fun. It is my hope that we get a chance to see all the good things that users are doing around OGF.
I also want to encourage users to try the “weekly word” challenge! That is a shared, friendly “competition” that is easy to participate in. The monthly Mapper’s Challenges are larger and thus different; their missions do not conflict.
This month’s challenge comes courtesy of a suggestion by Udi before the challenges went on hiatus for a few months.
The challenge for this month is to develop the culture and history of your country by constructing cinemas, theatres, libraries, museums, or other relevant facilities. Add any that are of interest to your country. Names like “Museum of Slavery” or “Library of Communist History” also give hints about a culture. Since culture is more abstract than highways and railways, you will need to be creative and think hard about what your country is like. Then, go for it! Give it a try and see what happens!
There are already a lot of these places popping up in OGF, and many users already have different skill levels on this topic. So I offer a tiered challenge for people to try:
For me, I’m going to try at least the moderate challenge. There are a few ideas I’m tossing around. I also am going to do the collaborative challenge, as there is a project with Litvania that needs to be finished. So, this month offers the perfect chance to do this. I’ll post some updates in my bliki as the month goes along.
After being selected as the winner of the weekly word by Kazuya, I have the honor of calling for the eleventh weekly word.
So this week’s word is
FISH
In an effort to get our timeline back on track a bit, the deadline will be midnight Monday morning GMT (0:00 UTC).
Best of luck and happy mapping! -A
I know the topic of religion comes up periodically, and I think we all seem to be pretty civil and sensitive to the nature of the topic. (Thank you for that, by the way.) Well, today, I’m throwing that all out the window…
I have decided to take up the challenge of creating a pantheon of deities for a Mauro pagan religion based on OGF users and their collaborative input. If you want to be enshrined as a deity, demigod, hero, angel/demon, leviathan, etc., head on over to the bliki page and jump in. I explain more there and give the rationale for this project. Maybe it will be fun. I’m hoping it is an interesting collaborative experiment!
(N.B.: No user will be a part of the pantheon without their expressed consent. If you don’t want to be a part of this, you don’t have to fear.)
I’ll see you on the bliki!
I would like to request some feedback on what users consider pros and cons of doing landuse and landcover tags as areas or relations. To this point, I’ve been tagging regular areas, since this is the standard I learned from doing my homework and studying OSM wiki/forum documentation. For example, this is what I used in the coastal region of Kabyea Essa. I comes out just like I want it and has the data I’d like for later (double plus!). I know that Luciano has been innovative in using relations to this end, and I was curious what the advantages and disadvantages are or might be. I’m not sure I really want to break up a roadway into a dozen pieces per kilometer just to adjust relations, but it might render things better for me.
I will say that areas get to be quite clunky in JOSM when placed against each other like this. It becomes impossible to select a highway or railway that is on the boundary. In many cases, I’ve resorted to just using iD, because it works better for me to do the fine-tuning detail work. At the same time, that could be a user issue.
I appreciate the insight. Thanks!
