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[tracing aerial imagery]

Hi everbody,

because the "Night of the living maps" at start of 2012 was well accepted by the OpenStreetMap community, we will start another Mapathon at the end of November:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Operation_cowboy

This time, you can choose one day within a whole weekend (23.11-25.11.) and we will put our focus on the US, because there is still a lot to do and I bet the most Americans think that this is currently the only quality, that OSM can offer. In this time the whole community tries to focus it's attention to one single topic and so we will do tracing aerial imagery for 24h. So if you like to support us, just join a local party (or even start your own party).

Here is the API documentation
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetBugs/API

Some suggestions: Create a list of all user bugs entered, so your users get notified, if a new comment was added/bug closed (refresh once a week is enough). Adding the name Locus+unique ID would make sense and as said to bring back in peoples mind, that a "Heavens Valley" is less worth than " From here to the XYZ road in NE, this area is called Heavens Valley".

It's not that we dislike locus, of course there are bad opinions due to the tile usage policy stuff, but that's like our opinion on MOBAC: we like the functionality that is great, but we disliked the use of the tool.

Anyway, providing tracks is a real nice thing, but please keep in mind, that nobody else has the exact klownledge of what you seen on your ride. Even with aerial imagery, it's realy dififcult to figure out if you were on just a track (bad way, but ok for jeeps) or on a real usable road on the countryside. But it's very useful for e.g. in the forests, as it helps us to determine if there is a path between the trees or if it's just a borderline to another tree culture.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/GPS_traces
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Upload_Waypoints

What might be a better idea to improve OSM is using http://www.openstreetbugs.org, as it's allowing you to drop messages. We currently in  a planning phase for a new version, that is still easy to use, but allows vendors (as you) to add easily support and (very important) an anomynised feedback functionality ("your bug had been closed", "XYZ can't fix your bug, please provide further details"). Of course with more features (uploading multimedia files, adding GPS track segments/precalculated routes, ...). But this will take some more time, as we currently looking on how we merge all the existing QA tools
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Openstreetbugs

Indeed I'm registret for the german mails, too. But we don't promote the tiles as we don't have that much resources.

You might be interested in the visualisation and compare
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/!i!/diary/15190

Yes, so you see whats the problem if we have 10 of this tools on our servers

BTW Currently there is no feedback by the OSM Admins if Locus can be unblocked. I asked them now again...

AFAIK there are some folks doing rendering on EC2 but currently don't know who that was...

I added it to the forums (that are within the general OSM forums and so you can logon with your OSM account)

Hi, I'm from the (german) OSM community and wrote the quoted summary.

Yes it might be possible that the tone of the admins is sometimes rough (even to me as a member) but on the other hand I know that they are under high pressure. The problem is, that the universities, that currently host OSM for free will kick off the project, because their network hardware is to much stressed (connections and traffic). For that reasons we had to ban the most heavy used apps to make sure that the project (that creates a free database not deploys a webmap with similar performance than google maps) is still alive.

Of course this is annoying to endusers but on the other hand this tools doesn't fullfil the Tile usage policy and thats not fair for others and esp. to the volunteeres of the project who just want to do a good job
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy

So what are possible solutions (as pointed out above)?
-use another tiles hoster as Cloudmade or Mapquest http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TMS
- buy a service account by a third party company http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List ... Consulting
- setup your own rendering stack
- use only vector maps and render it on device

At this point donations won't fix the problem itself (max. connections in university hardware), but feel free to join the discussions here: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/!i!/diary/15046