This channel has been made public, meaning you can forward posts and share links. Basically now it's a blog :) Thanks for being with us!

One more thing about the YouthMappers' documentary, from a mapper's point of view. Liz asked me how the movie looked to me as an osmer, and it looked pretty fine. At no point I wanted to comment, "actually...". No, it does a good job at showing usefullness and impact of our project.

But as a person with interest in UX, I couldn't help but cringe every time a screen was shown. Every editing experience we have is lacking, making people's lives harder than they need to be.

For example, three seconds JOSM has been on screen, a person used the Building Tools plugin. Which is extremely useful and like the second point on every JOSM tutorial. And the authors have refused bringing it to the core for 11 years, because "we have the extruder mode". You cannot edit the map with JOSM efficiently because you first need to know about plugins and which of these to install.

iD of course was also shown — inside the Tasking Manager interface, if I'm not mistaken. Which means, the actual map took just a third of a screen, with big panels for attributes and a current task taking the most of it. It's like mapping on a phone, while having all this extra screen estate just being static and unhelpful. And with an interactive map, you need all the place you can get.

And finally, the street mapping was done with Mapillary. Which is fun: you drive around making photos, then upload them back at a school, and you're done! Except you've done zero mapping: making photos is not it. OSM got nothing from your work, Facebook did. You have just increased Meta's market value without contributing anything to open mapping. Now you have to rely on people from far away, who may or may not look at your photos and make changes. And then, in a few months, this collaborative work might make a difference.

So yeah, mapping in OSM is hard right now, but it doesn't have to be. I hope in a year we'll look back at how we mapped before, and shudder.