Greetings from the cloud! (and SF, CA, USA, NA, Earth)

Lots going on here at OHM and we’re very excited about it all. Please take a look through the items below and let us know if you have any questions. As always, we’re looking for help from interested parties in organizing and managing this effort. Ping us on the maillist (historic@openstreetmap.org), OSM-US Slack #openhistoricalmap, OSM World Discord #openhistoricalmap.

OSM-US Mappy Hour - 8 Jul, 8:30pm ET

July 8, 8:30pm ET, 5:30pm PT Richard Welty will be leading This will be a great time for new users to get up to speed and to see who else in the community is interested in historical mapping. It’s a great way to get connected to OSM-US, as well. It’s a great group.

TeachOSM - July, tbd

Steven Johnson, the coordinator of TeachOSM is a huge proponent of OHM and has put together some instructional tasks for OHM using the TeachOSM tasking manager. We’ve talked about having a combined event in July, but have not nailed down the date and time yet. He’s already posted some cool OHM tasks here: https://tasks.teachosm.org/contribute?difficulty=ALL&text=historic (this reminds me… we need to get the OHM tasking manager back up!)

New videos

Richard Welty is doing all the heavy lifting these days - he just posted a couple of how-to videos. First one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az4HPJztcW0 Second one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2pYjFgOND8 These are very well-paced, easy to understand, but certainly not slow. Richard covers a lot of ground with some great examples.

Tagging

Just a reminder, the following tags are highly encouraged for your ways & relations:
* start_date = YYYY-MM-DD
* end_date = YYYY-MM-DD
Without one of these tags in that exact format, OHM will not render those ways or relations properly. iD has a form entry that makes it easy for you - it doesn’t look like it uses YYYY-MM-DD, but it does.

Other encouraged tags are: * source = [url of your source map] * wikipedia:en = [article name without spaces] * wikidata = [wikidata Q code]

I expect the discussion around tagging formats and standards to pick up quite a bit in the next few weeks, so please stay tuned.

Governance

We’ve been very focused on getting the dev environment squared away (see below), and haven’t made as much progress as we would have liked. This all relates to how we’re going to organize this community, plan activities, run website development, etc. If you’ve ever wanted to get involved in an open source project and you love old maps… well, hello!

Site Content Updates & Copyright Statements

We’re in the middle of scrubbing all of our site’s content, to remove references to OSM, where appropriate, and update all of our copyright statements. What is there now is a first-draft replacement of the OSM policy. Please take a look at it if you’re interested & let us know your thoughts.

Dev Environment

The dev environment is close to getting stabilized. What this means is: * Most of the migration-related bugs have been resolved. You should be able to use the site without repeatedly logging in, most of the internal links should be pointing in the right places (most, but not all… we’re working on those)
* The code base is getting stabilized into production, staging, and feature branches. Updates will be made to staging via PRs and once tested there, changes can be deployed to production. For those into these sorts of things… this is a big deal for us. Huge. Very exciting.
* It’ll be much clearer how volunteers can help contribute to the project.
* We’ll have a more detailed description of everything published in the not-too-distant future.

Future work

Development work for the site will continue even after things stabilize. (or, because things stabilize, dev work will be even easier & faster!). Targeted improvements in the near term include:
* Stylesheet updates
* Enhanced inspector / query features function
* Large area imports

Please keep the questions coming & spread the word. Follow @openhistmap on Twitter!