Two years ago, we created some maps which showed you the number of users per country for a timeframe of one month. Maybe some of you remember that the highest concentration of active contributors in relation to the countries’ population could be found in Europe. We thought it was about time to make some new maps to see if things have changed. The following map shows you the number of active contributors per day per country.

Similar to our results two years ago, the above map only gives some general information about the total number of users per country and does not consider the population for each country. Therefore we created a second map which shows you the relation between active users and the population in each country per day.

Overall the maps show a slightly similar activity pattern of the OSM users as in our previous results two years ago. The major concentration of the project still lies in Europe expanding more and more to the east. However, you can see certain changes in other areas of the world too. First improvements have been made in Africa, South America and South-East Asia. Greenland of course is looking quite exceptional due to the low population value.

So, what do you think? Where are you located and how would you describe the mapping activity development in your country?

***Update: Nov. 20th, 2012***

My last update about the HDYC website is a few months old now. For those readers who do not know what HDYC is: “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?” is a webpage which shows you in detail how long, when, where a member of the OSM project contributed to the project and which tools she/he used.

This time I added some new stats and graphs to the site. One of my favorite new features is the location information which shows the countries in which a contributor created at least one OSM Node:

A second new feature shows how long the mapper is already registered with the project and how many *active* mapping days she/he had:

You can also find some more information about the changesets of the user e.g. the number of changesets with a comment, the number of unique changeset comments and the median character length of the comments. Additionally, you will also see some information about deleted nodes, ways or relations:

Some of you might know about Richard Weait’s “Mapper Baseball Cards” idea. I added a similar graph to the end of the page to show which editors have been used by the mapper (thx Richard for the idea).

You will also see some facts about how many traces a user has uploaded to the OSM project and how many user blocks he received or if a user block is still active. Most of the stats are updated on a daily basis while the changeset stats will be updated once per week (which depend on the changeset dump).

Maybe we should create a “Hall of Fame” of OSM Contributors?

1. Contributor with most visited countries? -> mikelmaron ?
2.  Most active contributor? -> Zambelli Limitada ?
3.  … any other ideas?

However, I hope you like it!? Have fun …
>> http://hdyc.neis-one.org <<

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis for proofreading

Since past Friday the OpenStreetMap project has more than 600 000 registered members. As many of you may know, not every new registered member starts contributing to the project right away. Based on my “How did you contribute to OSM?” database I created a small (but neat) webpage which shows where the newest registered OpenStreetMap (OSM) members made one of their first edits. The following image shows a screenshot of the new webpage:

The visualized data will be updated on a daily basis. At the moment there are two layers available: one layer displays the latest members of the past two days, while the other layer does the same for the past seven days. At lower zoom-levels the icons are clustered and only show the number of new members. However, on higher zoom-levels you can click on the individual icons to get further information about the new project member. Thanks to Stamen for their really nice looking watercolor map. Would you like to see more statistics about the number of new contributors for each individual country?

The new webpage is online here: http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/newestosm.php

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

Many blog posts reported in the last few weeks about Google’s changes to their Google Maps API and the new usage limits. If a website that implemented the Google Maps API receives too much traffic or hits e.g. more than 25,000 per day, charges will apply [1]. This news caused some websites to start looking for alternatives and some of them switched to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project. You can read more about how and why you should also switch to OSM on the great switch2osm.org webpage.

As maybe some of you already know two prominent examples that switched to OSM within the past two weeks are Foursquare and Apple. You can read more about Foursquare’s switch here and about Apple here. Richard Fairhurst wrote a few days ago (on March 8th [2]) that the OSM Project was experiencing a nice boost in several categories such as:

• more map tiles than usual that have been requested
• new members on the OSM IRCs asking on how to make changes to the OSM data
• a higher peak of OSM publicity
• and as Kai Krueger [3] mentioned it seemed that several new users contributed to OSM.

I would like to add a few numbers especially to the last point mentioned above. Foursquare announced their switch to OSM on Feb. 29th, 2012. Before this announcement the OSM project would usually experience a growth of around 500 (+/- 200) new registered members every day in February. Out of these new members approximately 180 (+/- 50) contribute their first edit in OSM. Overall around 2100 +/- 100 members were active each day in February [4].

However, these numbers changed the first day after the Foursquare announcement. The OSM project had an increase of around 1600 new members during that day (March 1st), and on the second day about 1100 new members joined OSM. On March 3rd the numbers went down to the usual 600 new registered members again. Out of those newly registered members during the first day after the Foursquare announcement about 700, at the second day about 450 and on March 3rd 250 members started to contribute to the project.

After Apple switched to OSM on March 8th the daily new member numbers started to increase again. On March 8th 1400, March 9th 1800 and yesterday 1000 new members registered to the OSM project. About 560 of the new members that joined on March 8th, 780 that joined on March 9th and 400 members that joined yesterday started to actively contribute to the project [5].

The following picture from OSMstats shows the increase in the amount of daily active OSM members:

Source: http://osmstats.altogetherlost.com

So far we can say that due to the announcements the OSM project gets an above average boost on new registered members. It looks like more active users contribute to the OSM project each day, which is a good development! We will see within the next few days and weeks, if more people will not only use the OSM data but also contribute new objects …

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

[1] “How much will excess map loads purchased online cost?”
[2] OSM-talk Maillling-List: “Nice problem to have”
[3] OSM-talk Maillling-List: “Nice problem to have”
[4] OSMstats: Statistics of the free wiki world map (accessed on March 5th, 2012)
[5] OSMstats: Statistics of the free wiki world map (accessed on March 11th, 2012)

Last weekend Frederik and Richard asked me if I could give some additional information on the „How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?“ webpage. So here we go. Below the prior, familiar chart which shows the contributions per month, you will find two new charts. The first one shows the number of changesets per weekday and the second one the number of changesets per hour.

Additionally I added an output that roughly estimates what type of mapper the contributor is, based on his/her number of contributions (changesets). However, I will give no warranty regarding the group or type of mapper that each individual contributor falls into and I think you will figure out the different groups of mappers by yourself anyway 😉

The following picture highlights the new things on my webpage:

Most of you already know it, you will find “How Did You Contribute to OpenStreetMap?” here: http://hdyc.neis-one.org

thx @ Frederik & Richard for the idea
thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

*Update* (2020-06-11) What are the different requirements for your #HDYC type of #mapper? See

During my really great vacation in Sweden I had some time to do some further adjustments to the well-known “Your OSM Heatmap“-webpage. For the new readers: “Your OSM Heatmap” shows the contributions of an OpenStreetMap user as a heatmap overlay. You can find my blog post with some more information here.

However, I think it would be a fantastic idea to add a time slider to the webpage. You can find it now below the map! The year of your first and last contribution is on the left and right end of the slider. With the slider you can visualize your OSMtastic-work over time. The following image shows the webpage including the time slider:

As a second feature you can now use, beside your OSM heatmap-link, the permalink of the map to point to an individual position of your heatmap! Finally I have updated the data for the webpage with the latest OSM changesets. Overall the heatmaps for about 150 000 contributors are available. Remember: Not *every* registered OSM member did contribute to the project.

So, who has an awesome OSM HeatMap time-travel? >> http://yosmhm.neis-one.org

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

Last week Stephan released the neat “Where Did You Edit?” webpage. A world map indicates where in the world you have been editing OpenStreetMap (OSM) nodes. Unfortunately it is based on a full history OSM planet dump which is nearly two months old. Also, the map does not include any tools to zoom into or drag the map. However, Stephan mentioned that he is working on these functions. Keep up the good work, Stephan!

Based on my OSM changeset table of “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap ?” I created a slightly different webpage and used a different approach. I used the weekly OSM changeset files and I presented the results in an OpenStreetMap including zoom and drag functions. Your contributions are indicated by a “Heat-Map-Overlay”. For this overlay I am using Bjoern’s OpenLayers addon. For better performance I generalized the total changesets of each OSM contributor. This means that it is possible that not every little contribution from a member is taken into account and displayed in the map. Anyway, I think the results are quite impressive, aren’t they?

The following picture shows the heat map of Harry’s OSM contributions. Really nice! But honestly: Harry, did you visit all places in person? 🙂

I think you will find other incredible OSM Contributors Heat Map stories?! You can find “Your OSM Heat Map” (aka Where did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?) here: http://yosmhm.neis-one.org . I can update this website every week if you like …

thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

Most of you might already know that the OpenStreetMap project will celebrate its 7th Anniversary this month. Several events will take place on Saturday, 20 August 2011 at different locations around the world! You can read more about it here.

A small gift that I would like to contribute is a website which allows you to get some information about your “OSM-Age“. The functionality is similar to “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap ?“. Type in your or any other OSM username and your or the corresponding user’s OSM-Birthday will be displayed. To be more specific the website will show your OSM-Age and your rank within the OSM contributors list. Remember: Not every OSM member contributed to OSM (cf. „Nominal Members“ of OSM). So it is possible that your rank is better than you might have expected. The date of a user’s birthday was collected from each users OSM User Wiki page (“Mapper since: …”).

The following image shows an example search result:

Additionally you can find the oldest and newest contributors in the boxes below the search results. Further you can see whose birthday it is on that specific day, or within the previous or following three days.

Soooo, what is your birthday? Check it out here: http://osmbirthday.neis-one.org

Additional information: Today (Aug. 2011) the OSM project has about 143 000 contributors with at least one edit in the database. Remember that officially the project has over 446 000 registered members (cf. OpenStreetMap stats report). I will announce more about this topic here in my blog in the near future … so stay tuned! Or you can read the blog post from last year (2010): „Nominal Members“ of OSM

thx @ *Fab* for the user-interface
and thx @ maɪˈæmɪ Dennis

Ok, you want it, you’ll get it! Maybe some of you know the nice website: www.googlefight.com. You can enter two keywords and after that it starts a funny fight between these keywords. Based on the database of “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?” I created a similar website where you can set up a “fight” between OpenStreetMap contributors. The following picture shows an example fight:

I am very sure you have some ideas for further fights, don´t you?
“Let´s get ready to rumble!” >>  http://osmfight.neis-one.org/ <<

thx @ Frederik for idea during a talk
thx @ *Fab* for the user-interface
and finally thx @, you know it: maɪˈæmɪ Dennis 🙂