I am curious. For all our mappers, what is your favorite locale-geographical area to map that is not within your own country. For me it is Greece and Cyprus.
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Hi,
I hardly ever map outside the city where I live. If I had to choose a favourite area outside my city, I would choose the United States. I remember one of my first OSM edits was to add Throreau Farm in Concord, Massachusetts.
That’s fun! Thank you for sharing 
I’ve revealed before that I like to map whenever I’m visiting friends or family, on vacation, going camping / backpacking in the wilderness, and places like Burning Man (a festival in the Western United States Black Rock Desert area of northern Nevada).
Especially after discovering OSM (and the creativity it allows me to “map what I see and experience”), I feel as if I am a mapper wherever I go. “Translating” my sights and experiences into OSM, wherever I might find myself on our wonderful planet, is an endeavor I deeply cherish: I seem to have “found a calling,” even as I “simply” find myself a volunteer in a global project.
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This is cool. I’ve noticed this is the modus operandi of many OSM contributors, and is very valuable mode of contribution, on parity with any other.
For some weeks I enjoyed choosing locations at random (really, with a random coordinates generator) and mapping what I can find.
Nowadays I almost exclusively map in my city and state because local knowledge is really helpful for adding to OSM and that way I can take advantage of my own contributions when navigating or looking up opening hours.
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I need to do this more for my own city.
I also map mostly in the state where I live and my knowledge is most useful. There is plenty still to map here and I haven’t felt the need to look farther away for things to do. I also enjoying mapping a bit in places I travel to.
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For me, there is enough in my own country & region that is not mapped, or tagged incorrectly, that I don’t need to look far. Whenever I travel I compare OSM to what’s on the ground & update accordingly.
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My day job involves contributing organized edits and analysing local editor contributions on a daily basis. After this and other OSM related activities I find it hard to motivate myself to map more for my city in my own time. I am my own worst enemy, because my self-determined objectives are always too ambitious and exceed what time I can devote.
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The vast majority of my mapping is for where I live or visit. We just purchased a vacation cabin in some mountains about 3 hours from home so you can guess my current focus: The town that cabin is located in. This morning I walked around collecting some street numbers for OSM.
With respect to places outside my country: Again places I visit or plan to visit. Usually I will pull up the area in JOSM and get a feel for how well the area is mapped so I know how much to trust the OSM based maps I will be using on my trip. Then while on the trip I will take geo-referenced photos and collect GPX files. Once home I will then make corrections and/or additions based on my tracks and notes. I try to be nice to the locals when doing this: If it seems that a lot of what I think is dodgy mapping but it is consistent across the area and the history shows they were made by local mappers I will leave things alone.
This is awesome. Happy mapping, I wish you all success in your effort to map this town
- I like to go to a random rural / remote area in the Western United States and do some improvements to roads (especially “residential” roads from TIGER imports, and tracks), old GNIS nodes (there are some MapRoulette challenges related to GNIS imports such as this one, it’s easy enough to create your own.)
- I love to do some on-the-ground survey mapping wherever I visit. I was just in Hawai’i over Christmas and did a fair amount of mapping there, all small improvements but you have to have “eyes on the ground” to make them. There were four of us on the trip and I always made sure that I was not the one driving so I could look out the window and map instead
I use GoMap!! in those cases.
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No particular favourite place. My wife and I make hiking trips together or in a group. I can’t do extensive mapping while on the go, so I make a lot of snapshots and process them afterwards. Not with Mapillary, though. I mix regular leisure snapshots (views, monuments, persons, animals, architecture, villages, nature) with snapshots of OSM-details for hikers (surface, signposts, benches, small bridges and tiny streams, viewpoints, water taps and drinking fountains, paths, steps, stations of the cross, Stolpersteine, probably scrambles in the near future…), the mix is not Mapillary material.
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My favorite area to map not within my country is France, because …
… I map mostly in the area where I live and I have local knowledge …
… and I don’t need to move far to cross the border to France. There are two French villages and one French town less than four miles away from home whereas I have to cycle more than five miles to the next neighboring village in Germany 
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In fact my first edit was in France, correcting the name of a neighbourhood - because I had seen the place name sign often enough to know it better.
Fantastic!