Hi everyone,
I wanted to share an update here in case there are any Open Aerial Map users in this forum 
OpenAerialMap is an open service to provide access to a commons of openly licensed imagery and map layer services and it is used by the open mapping community.
This year Humanitarian Open Street Map Team (HOT) joined with Kontur to take a fresh look at OAM and redesign the platform. Focusing on how OAM could be improved to better support HOT’s vision that everyone has access to high quality map data and use that data responsibly to improve lives and communities. Read more about the project and initial findings in this blog. HOT and Kontur are now organizing two workshops to further refine and prioritize user needs and ideas:
- Tuesday 26 April 16:00 UTC
- Thursday 28 April 11:00 UTC
If you want to participate in the workshops, please sign up through this form and a calendar invite will be sent to you!
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It is not quite clear if you are referring to the OAM instance operated by HOT or to the software in general, but in the end the comments apply to both.
The major issue with OAM is not that it needs a redesign (that is just a pretense to get project funding), but that the software is unmaintained, the documentation is out of date and that operations are in abandoned plane on auto-pilot mode. If you need an example of that, I tried, literally for years, to get a broken global imagery source removed to no avail (I ended up hardwiring a filter to ignore it).
No redesign is going fix any of those, actual, problems and I would warn anybody against wasting their time on what will simply result in a redesigned, unmaintained and unsupported service.
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Hi Simon - thanks for your comments. OAM here is referred to the HOT instance, because it’s the only one publicly available so far, but the redesign effort is intended for the software, for improving its sustainability, and the community around it.
I agree that the project hasn’t been maintained very much and there are broken parts that prevent its usability on several aspects. We would like to get everyone’s input, from users to contributors, and prioritize needs on how to focus the redesign, starting from what’s currently not working.
This will be done with that sustainability objective in mind, to build a software and a platform that can serve the OSM and other communities - and it’s maintained and supported by members within those same communities.
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Hi everyone. Just sharing an update from the OpenAerialMap redesign project in collaboration with Kontur : Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team | OpenAerialMapv2 - Design Phase Update for those interest to have a read what happened since the workshops
PS: I had a quick look at the update, and it is as expected. I would note however that it glosses over the fact that Vespucci, AFAIK as the sole OSM editing app, has had OAM index integration since back in early 2018 10.1.0 Release notes - Vespucci which didn’t seem to be note worthy in any form.
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