In response to feedback about a lack of community involvement in choosing the UK Quarterly Projects, the OSM UK board discussed this at its recent meeting, and thought it would good to have a community vote to decide. To avoid having a potentially unmanageable list of projects to vote on, and ensure there’s enough information for people to make an informed decision, we’d like anyone who wants to propose a project for consideration to make a post in this thread with the format shown below to describe the project.
Proposals for Q3 can be made here until 20th June. We’ll then open a vote here for a week to decide on the project. Please keep this thread just for the proposal posts. Any discussion can continue in the other Q3/4 discussion thread.
Title
[Short descriptive title for the project]
Goals / Activities
[What would the project achieve, and what would mappers be asked to do?]
Helpful datasets / tools / tracking
[Are there any existing datasets / tools that can be used? Could new data be found or new tools made? Are there any metrics we can use to track progress / measure success?]
Why this would be a good quarterly project
[Both benefits of the outputs to OSM/society, and suitability for the quarterly project format]
Similar Projects
[Has this project, or something similar been done in the past? If so when?]
Goals / Activities
When the last note-and-fixme quarterly project took place in Q1 2023, there were approximately 30,000 open notes in OSM UK. This has increased gradually to 35,000 today.
Can we reduce that number and/or the overall trend in a meaningful way?
Why this would be a good quarterly project
When note/fixme density is sufficiently low in an area with active (or beginner) mappers, it’s more likely that newly-added note/fixmes will be resolved quickly – and so the map itself should be more up-to-date and helpful for local users.
Similar Projects
This is a suggested repeat of a previous project to reduce OSM UK note/fixme quantity in Q1 2023.
Goals / Activities
Add and update data on existing schools, ensure that buildings, roads, car parks, sports pitches, paths etc. are accurately mapped on schools. Add missing schools, remove/mark disused schools that have closed/relocated.
I have been storing the history of the number of schools in each region which are unmapped, have issues, are unmatched etc.. I could fairly easily add something to display these data.
Why this would be a good quarterly project
Lots of people look for or go to schools or are involved in them. It is useful to have up to date information about schools, firstly locations, then names and contact details.
This fits the format since an occasional push is needed to get data up to date.
Goals / Activities
Improve the coverage and attributes (e.g. operator, opening times, accessibility) for public toilets and drinking water taps/fountains. We could also try to compile a list of council websites describing their toilets, and check OSM mapping against those. Could we even develop/promote a data standard for councils to publish toilet data in, so people could automatically update details?
Helpful datasets / tools / tracking
I don’t think there are any official central UK lists of public toilets but Toilet Map is an independent effort to crowd-source public toilet info, and also takes data from OSM. It would be good to try to collaborate with them to get their data into OSM, as it would then be exposed to a wider audience.
To measure progress, we could track numbers of amenity=toilet and amenity=drinking_water, and possibly also look at stats for the last updated date on these objects.
Why this would be a good quarterly project
Everyone needs to go to the loo from time to time, and for tourists and visitors, being able to find facilities in an unfamiliar area is very helpful. People with various medical conditions and those with young children may have particular need for toilets. Likewise drinking water sources can be very useful to visitors and e.g. cyclists passing through an area.
Being able to find toilets and drinking water on OSM and in mobile apps like OsmAnd, CoMaps and Organic Maps is a great use-case that can be used to promote OSM, provided we have reliable data. Since this project is likely to involve outdoor survey work, and the data is particularly relevant in the summer (tourist) season, this would be great to do in a summer quarter.
Similar Projects
No previous UK quarterly projects, but Toilet Map is an independent effort to crowd-source public toilet info.
Many thanks to everyone who voted. The proposal with the most votes was Public Toilets and Drinking Water with 65%, so that will be the project for this quarter. Lets discuss the project further in a dedicated thread: UK Quartery Project 2026 Q3: Public Toilets and Drinking Water .
The other suggested projects can be reconsidered in future quarters.