Lets continue with the method we used time to select the next quarterly project. 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. It’s fine to re-use proposals from previous quarters if you want.
Proposals for 2026 Q4 can be made here until 21st September. 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?]
We’ve had three nominations of projects for the next quarter’s project. See below for the details. Please cast your votes here before midnight at the end of Monday 28th September.
Goals / Activities
The main aim would be to try to increase building coverage in urban areas and to split and improve alignment of existing building WRT the cadastral overlay.
Helpful datasets / tools / tracking
The usual suspects are available for imagery.
The Overture Maps building page has a map showing buildings colour coded by source. Where they have supplemented OSM with Bing ML data the Bing buildings are highlighted in orange at sufficient zoom. I don’t know how often this is updated.
Why this would be a good quarterly project
As the quarter containing the shortest day of the year it might be the best candidate for some armchair mapping.
StreetComplete is currently the second most popular app for OSM editing (after iD), building outlines are very useful for collecting address as well as correctly placing POIs in more built up areas where GPS offset can be significant. Most other methods of on the ground mapping also benefit from having building outlines for orientation when placing features.
I propose: Pavements and Crossings
I think a lot of towns and cities are still lacking good pavement detail, even in busy areas. Adding missing crossings and separate pavements would enable more detailed and flexible routing, e.g. for wheelchair-friendly routing. People can also survey existing mapping using e.g. Streetcomplete to add detail that can’t be seen from aerial imagery. Other useful edits include adding street:name= to pavements so that routers can give better instructions to users.
Other QA queries for kerbs and pavements can be found here:
I also made this little graphic which illustrates how the most common crossing mapping error should be corrected, as I couldn’t find a good diagram on the wiki that conveys how crossings should be correctly mapped. Not really related to the QP proposal but it’s here.
Goals / Activities
Improve the coverage and detail of recycling bins, Household Waste Recycling Centres and reverse vending machines. A concerted push to add the accepted materials to existing locations.
Helpful datasets / tools / tracking OpenWasteMap lists many recycling centres for survey.
StreetComplete has quests related to recycling containers.
I think we can create some Overpass queries to highlight potential locations for survey e.g. missing recycling:* tags or supermarkets where we’d expect to see a battery or plastic bag collection.
Why this would be a good quarterly project
Ongoing government schemes are changing the recycling process for many people across the UK making recycling a topic people are thinking about more recently as well as over the next few years.
Having a reliable map of where to recycle particular items would be useful.
Similar Projects
Waste and recycling was a quarterly project for Q4 2021.
So the 2026 Q4 project will be Building Traces. I’ve set up a wiki page. @InsertUser (and/or anyone else) do you fancy adding some more detail to it t help participants?
