MapForSTL

Between now and midnight on May 31st, OpenDataSTL is hosting a month-long MapForSTL editing competition, pitting teams against each other to see which team can make the most improvements to St. Louis in OpenStreetMap (http://www.openstreetmap.org/about), an open, community-driven map.

Changes to the St. Louis, MO-IL metropolitan area*  made between 12:01 am May 1st and midnight on May 31st count.  We’ll also have an exciting sprint to the finish during BuildForSTL on May 31st.  The winning team will will be announced on Sunday, June 1st at BuildForSTL and will have bragging rights for a full year.

For points to be awarded, OpenStreetMap changesets must be tagged with both #opendatastl and a team name, such as #hiker, #biker, #geocacher, #runner, #librarians, #STLMapNinjas, etc.  Feel free to make up your own team & get your friends to join in!

We are revising the point system, because we’ve got some great mapping starting to happen & we don’t want to slow anyone down.  We’ll count every change to OpenStreetMap as a point…so go crazy!  (Hint: it is still a good strategy to grab your friends & get them to help…the more mappers the better.)  The only thing to note is that we won’t be counting any bulk imports toward team points, because we want to make sure that bulk importers take their time and follow the guidelines set by the OpenStreetMap community.  If you have data to import that would improve OpenStreetMap, get started by checking out those guidelines here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines

You can see a scoreboard here: http://bl.ocks.org/eleanortutt/3560baeae3e60047c41d

Points will be awarded as follows for each mapper:

• First change: 1 point
• 25 changes: 5 points
• 50 changes: 10 points
• 100 changes: 15 points
• 500 changes: 20 points
• 1,000 changes: 25 points (Maximum number of points for any single mapper, though there’s no need to stop mapping! We will announce the individual mappers with the most changes before announcing the winning team.)

If you are new to OpenStreetMap, signing up and making your first edit for your team is easy!  Go to https://www.openstreetmap.org/login, zoom to the St. Louis area, and click “edit.”  You should automatically be taken to a walk-through of how to use the in-browser iD editor.  When you save your changeset, just be sure to tag it with #opendatastl and your team name tag (there will be a spot for you to type in some notes about your edits when you save – that’s where the tags go).  Now go get mapping!

*A note on geography. Specifically, our scoreboard will be watching changes made within the following bounding box: -91.4187, 37.7341, -89.1383, 39.5234.  That includes all the counties within the St. Louis Metropolitan Statistical Area in both Missouri and Illinois, plus a little extra.

Read more posts on this event here.