OSMTime in Cluj featuring MapRoulette

OSMTime is a monthly OSM mapping event organized by Telenav colleague Beata Jancso. Telenav hosts the events in the Cluj-Napoca office and sponsors with pizza. Usually, Bea chooses a theme and sometimes there will also be a speaker with an interesting OSM-related topic.

While visiting the Telenav Romania office in Cluj last week, I was lucky to also catch an OSMTime event. The theme of the evening was ‘Mapping Roundabouts using MapRoulette’. Being the person behind MapRoulette, Bea asked me to do a quick introduction. Colleague Bogdan Gliga also presented the methodology he used to detect missing roundabouts from massive amounts of probe data. (He wrote about that topic here as well.)

OSMTime Cluj with Bogdan presenting
OSMTime Cluj with Bogdan presenting

After the presentations and pizza, the 25 or so mappers logged on to MapRoulette to start with the new Missing Roundabouts challenge. Most people had not used MapRoulette before, so I was glad that everyone was getting the hang of it quickly. Most of the problems and questions were not about MapRoulette but about what is a roundabout exactly, and what is the difference between a roundabout and a mini_roundabout and a traffic_circle. (The OSM wiki helps out a little here.)

At the end of the evening, the mappers in the room already made a good dent in the challenge, which has more than 4500 tasks total.

I had a great time, thanks to Bea for organizing the OSMTime events every month and spreading the word. If you are in the Cluj-Napoca area, you may want to subscribe to the OSMTime meetup so you know when the next one takes place. Or look for an OpenStreetMap meetup in your area and meet local mappers!

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