weeklyOSM 846

01/10/2026-07/10/2026

Mapping

• Mateusz Konieczny proposed a mechanical edit that would move info about material from bollard= to material=. It would include editing bollard=concrete/wood/stone/rock/metal/plastic.

• Mappers in the United Kingdom are considering removing the brand:wikipedia tag, which was mostly set from presets from the name suggestion index that no longer include them, two years after the same thing was done in the United States.

Mapping campaigns

• Ballerup Municipality thanked OpenStreetMap Denmark volunteers for a successful September 2026 mapping campaign that significantly increased the mapping of accessible parking spaces.

Community

• While you are enjoying the #31DayOSMChallenge don’t forget that the #30DayMapChallenge will soon be here. This year’s list of themes has been published.

• Aselnigu explained how new data gets onto the OpenStreetMap.de map.

• Rawaz explained how Claude AI can help map complex 3D buildings in OpenStreetMap.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OpenStreetMap Foundation Local Chapters and Communities Working Group launched the 2026 Community Microgrants, offering a total of EUR 5000 that will be distributed to various OpenStreetMap communities in grants of up to EUR 500. Applications are open from 5 to 25 October for small, concrete, and time-bounded activities that support mapping, data improvement, knowledge sharing, or community growth.

Events

• OSM ENSTP (École Nationale Supérieure des Travaux Publics, Cameroon) organised ► a practical workshop on bridging paper and digital data for local urban planning on 4 October 2026. In collaboration with HeiGIT, the UN Mappers and GeoWakanda, the club brought participants together on campus to explore participatory mapping.

• The FOSSGIS programme committee announced ► that the next FOSSGIS conference will take place in Heidelberg (Germany) from 9 to 13 March 2027.

• The State of the Map Latam 2026 will take place from 27 to 29 October at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City. Those who wish to attend in person can register now.

Education

• Hans van der Kwast gave a workshop, ‘Hydrological Analysis in QGIS’, at the QGIS User Conference in Laax, Switzerland. They explored the new native QGIS 4.4 tools for flow direction visualisation, stream extraction and catchment delineation, and a diverse range of tools for conducting comprehensive hydrological analysis. Materials are available at @gisocw.

Maps

• nicofr77 has developed Tisseur de Voies, a website that calculates bike loops with a return journey by train. The cycle routes come from OpenStreetMap and the national cycle-route database (France), while the basemap comes from OpenStreetMap. Journey times come from open-data timetables published by SNCF, Île-de-France Mobilités, the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, and the Corsican Railways.

• Yury Kosharovskiy has created Star Ninja, a free web map for planning a night of stargazing. It shows sky darkness, cloud forecasts, and moon visibility for any spot on Earth, using OpenStreetMap data through Nominatim (place search) and MapLibre GL JS with OpenFreeMap tiles.

OSM in action

• Home Assistant 2026.10 has introduced a redesigned map built on the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s vector tile service, marking a significant milestone for its adoption by major open-source projects. The new maps features smoother rendering, dark-mode styling, improved markers, and clustering. Home Assistant proxies and caches tiles locally, reducing the load on OSMF infrastructure. The release credits Guillaume Rischard for initiating and leading the OSMF vector tile project, Paul Norman for developing the tile infrastructure, and the MapLibre, Shortbread, and VersaTiles communities.

• Sebastian Mietzner has made KAIJUMIETZ, a browser game that builds any neighbourhood on Earth from OSM data and lets a giant cat destroy it in two minutes.

• VivaMap, a free quality-of-life map built partly on OpenStreetMap data, now also covers the Netherlands. Four of its nine Swiss dimensions (schools, restaurants and nightlife, healthcare, and part of nature) are computed from OSM points of interest and building footprints, weighted by type and distance on an H3 hexagon grid. The aggregate scores are published as CSV under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Software

• Stadia Maps shows how to build a custom map style in about 30 minutes by forking a MapLibre style, recoloring it in Maputnik, and hosting the JSON yourself, including authentication setup and common styling problems.

• Stadia Maps has rebuilt its boundary processing pipeline so that each boundary retains the same disputed status at every zoom level, resulting in smaller tiles.

• Heikki Kalliokoski has developed copilot.travel, a free web planner for road trips in Europe powered by OpenStreetMap data. It routes drives with self-hosted Valhalla and describes sights using linked Wikipedia/Wikidata entries or their OSM tags.

• After two years of development Alexandr Lovkov has shared his web app RouteCycle, for creating convenient and engaging cycling routes. The app supports displaying landmark photos from Wikimedia Commons and Strava integration for tracking unexplored roads and landmarks.

• The Wikimedia Enterprise team published an article about how CoMaps downloads Wikipedia articles to link them to OpenStreetMap data to provide offline access.

• Erick de Oliveira is bringing back the OSM Smart Menu as an open-source extension for Chrome and Firefox. With a single click, it opens your current location at the same zoom level on other maps, in mapping tools such as iD, JOSM, or OSMCha, and also in Wikipedia articles containing coordinates without the need to enter any data.

• Rua de Cima is a free tool for house hunters in mainland Portugal. It uses official statistics to compare ► a home’s asking price with nearby sale prices and shows walking and driving times to schools, health care, public transport, shops, and beaches. Place and road data come from OpenStreetMap, routes are calculated using Valhalla, and the basemap uses Protomaps.

Releases

• GraphHopper has released version 11.1, fixing a remote code execution issue.

• Nearly two months since the last report, we received a new recap of changes to openstreetmap.org. Some of these include a new version of iD (with updated tagging schema), tweaks to notes, and a new effort to track and help fix errors that were invisible to the team. But the spotlight is on the changes to visibility settings for uploaded GPX traces. These were announced back in May (we reported earlier), and have now landed for the general public, including a page that mappers can use to update their past traces in bulk in order to bring them up to the new spec.

• HeiGIT announced a major release of openrouteservice with version 10.0.0, also known as Amalthea. This release focused mostly on the technical foundation of the engine. It upgraded Java and Spring Boot, reduced the set of release artefacts to a fat jar and Docker images, and moved the slim Docker image to a hardened distroless base.

• Organic Maps released its September 2026 update with route optimisation, improved alternative routes, individual track hiding, and intermittent water area rendering.

Did you know that …

• … the Earth is getting rounder?

• … you can easily edit OSM public transport relations using OSM Relatify?

Other “geo” things

• Heise reported that the European Space Agency determined a position using Galileo’s future Signal Authentication Service for the first time under real-world conditions. The technology is intended to make various types of GNSS spoofing attacks detectable.

• The Nigeria Postal Service has launched its National Digital Alphanumeric Postcode, a precise, GIS-located address system for every building in Nigeria. To mark the launch, OpenCage shared several geo-trivia facts about Nigeria.

• Sentient Media has published an interactive map of Iowa’s concentrated animal feeding operations that shows nearly 11,000 facilities, 126.4 million animals, estimated manure volumes, and violations since 2003. It uses data from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources alongside Sentient Media’s own estimates; the data and code are available on GitHub.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
🇨🇭	Bern	SBB Headquarter	Open Transport Community Conference 2026	2026-10-06 - 2026-10-09
🇬🇭		Ghana	Everywhere She Maps workshop 2026	2026-10-07 - 2026-10-08
🇹🇭	กรุงเทพมหานคร	Brighton College Bangkok Mapathon	Missing Maps Mapathon (Beginner) - Bangkok, Thailand	2026-10-08
🇹🇭	กรุงเทพมหานคร	Chulalongkorn University	Fund Geo Class Mapathon, Survey Engineering Chula	2026-10-08
🇧🇪	Bruxelles - Brussel	Galerie Bortier	Brussels meetup - byebye Thierry & Joost	2026-10-08
🇩🇪	Bochum	Das Labor, Alleestraße 50, Bochum	OSM-Treffen Bochum	2026-10-08
🇩🇪	Berlin	Grosse Hamburger Strasse 37, 10115 Berlin	220. OSM-Stammtisch Berlin-Brandenburg	2026-10-09
🇨🇭	Bern	Restaurant Kairo	OSM-Znacht in Bern	2026-10-09
🇮🇹	Catania	Biblioteche Riunite Civica e A. Ursino Recupero	Modifichiamo Wiki e OSM insieme! - Catania	2026-10-10
🇹🇭	กรุงเทพมหานคร	Public House Hotel Bangkok	OSM Thailand Community & HOT Meet-up	2026-10-10
🇫🇷	Angers	École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers	OpenStreetMap, des cartes à la carte !	2026-10-10
🇭🇺	Salgótarján	Salgótarján - völgyváros gyár	Salgótarján Mapping Party 2026-10-11	2026-10-11
🇩🇰	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-10-11
🇫🇷	Angers	École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers	OpenStreetMap, des cartes à la carte !	2026-10-11
🇧🇪		Espace Public Numérique (EPN) de Neufchâteau	OpenStreetMap	2026-10-12
			Panoramax Nederland - Online Community Meeting #1	2026-10-12
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-10-12
🇳🇱	Amsterdam	TomTom HQ	2026 Autumn Maptime	2026-10-12
🇩🇪	München	Echardinger Einkehr	Münchner OSM-Treffen	2026-10-13
🇩🇪	Hamburg	Voraussichtlich: “Variable”, Karolinenstraße 23	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2026-10-13
🇩🇪		temporärhaus	OSM-Stammtisch Ulm/Neu-Ulm	2026-10-13
🇬🇧		Canolfan Cefnfaes	🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 North Wales Mapathon Gogledd Cymru 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿	2026-10-14
🇪🇸	Barcelona	Barcelona	Assemblea d’OpenStreetMap Català	2026-10-14
🇧🇪	Bruxelles - Brussel	Tour & Taxis, Avenue du Port 86C - 1000 Brussels	FOSS4G Belgium	2026-10-15
			OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting	2026-10-16
🇩🇪	Potsdam	11-line	Potsdamer Mappertreffen	2026-10-16
🇦🇷	Pergamino	Hub de Innovación	Encuentro OSM Argentina 2026	2026-10-17
🇫🇷	Metz	Espace Arob@se - Metz	Atelier OpenStreetMap Metz	2026-10-17
🇮🇳	Noida	Noida	OSM Delhi NCR Mapping Party No.33 (Noida)	2026-10-18
			Missing Maps London Mid-Month for Advanced Mappers (no training provided) (Online) [eng]	2026-10-20
🇫🇷	Lyon	Tubà	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon	2026-10-20
🇩🇪	Chemnitz	Kaffeesatz, Chemnitz	OSM-Stammtisch Chemnitz	2026-10-20
🇩🇪	Bonn	Dotty’s	205. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn	2026-10-20
🇬🇧	City of Edinburgh	Guildford Arms	Edinburgh Social	2026-10-20 - 2026-10-26
🇩🇪		Online	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)	2026-10-20
			Formazione Wikimedia Italia - OpenStreetMap: modifica tramite sito e tramite app	2026-10-21
🇩🇪	Karlsruhe	Schwarzer Kater	Stammtisch Karlsruhe	2026-10-21
			OSM US Mappy Hour: Mapping Accessible Trails	2026-10-21
🇩🇪	Berlin	Online	EarthPV: Mapping Photovoltaics	2026-10-22
🇩🇪	Berlin	Wikimedia e.V. Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24,10963 Berlin	OSM Hackweekend Berlin-Brandenburg 10/2026	2026-10-24 - 2026-10-25
🇸🇪	Uppsala	Datorföreningen Update	Mapping meetup in Uppsala	2026-10-25
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-10-26
			Formazione Wikimedia Italia - OpenStreetMap: tasking manager	2026-10-26
🇩🇪	Heidelberg	DEZERNAT#16	Rhein-Neckar OSM Treffen	2026-10-26
🇩🇪	Stadtgebiet Bremen	Online und im Hackerspace Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen	2026-10-26

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, Rob Yoegel, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.