2026-08-30 –, La Réunion Language: English
OpenStreetMap contributions in Ghana and Africa continue to grow rapidly but one big question is how is this growth transforming and impacting the project's future. In this talk I share how decisions by both individual and organized mapping activities continue to create massive useless data in OpenStreetMap that nobody is ever going to use and how we can prevent more of such future occurrences.
Publicly available imagery in OSM might not always be up-to-date but massive data is being created with very old imagery in many parts of the continent. In this talk, I will travel through Ghana on OpenStreetMap showcase results of organized mapping activities that live in OSM almost forever; data in most cases is not usable. In doing this we will explore tools, methods and best practices to be aware of when contributing to OpenStreetMap in Ghana and somewhere else on the Africa continent either as an individual or organization.
Data Quality
I am a volunteer OpenStreetmap contributor and Free/Libre and Open Source Software enthusiast. I contribute to OpenStreetMap mostly in Ghana where I try to add new features and also fix many useless contributions from years and recent by both individual or organized remote mappers. I support Good changeset comments.