Ever get tired of mapping (I can’t imagine that!) but still want to be engaged and help out with the greater OHM community (heck yes!), we have plenty of opportunities and needs for assistance in making our community even better than it already is.
If you or someone you know might be interested in helping in any of the following areas, please let us know - we’d love to get more hands on deck!
Event planning and coordination - for example, local or regional maptimes, meetups, geogroups, historical societies, digital humanities organizations, schools, etc.
Communications - helping with our social media, newsletters (OSM-US), blog posts, etc.; help us spread the word to libraries, historical societies, schools, and the like.
Documentation - we need help! Everything from how to get started, working backward from current data, importing, warping - you name it. All of this could be better documented.
Forum Moderation - it’d be great to have some moderators who’d help shoulder the load of monitoring activity. This might include Slack and Discord patrolling, whatever floats your boat. (too many nautical metaphors?)
Instructors - are you great in front of a room or a crowd or even 1:1? You could be a go-to resource for getting others up to speed.
The bottom line is: we could use help in any way you’d like to help out & we’d love to have you on the wider OHM coordination team.
Hi Jeff
In September 2023 you called for volunteering. Is there any progress in documentation? The documentation I found is very basic. I’m a complete newbee and German. I tried to understand how to work with OHM. The existing documentation - neither English nor German - is not very supportive.
Is there a group of users who are working on this?
My ideas:
Lets think from beginners view. Maybe we need a few personas.
Lets define typical scenarios for this users
Lets create a step by step guide
We should try to avoid a mixture between OHM and OSM documentation. Its confusing beginners, but it may be ok for expert users.
I can add my few cents to the discussion and work on this partially.
Hi,
The sources you’ve linked are very helpful in concrete projects. Editors and groups of editors of maps can use them in a project.
I see great perspective for OHM not only for cartographers and historians. Teachers in schools, colleagues and universities can use OHM for preparation of lessons or assignments. Students can work on own projects in groups, Local hobby historians can use OHM in preparation for exhibitions or local articles.
All of them needs a good documentation as starting point. A cartographer has a professional background and needs onyl additional feature specific doc. A complete starter needs a general overview about basic concepts how to work with OHM.
You’re coming from a great perspective… the kind we like : )… new and fresh and most importantly, willing to pitch in.
I agree with your assessment of our diverse audiences, each of which might have a different entry point. We do have resources on our wiki, but I fear much of this is too techie for the masses.
What did you have in mind? Is there a document or tool you think would be good to start with?
Anyone else out there interested in pitching in? Ralf - I’ll see if we can recruit some fellow doc writers.
Hi Jeff
thanks for your comment and invitation to participate.
A few words about my background. I’ve worked for nearly 50 years in adult education business and for more than 20 years with Moodle Learning Management as a professional partner in the Moodle environment. The Moodle documentation at docs.moodle.org is a great ressource for beginners in different roles. I supported Moodle by localization, wrote German handbooks and published on Linkedin Learning.
OHM is different and as far as I see not so complex.
I will share my ideas in seperate topics in the forum.
I found some introduction videos for OHM and OSM from Anne- Karoline Distel on Youtube: Anne-Karoline Distel - YouTube
The level of introduction is very helpfull for non professionals. She explains features based on OSM und UMAP in most videos but ade also a few OHM videos. My idea is to follow the wikipedia way, including screenshots and perhaps embedded Youtube videos if it makes sense.
Be still, my beating ! I’m also an edtech veteran and have always hoped OHM could be a foundation for educational materials. See my original – and long outdated – concept, the Global World History Atlas.
I see that you answered my other question about the wiki here, which is great. I’m sure that if you coordinated the construction of your outline on the wiki, you could assign sections to others, especially if it’s within a framework, editorial intent, and audience (persons) that you’re guiding. The content could be screen shots or videos.
Hey Yinz Guys! First time user, long term history buff, and minor cartographer. I hate to say this, but I would be willing to lend a hand when I am able. As long as I do not get in over my head. IRL I am more of a data analyst and database type. Have always been a history buff. My wife is actually a historian and archivist, but currently works outside the field (you know, jobs that pay).
Over the years I have some how become the family genealogist, which has lead me down a few rabbit holes. One particular hole, I was chasing down information on an abandon cemetery near where I grew up, and trying to figure out more about it. We actually have ancestors buried in it. Looking through old deed books, in an attempt to figure out who owned the cemetery in the past. That lead to to surveying, learning how to take and map out the metes and bounds of a deed. Then once I crossed beyond the 1800’s, I started to get into the early land surveys of our region. I initially stared plotting out surveys using a plot generator that created a KML file that I then imported into Google Maps. Frustrations with Google lead me to QGIS. Been doing a lot of work with it, but there was always the question of how I was going to share or present the maps I was able to put together. At some point I ran across OHM and signed up, but never did much with it. Recently decided to give it another go.
But as Ralf commented, there just not a lot of good training materials out there on how to do stuff. Tons of videos on the background, or the changes being made to the system. But that’s not the stuff that teaches a user how to do things.
Anyway, I am sure I will be around and chatting some more.
And, apologies for the lack of good how-to materials. Maybe we may have been leaning on the how-to materials from OpenStreetMap a bit too much?
Given that you’re tech-inclined and have already been using QGIS, have you checked out JOSM? LearnOSM has a good Getting Started with JOSM that I bet you’d blaze through pretty quickly.
To use JOSM with OHM instead of OHM, you’ll want to set some OHM-specific configs to connect to our API.
And, you’ll want to add the OpenData JOSM plugin, which will enable you to open your shapefiles in JOSM and add OHM-appropriate tags before uploading.
If you’d like to test this with a small changeset, I’m sure plenty of people here would be happy to help you along your way!
It is no problem, it is just fantastic to find people working on a project like this. I think this could be a great resource.
I have played around a bit with JOSN a bit using MapLibre’s Maputnik. But I just noticed that is JSON vs JOSM. Wow, that is going to be easy to confuse. I have not checked out JOSM before, but I will start to dig into it.
I think this is becoming one of those Dunning-Kruger curve moments! You THINK you are starting to understand something, then you open the next door and are suddenly aware of how much more you don’t know. But, at least the group seems friendly and open to help outsiders come in from the cold.
I really do try to NOT be one of those people that complain about something without being willing to help fix it. Just might take me a bit to get up to speed on some of it. There is the balance between how much time I would spend learning and doing something, vs the amount of time my wife would see as appropriate, as my “honey-do” list grows larger.
But my inexperience could also help in looking at and development more “how-to’s” or other instructions. It could help identify stuff that needs explained better or differently. When you have been working with something for a long time, there are often assumption your mind makes. Not meant as in insult in anyway, we all do it in one way or another. Over the years I have helped write a lot of help documentation, begrudgingly or not. It is certainly not my favorite thing to do, but I can do it. I just hope I can be of assistance here.
Maybe I should start another thread to explain what I am hoping to do here with my project.
! I’m also an edtech veteran and have always hoped OHM could be a foundation for educational materials. See my original – and long outdated – concept, 
IRL I am more of a data analyst and database type. Have always been a history buff. My wife is actually a historian and archivist, but currently works outside the field (you know, jobs that pay).
You THINK you are starting to understand something, then you open the next door and are suddenly aware of how much more you don’t know. But, at least the group seems friendly and open to help outsiders come in from the cold.