User:Sdoerr
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I discovered OpenStreetMap in January 2010 and was immediately attracted to the project. Living in Northfleet (Gravesham district, Kent), I found that my local area was well mapped already, but when I checked out my childhood home in Strood I found that neither my estate nor the neighbouring council estates had been mapped. So I concentrated on that are for the first few weeks. I also discovered some areas of Chatham (my brother lived there for a while) that were missing, so I started mapping those. Finally, as I sing with a choir that rehearses in Burgess Hill, Sussex, I checked that area out: I looked for the pub that we go to after rehearsals and found, not only was the pub not there, but neither was the road it's in or many streets round that area.
I've been using TomTom devices in-car for some years, but realized I needed a device that did track logs. I dug out an old Garmin GPS II+ that I'd originally used years ago (in conjunction with software on a Psion Organizer) for sat-nav capability, and started using that, but the LCD display had degraded so much that I couldn't do anything other than switch it on and off. Also, I wanted a unit that I could download OSM maps to for trips to Cyprus in particular (no TomTom maps available). So I now use a Garmin Nüvi, partly thanks to a 'hack' someone found that enables a track-log facility to be switched on, despite the lack of anything in the user interface to do this.
I was particularly chuffed to read a thread on GB-Talk where an experienced mapper spontaneously mentioned my work in Strood, describing it as 'very very good'.
So far I've worked entirely from my car, and I use just GPS tracking and paper to write down street-names on. (I know some people use cameras and/or voice recorders.) I try to note down any schools, and record their location as POIs on the Nüvi, but otherwise I don't collect many POIs: my focus is missing and unnamed streets. I use tools.geofabrik.de/mc to compare Mapnik against Google Maps in order to identify areas where streets are missing. Obviously, I map streets entirely from my GPS trace, but I do use Google print-outs to write down the street names as I'm driving around - saves having to draw the roads freehand. I use a zoom level at which street-names do not appear, and then blow it up to an A4 sheet.
Sdoerr 13:18, 16 March 2010 (UTC)