"OpenStreetMap for Parks and Parks for OpenStreetMap?" By: Dan Rademacher. >> We are currently having a USB readability problem. But if Chrome opens, I can just download. >> Please welcome Dan Rademacher. [Applause] >> Hi, everybody. So I'm Dan Rademacher, I'm here to talk about parks and OSM and I don't know somebody wave your hands if I put this mic too close to my mouth and deafen you. So I'm going to talk about -- oops. Wrong computer. I'm going to talk about why I'm up here. What's a park, what's in parks, and how can we map parks? What's in parks rather and some ideas where we might go from here. So why am I up here? I've been working at sort of the intersection of parks and open space and storytelling and data mostly as a journalist and less as a maps over the last 15 years. But a couple of years. During that time, I collaborated with folks at green network and Cali parks, we use the California parks protected database, I'll talk more about that later. And harvested photos from Instagram with a lot on how to do that. And also then pulled in trails and parks amenity data and there's parks and protected land in California managed by 1,000 agencies, so a lot of stuff. And the problem we ran into Marin county, some of the OSM trails were not authorized and particularly some of it they don't want on maps because they cause erosion into streams that are home for federally protected salmon. And in addition to liking salmon and having a lot of history with parks and wanting to work with park agencies, the project itself was also closely associated with a parks reform and sort of statewide parks revitalization effort. So we couldn't just say that's the way it is. We had to try to figure something out to deal with it. And we sort of were on our hands a little bit. We could have just gone in and fixed just a few trails, which is sort of what we ended up doing in the end. But we wanted to try to figure out something that would help further the discussion of social trails more generally. And so Seth and I journeying onto an open trail labs ended taupe hack-athon and started working on this problem, how do we compare official parks trails data to OSM data and, you know, in a day mostly thanks to I'm a project manager and executive director so thanks to mostly Seth and Jeremy, we came up with a quick digital F here where the pink lines OSM trails and yellow lines official trails innocent OSM and the white lines are both, and you can see an area where they differ a bit but the big pink lines were the main concern. And what we did after the hackathon have, we being really Stamen and me, we proposed a new tag that didn't go over so well, as some of you might have seen on various lists and this was my first action with OSM and inspired a little bit of press, more press than I merited, but it then did get noticed and particularly a phrase Cal I parks hits mute on unauthorized trails and that became the center of controversy. And it was -- I mean it's all fine, in my opinion, and, you know, the -- ultimately this social path tag doesn't a great idea perhaps and wasn't accepted. But it inspired for me conversations and this idea -- around the same time actually. I was just learning about Missing Maps and the idea of OSM as a central and shared store for public agency data as well as infrastructure data for greater good than -- not to say than just mapping the world. But anyway it started to connect the dots of me other ways that we could be trying to push for OpenStreetMaps used by public agencies and for public interest around parks. But it's not so easy I think to figure out how to bridge the culture differences between the OpenStreetMap community and between crowd so you went fundamentally democratic and sometimes chaotic effort and agencies who only manage and don't have a lot of staff. One land manager said this. It took me five years, but I found somebody at Google to talk to and they fixed their trails data. Just tell me who I can talk to at OSM. And I tried to talk while joining the community and this, and in some ways I had to say I wasn't really walking the talk of doing, encouraged me to put in for this talk, so hopefully this talk is part of walking the walk as well as talking the talk. And so now I'm running this organization Greeninfo network and on the side I also do this volunteer thing called, in other words, for nature. So Greeninfo network we're deeply meshed in boundaries data for parks and we manage the California protected areas database where parks are and work with small and medium-sized land in agencies that have very little almost zero technical capacity certainly when it comes to coding and interactive development and data management. And then, in other words, for nature is a place where we -- it's all volunteer, it's kept on a very sort of low burner so that we can experiment in kind of low stakes ways with new ways to gather data for parks. And so what's in a park -- well, what is a park is one of the first questions, and we can in the history of the protected areas databases is that we work on a Greeninfo really from the conservation and land -- well, land acquisition planning perspective, so they can get really arcane about what is a park. Although from a GIS or from a conservation acquisition planning perspective, what is a park in OSM is also arcane and really hard to understand. These are things that I pulled out as possible park-type things. And the protected areas database of the U.S., which I'll talk about a little bit more, and it has a more, to me, legible definition, but it's not necessarily any easier. So protected areas dedicated to the preservation of biodiversity recreation, cultural uses, and managed for these purposes. So -- and then PADUS which came out with a new version in the last month has 135,000 parks, preserves, and other areas I'm going to say 50,000 reservations of wilderness reservations and easements that are overlay restrict use for conservation. So certainly folks that I've talked to over this weekend who are working on collecting public lands boundaries using PADUS or at least starting with it is a great idea. And trust for public land has several million dollars in public funding to build out that dataset to a much smaller park level across the whole country over the next two and a half years. So we can map public lands in a very complete way with PADUS and increasingly complete way. And we can also, there's a system of state stewards is that for Washington -- I actually know her and these pages for each state will be live on a new version on a site called protected lands.net just as soon as USGS gives us the okay to publish it, which has been pending for about six weeks. So we have this sort of system of state stewards to help collect this data for each state across the country. And so this is coming out of the USGS gap program based in Boise, and we're working on trust republic land is working on it and a lot of other folks working on it. And there's some of the FGDC has agreed to use it but future recreation.gov is supposed to use it, the CDC is interested in it, and the question, though -- I mean all of those groups -- well, I shouldn't say that. It's hard to figure out how much those groups are particularly interested in getting that data into OpenStreetMap. And I've been questioning myself this weekend. Like, how important is it to have data in OpenStreetMap? You can't see it? It's hard to really verify it if you're not an expert or landowner, maybe it doesn't matter. But we certainly find that there's a lot of good uses that can be done with boundary data, whether it's happen at that time connectivity or parks equity mapping, and also I think just knowing that parks are the -- like regular people identify with parks, even if they don't particularly care where the boundaries are but trying to figure out how close her to a park if you don't know the extent of that park, it's hard to say. So I think there's a lot of good reasons to try to have good park boundaries in OpenStreetMap. And we did a quick map just showing for California how different is PADUS from OSM? So some of these gray areas here are public land that -- or lands marked as parks in OSM that as far as we know are not public land and these bright green areas are public land as far as we know but not in OSM. And this is down near L.A. in the southern valley have a lot of missing land. And I would say within cities -- well, within well mapped cities, you're going to have a lot missing but some of the lands. So there's definitely ways -- there's areas to improve public boundary -- park boundary data in the OpenStreetMap. And I originally said that PADUS to myself that park boundary are basically a solved problem because of PADUS. It's not true, though, and USGS provides a home for that and state stewards provide a structure for doing this on a nationwide level, and you can download it, and my slides will be on Greeninfo's blog, which I'm going to later. But they're only sort of solved. TPL is working through 2019 for funding for those. The data structure is really complicated. If you download it, you'll find -- you'll get a GDD or tons and tons of shape files with 14 different flavors that either do or don't include easements and protected areas and there's documentation for all of that but it's not simple, it's not easy. So I've been asking these -- myself these questions of can we get the boundaries into OSM? Should the boundaries into OSM? Should we publish them separately in OSM format or in some other format? So I would be super open to feedback on what's possible and feasible and desirable in all three of those areas as we work with USGS over the next several years to build this dataset out. That only gets us to boundaries. Like, what's in a park? So this purple is a boundary, and what's in a park is actually what people use and visit and can see and can verify. And I think that's really where OpenStreetMap can add so much to public lands mapping, some of them think they can map this stuff, but they don't have the resources to map it. They certainly don't have the resources to keep it up to date. And so how to bring these two threads together. And so I've been looking around and thinking about this, and it seems like there's people going big on this, particularly as we heard this weekend, I feel if I just wait long enough, some smart computer vision people will figure out how to extract all the park facilities I would ever want from remote data. There's other folks like trailhead labs who are working with agencies to publish their trails data in a standard format that's much more consumable than most trails formats. So to the extent that those spread, I think that's helpful. And then I did a little basically through, in other words, for nature, you know, most experimentation, easy stuff tried to photo survey a park in San Francisco. Can we make it really easy to go out and take a lot of photos of a lot of things in a park that the agency cares about? And this was really based on grassroots bioblitzes that we pioneer into nature to get naturalists to get as many observations of parks and animals in the parks as we can. Between us and the California academy of science, we've probably done about 30 of these and in two days, which is about five hours at a park, for example, we got about 3000 observations of 400 species of plants and animals. So how can we do similar things for photo surveying? And reflecting the talk earlier today about Georgia avenue and the youth photo mapping, sort of similar lessons we've learned in the process of biowoodsing, which is find a local partner who cares about the park we're in and we use the data in some way and has an ongoing interest with the park and connect us with people who know the park so we've done that over the last two or three years. And then for this one, basically we just had people taking pictures of benches, playground facilities, restrooms, curbs, ballads that might prevent access, and showed that to the folks who participated and then very quickly showed them the results and then entered those results into OSM and got a lot of improvements in that park. This is also the City of San Francisco is about to invest $12 million in. So they're able to use these photos -- in the museum world we show these voucher specimen minimums. This is a bench, yes, it has a back, it has a graffiti problem and it doesn't look like it's in good problem. So I can show that to the city and park advocates that they want to fight for particular types of improvements in parts of that park. So the photo survey method, I think it was really fun, it was easy, it was welcoming, there were easy ways to provide benefits both to OpenStreetMap and to the agency. Hard to scale 12,000 parks in California, not to mention the 35,000 or whatever I said. So that's my experience of OpenStreetMap over the last four or five years. And so my big questions are how can we continue to publish the particular areas database in the United States in ways that are easier to consume? Help get more information into the -- in public boundary data into OSM? And do some of these mapathons that are easier, more frequent, and benefit both agencies and OSM. Thanks. [Applause] Questions? >> Any questions for Dan? >> So back to your original comments about trails, did you ever come up with anything satisfactory in terms of tagging in foremost social trails? >> Yeah. I kind of skipped over that because I managed to garble my notes. But the resolution there was to -- I mean I think this was already probably somewhat common practice in many areas. Access equals no. I mean I would say we were -- the thing that I had found challenging is most of the agency partners that I talked to about this particular issue, including one I had to say I just can't do that project for you is they just want to delete the trails. They don't want them ever on any map. And so access equals no I would say is acceptable within the OSM community, and that's fine. I haven't really figured out how to make it accessible to the folks in some agencies who are particularly sensitive to this issue. >> So is there like a breakdown of what portion OSM is when you first talk and what percentage consider it support in their interest? >> That's a good question. Most of them I would say are aware of it ask a little wary. And mostly feel like it's another place that they need to worry that things are going wrong. And that they have to figure out the deal with it. And partly the photo survey thing giving that data to the city, it's a drop in the ocean. But trying to figure out some way to say okay. You get this and the map at the same time, trying to provide some directory -- I mean there's the philosophical benefits but trying to find some direct immediate benefit that they would get from that. >> I was going to say if it's a side trail if it's not on the map or map with no access, I don't know which way to turn. You know, they have to be on the map so people walking on it know where it is. >> Yeah. I agree with that. I think -- one thing I've wondered is if turn -- if a proliferation of turn by turn trail directions would particularly if they're OSM based would sort of turn the corner on land managers in OSM if people were not able to follow the directions in the field because it's not clear what they're supposed to do because a map doesn't reflect reality, then that maybe is a solution. I mean I think some of this is just frankly pure, like, culture of we own the land, we control it, and we're responsible for it, and we don't have the resources to put the signs up in the places that we're supposed to and can we just not have it on the map, and I can worry about the rest of my job. But I think there are lots of logical reasons to have that data available. There's firefighting, there's emergencies, we can make a lot of arguments, and then there's also the sort of general sort of fright. I mean, to me, I just want to -- if we can figure out big benefits to give to the agencies from OpenStreetMap data, that might get them over it, even though there were logical arguments to convince them otherwise. >> Question for you. It's not having somebody get lost on the trail like the lady did on the Appalachian trail. She was close to the trail, she got turned around, she got lost from her friend who knew where to go and there she is dead. So I would suggest perhaps putting points in and putting the information on the points virtually so that someone could download the information, go out on the trail, and when they get to a point, it would say, you know, turn left this way so many miles to what or turn right the other way, you know, so many miles to the next thing. I think that would protect them from the horrible publicity associated with their particular area. >> Yeah. I think I understand the point. I mean I think the flip side that we've heard about with unauthorized trails on maps is if someone walks on a unauthorized trail and dies, then who's responsible for that? And if they had stayed on the mark that maintain trails, maybe they started down -- you know, and it's -- a lot of this is, like, the map reflects problems in reality; right? And the problem in reality is especially when a social trail starts outlooking great. I mean I've had this experience myself where it was -- it looked like a perfect trail. Standard walking down it and within about half a mile, it became clear that it was a crazy super steep weird bootleg mountain bike trail with amazing jumps and stuff. And it was nuts. But at the beginning, it looks like as well maintained as every other trail. So how do you -- is the map the problem there or is the trail maintenance the problem? >> How did you collect your biodata? Do you have the software. >> I will happily do a commercial from the app which is housed in the California academy of sciences, and I've actually been thinking about it a lot this weekend as it has basically -- it's a science app developed out of the folks at UC Berkeley and eventually into the California academy of sciences. And I forget all their stats. But there's about two and a half, three million observations in that. And they have a pretty interesting and well-established data pipeline where you move your data up and with a photo -- if it has a photo, other people will try to ID it and as soon as two people ID it, it becomes research grade and feeds into what's called the mobile information facility, which is a global network of diversity there. So I can have all kinds of people in a park, half of them are taking pictures of blurry crows and half of them are taking pictures of all kinds of super cool stuff, and that works within the platform and the blurry crows just sort of sit there on their accounts -- and some days somebody does a study of crow and all of those blurry crows become useful. But anyway. That's how we do it. Thanks. >> Please thank Dan for his wonderful presentation. [Applause]