Partnerships Lightning Talk, Minh Nguyen – Transcription

Do you have speaker notes? I can go off without them. It’s okay. Okay. Hi, my name is Minh Nguyen. The other Nguyen here. And so I’m here to talk about San Jose, where I live. There’s a song about San Jose. I wonder if any of you have heard it? So for those of you who only know San Jose from the Dion Warwick song, it’s the tenth largest city in America, which is pretty big. It’s a pretty sprawling place. But it gets overshadowed by a smaller city to the north called San Francisco. And OSM is no exception. San Jose is in the shadow of San Francisco in terms of OSM participation. Both by local kind of craft mappers and also by entrepmappers and others. There are people in San Jose mapping in OpenStreetMap. I’m one of them. But for a long time we didn’t know who each other were. We didn’t coordinate. Didn’t see each other face to face And there weren’t meetups for an eightyear span from 2009 to 2017. The one in 2009 was introduced by Cloud Made. If you remember Cloud Made. So the lack of local coordination has meant that OSM’s quality, its coverage in the South Bay is uneven. So the most basic things, cleaning up the tiger import. That stuff actually happened quite early. And that’s in pretty good shape. And really as far as roads go, San Jose and South Bay are in good shape. Companies like my employer, Mapbox, are invested in making sure it’s suitable for turnbyturn navigation and routing and things like that. The roads are in good shape and so is the cycling infrastructure because of the tireless efforts of cycling enthusiasts that live in neighboring areas. But on the flipside, there are things quite lacking. So public transportation coverage in the South Bay and San Jose is almost nonexistent. That’s a stark contrast to neighboring counties, like San Francisco County. There’s also there are buildings being added, but it’s kind of at a plodding pace. So it’s not the kind of comprehensive building coverage you would expect from a large American city at this point. And in terms of points of interest, you know, if grow to some of the some of the touristy areas, you might find good coverage and points of interest, but there are still plenty of POI deserts. Especially in neighborhoods and so forth. I’m going to expand on that last point, points of interest, actually. I was curious how well we had points of interest covered. So I picked up a phone book and I took a look at the business white pages and the yellow pages for the 408 area code that contains San Jose. I’ll have a proper writeup about this online shortly. I wanted to present some of the of the takeaways from that. And the biggest one is OSM, compared to this admittedly imperfect other source has 23% as many name POIs. When you think about it, that’s not a lot, but when you think about who has been doing that. That’s with a community that’s fragmented and not really coordinating. In that 23%, we’ve mapped 94% as many restaurants and 78% of the places of worship. And when you dive down into the different categories that the yellow pages has, you get some interesting findings. So OSM does really well when it comes to retail, entertainment and motorist services. And apparently, we do well in terms of cannabis as well. The phone book doesn’t have any. [ Laughter ] On the other hand, we don’t do quite as well when it comes to professional services. Which you also kind of expect to see in a data set like OSM’s. So we like cannabis more than taxes, apparently. So looking ahead to the future, we benefit we’re benefiting now, more recently, from a partnership with Code for San Jose, the local Code for America brigade. They basically sought out the local mappers, got us together and recruited more people. We had our first mapathon since 2009, since Cloud Made. And we’re keeping up the momentum with monthly meetups. We are adding POI from Mapillary. Importing sidewalks, and if you have been following the discussions, we have definitely been adding sidewalks, but also committed to adding crosswalks to fill in the gaps. We’re in this for the long haul. We’re not going back to what we were before people sitting in chairs doing mapping and nothing else. If you are interested, we have a web page and we’re on Slack. Thank you. [ Applause ]