The United Nations Foundation, the United Nations Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and others have recognized the
crucial role played by OpenStreetMap in relief efforts in Haiti and
elsewhere.

Quoting from the UN Foundation Disaster Relief 2.0 Fast Facts

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a community of approximately
150,000 mappers dedicated to building a free and open map of the
world. OSM mobilized more than 640 volunteers around the world, who
scanned and rectified old atlases and maps and traced Haitian roads,
bridges, and buildings into the OpenStreetMap geospatial wiki using
tools that only required a simple web browser and time. In the
process, this community turned a blank spot on the map into one of the
most accurately mapped countries in the world—creating a map far
better than any available to the UN. By mid-March, OpenStreetMap had
become the de facto source for Haiti map data within most UN agencies
and the EC Humanitarian Unit. MapAction credits OpenStreetMap with
providing an essential service and for building a street map of Haiti
from scratch in about two weeks, a project that should have taken
about a year.

April is food month. We’ll be tagging various portions of the food
supply system in and around our homes. We’ll look at Farmers’ Markets
for the full month; venues for many vendors of food directly from the
source. Through the month we’ll look at individual vendors of various
foods. As always, Project of the Week and Project of the Month exist
only to encourage your mapping. You don’t need to wait for a project
to add a cheese shop to the map! Unless, of course, you waited for
this week! This week, prepared foods.

Delicatessen, convenience stores and prepared food

Prepared foods occupy that middle ground between groceries and a
restaurant. Some delicatessens have seating and table service, and
might be correctly tagged as {{tag|amenity|restaurant}}. But the
stock in trade of the deli is prepared food. Cured meat, or potato
salad, or caviar, or herbed olive oil for inclusion in your family
meals. The convenience store might provide you with a pre-made
sandwich and a carton of milk, but table service is unlikely. So is a
chair. Recent studies have found that urban areas with financial
challenges often lack the markets and grocery stores from earlier in
this project of the month.

This week we look at those not-quite-restaurants that are not quite
food vendors. The prepared food vendors such as delis and convenience
stores are the focus of this Project of the Week. Let’s put our local delis and convenience stores and other prepared food vendors on the map.

This is your Project of the Month. Make suggestions. Inspire other
mappers. What is it about contributing to OpenStreetMap that
interests you? Postboxes? Bowing alleys? Share your OpenStreetMap
interests by suggesting a Project of the Week or Project of the Month.

Deli photo by Liz Henry is licensed CC-By-ND

OpenStreetMap data is used to generate 3-D terrain data for a flight
simulator. In the photo above, terrain for the X-Plane filght
simulator is generated by a program called osm3xp.

This is a Featured image, which means that it has been identified as
one of the best examples of OpenStreetMap mapping, or that it provides
a useful illustration of the OpenStreetMap project.

If you know another image of similar quality, you can nominate it on
Featured image proposals.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Featured_image_proposals

April is food month for Project of the Week / Month. We’ll be tagging
various portions of the food supply system in and around our homes.
We’ll look at marketplaces for the full month; venues for many vendors
where you can buy directly from the source. Through the month we’ll
look at individual vendors of various foods. As always, Project of the
Week and Project of the Month exist only to encourage your mapping.
You don’t need to wait for a project to add a cheese shop to the map!
Unless, of course, you waited for this week! This week, we address the
cheese shop and other specialty food ingredient shops.

This week we look at food vendors who offer specialty ingredients. The
butcher, baker, cheese monger, fish shop, and other specialty food
stores are the focus of this Project of the Week. Let’s put our favourite specialty ingredient vendors on the map.

This is your Project of the Week. Make suggestions. Inspire other
mappers. What is it about contributing to OpenStreetMap that
interests you? Postboxes? Bowing alleys? Share your OpenStreetMap
interests by suggesting a Project of the Week or Project of the Month.

Cheese photo by nikoretro is
licensed CC-By-SA

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnNyM41ZcYk?wmode=transparent]

We first told you about the Saransk Mapping Party last month when OpenStreetMap contributors showed us
an animation of the mapping event. A month later, they have created a
video that combines animation of the mapping party with various
renderings for various uses and photos of the ground truth. Enjoy the
video.

This is a Featured image, which means that it has been identified as
one of the best examples of OpenStreetMap mapping, or that it provides
a useful illustration related to the OpenStreetMap project.

If you know another image of similar quality, you can nominate it at

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Featured_image_proposals

OpenStreetMap contributor ungzd reports that what seems to be
OpenStreetMap, or at least Mapnik appears in a story on a Russian news program.

An automated translation to English suggests that building janitors
are offered a 33% salary increase in exchange for having their
location monitored during the work day.

You can see a map of London from OpenStreetMap in an episode of
K9. More details on the OpenStreetMap Foundation Blog.

It’s nice to see interesting projects using OpenStreetMap for
interesting things. Geocaching.com have a Beta map that allows
users to select OpenStreetMap mapnik tiles as one of many basemaps.
This is pretty cool. What’s even cooler is that we may be approaching
the point where OpenStreetMap and Geocaching start to make each other
noticeably better.

Geocaching and OpenStreetMap seem like a match made in a top of the
line GPSr. As a long time OpenStreetMap participant, it has always
seemed like a natural match. It seemed to me that Geocachers would
like OpenStreetMap. Why did it take me so long to try geocaching?
And what secret did I learn that Geocachers will want to know?

Learn the secret about OpenStreetMap that your Geocaching friends will want to know.