In February 2025, UN Mappers have adopted the #ValidationFriday campaign. As the name implies, the campaign is about focusing on verifying features mapped in our active projects every Friday. We communicate the #ValidationFriday call through our community channels (Discourse, Slack and social media) and through messaging our Validator's team via the HOT Tasking Manager.
For two weeks in a row, four (4) mapping projects has been completely mapped and validated by our volunteer validators. Huge shoutout to our top validators: Frans S and KingVik!
In 7 March, Friday, we hosted a #ValidationFriday Mappy Hour where we meet expert mappers and aspiring ones to share best practices, tips and tricks, and challenges when mapping and validating roads in OSM. During the session, we acknowledged how different it is to map roads in OSM as there are different tagging conventions depending on the region and place, and low resolution imagery. The validators gained alignment on which tags to use when mapping roads:
1. highway = unclassified
These are roads that link villages and small towns. It is important to zoom out and gain a broaded view of a road as some mapping projects' area may be smaller than the full extent of an unclassified road.
2. highway = track
These roads are used to to reach agricultural and forestry areas (including bushes and hedges),, and can be passable by cars and vehicles and often unpaved.
3. highway = path
These roads are non-motorized tracks or smaller and less passable by cars.
We also discussed about riverbeds which can be seasonally used by roads and shared opinions on how map and tag them.
It was initially scheduled for one hour, but the discussions were very engaging so we extended for about 15 more minutes. Moving forward, we plan to include a validators breakout room in our monthly Mappy Hour, and agreed to have another #ValidationFriday Mappy Hour on the first Friday of each month.