I hope everyone is enjoying their new year, so far.
I did a lot of work for last month's challenge, trying to fix some mistakes in Mahhal, mostly related to climate and population density. I started big, by moving Tárrases to a new, lower latitude at the northwest end of the Mahhalian Archipelago. This was a giant step, from a data standpoint, since the island is quite detailed. It required changing the coordinates on almost 400,000 nodes. Probably it was single largest edit ever on OGF. JOSM made it all go smoothly, however.
After that big start, I worked pretty consistently on trying to clean up various aspects of Mahhal to improve climate realism - rearranging coastlines, moving some towns, downgrading cities, updating wiki articles. Grading my own efforts, I'd give myself a "B." How did everyone else do on the challenge?
This month, for the new year, I'm going to return to something I tried before, but in a different way.
Luciano's Mapper's Challenge #10 - January, 2017 - Give and Take
Back in July, 2016, I gave a challenge to map something in a "blue" country. That actually didn't go so well, at least from my perspective, as it exposed some of the major issues we have with "blue" territories in general, especially Commonia. Those problems have still not been resolved.
However, recently I have been impressed with some innovations by other users in the area of trying to improve collaboration. PColumbus73 made a collaboration page for Drevet modelled on (but improving upon) the old collaboration page I'd made for Ardisphere. And Mstr made a page "offering mapping services". These are really great ideas. What I hope to achieve with this challenge is to encourage this, further.
The challenge is to collaborate somewhere, with someone. It could be in a purple country. It could be in someone's privately owned country, like a neighbor or someone you already know that you work well with. I've done this a number of times with various individual users.
I don't actually want to suggest collaborating in a "blue" country this time, to keep it different from the previous challenge, although if it's specifically working with another user, then a well-thought-out collaboration in a place like Gobrassanya could qualify.
Anyway, the main goal is to map something significant in a territory that isn't "yours," working with the person who controls that territory. Alternately, you can invite people to map in your territory, too. I may try something like this with Tárrases, where there is so much mapped, it would provide a fairly controlled environment for some interesting collaboration.
Enjoy your 2017 and happy mapping.