Piste map editor community

Hi

I’m trying to work out the best way to communicate with the community of people who map specifically the ski pistes and lifts.

I’ve made an free app called Ski Nav for iOS and Android (web demo* also available) that does point-to-point routing on piste maps shown from the angled 3D view like the familiar paper maps.

I don’t want to spam this forum with marketing if it’s not appropriate, but there must be a huge amount of contributors who I think would like to know about my app. (Though I’m ignorant about how OSMers generally consume map data other than via www.openstreemap.org and if they can easily get routing functionality.)

Is there a better way to reach this group than the Q&A section here?

Thanks

I would suggest writing a blog/diary post on openstreetmap.org.

Thanks @SimonPoole. Diaries were not not something I knew about so, great, I will do that.

It will still presumably miss the majority of ski-map-specific contributors though.

Any further suggestions I’m still listening.

I would think marketing where skiers and snow boarders are likely to be found will be more productive for you.

I took a quick look at your app and the nearest resort to me that you seem to have is Mammoth Mountain. From experience, it I think there are far more runs/pistes there than you show. I know there are other ski areas closer to me that are at least partially mapped in OSM because I mapped them. What is your criteria for having a map for a particular ski area?

And, from experience, I can use the ski/piste add-on for OsmAnd to navigate a ski area. So your app is not alone. But, OsmAnd is a ugly and complicated which leads me to believe there is a opening for a decent ski navigation app. Good luck.

The criteria was simply being on a list of resorts of a certain size. Most of the larger resorts are quite good from the automated processing of the raw OSM data, Whistler for example. I didn’t want to hide these resorts before I get time to check them manually (20-30 of the biggest resorts done so far), but the downside is showing incomplete ones like Mammoth Mountain (looking at the official map, are there no set trails?).

Didn’t know about OsmAnd and the ski add on so will check that out. Ta.

I’d echo the idea of writing an OSM diary entry (sort of blog post). If it is interesting with good content, it may get picked up the Weekly OSM news consolidation service which reaches a good part of the OSM community.

You can also create an OSM Wiki page with additional information. There is a process which picks up data about OSM-relevant software updates from the wiki (I’m not familiar with how it works) and these also get reported on Weekly OSM.

Great, thanks for these suggestions @SK53. I will be submitting this diary entry to weeklyOSM and will have a look into how referencing software from the Wiki works too. I must have visited the same couple of pages in the Wiki regarding the tagging of pistes and lifts hundreds of times so it makes sense people might catch links from there.