The most important news is that version 0.7.53 is now live on the dev.overpass-api.de and overpass-api.de server. The Rambler server will follow in the next days.

I will give details on this further below. Also below I will explain how an incident with Pokemon Go shaked my mindset about quota policies.

Before this I will present the number of the month: 74.9 percent. From 74.9 percent of the total IPv4 /24 subnets of the entire world I have observed requests in the logfiles. Amongst some random IP block owners from the logfile: General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Daimler, BMW, Volkswagen. Media Outlets: New York Times, Guardian, Der Spiegel. Further starring: SNCF, Deutsche Bahn, SBB, numerous universities and even ESRI. Of course also long lists of telephone carriers. Remember that Overpass API is a quite deeply buried and highly technical service. It is almost sure that the popularity for the combined tile servers is even higher. This matches very good with the observation that half of the public administration in Germany is figuring out how to get OpenStreetMap in their workflow.

Punchline: OpenStreetMap is by no means small. It is the de-facto standard for general purpose geodata. And if there are limits to the growth of OpenStreetMap in sight, then these are most likley the size of mankind.

This does not mean that the majority of mankind is using OpenStreetMap. Please do not forget that you cannot eat geodata. Or substitute drugs. Geodata is in important field, but not the core of the world or the internet. The statistics from above say that whoever is involved in geodata is almost surely aware of OpenStreetMap.

Hence “irrelevant” is an adjective quite entirely unrelated to OpenStreetMap. Blog posts stating otherwise are simply wrong. This need not be a willful misinformation, but it may be an observation from a very unusal environment somewhere in the last 25.1 percent of the IPv4 space. Hence there is no need to have some obscure and complicated extra documents called “CoC” or so just to please unknown people that might not exist at all. Let aside that there is few to no precedence that extra bureaucracy pleases people.

But back to Overpass API. During the weekend around October 1st I have seen a spike in load. Such a spike is most of the time some developer trying to offload undue amounts of requests on the Overpass API. In this case it turns out that the only client responsible for a load spike is (overpass-turbo.eu)[http://overpass-turbo.eu] - due to the highly technical nature of the tool this is more than unlikely.

It has taken some days until the search engines have delivered the evidence what was going on: overpass-turbo.eu has got credits from the remaining Pokemon Go community. Testing against that hypothesis, I found that people have accessed from 30’000 different IP adresses per each day of the weekend on Overpass API - roughly twice the normal. However, there is plenty of credit for OpenStreetMap. From the logs I can observe that a lot of users come from developing countries. And from my personal environment I know that more than half of Pokemon-Go-players are female. Actually I would call this as exactly what we like to achieve with outreach. Hence, neither blocking these users constituting the spike nor blocking overpass-turbo.eu altogether would be an option that makes sense.

So a second result of this weekend is that I should ask rather soon for more server capacity. The improvements by Mmd and me may help. But a second server at some point in 2017 would probably help to attract people. Maybe even people that do not yet have a relation to geodata.

Version 0.7.53 excels rather at having fewer bugs than at having new features. There are nonetheless some improvements: * [!key] can be used as shortcut for [key!~”.”] * the user statement accepts multiple users as a comma separated list

Version 0.7.54 is hopefully ready at the end of the year. I have already started to develop some features. Others have been sketched in my SotM talk (video tba). So please stay tuned. And in the meantime, please spread the message that OpenStreetMap is already the standard choice for general purpose geodata.