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Apply to be the OpenStreetMap Core Software Engineer

OpenStreetMap powers maps and services used by millions of people around the world every day. To better support the community that makes this possible, the OpenStreetMap Foundation is seeking a dedicated mid- to senior-level software engineer with a passion for open data, collaborative software, and digital commons.

The ideal candidate is proficient in modern Web development (frontend and backend), experienced with open source collaboration, and comfortable working in public repositories with community feedback.

Your main responsibilities will focus on the openstreetmap.org website and its underlying API-a critical part of the infrastructure powering a global mapping movement. Your work will directly support an ecosystem of tools used by tens of thousands of contributors monthly, producing map data relied upon by millions worldwide.

You will collaborate closely with the OSMF’s Core Software Development Facilitator (CSDF). This position is made possible through funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund.
We strongly encourage applications from individuals of all backgrounds, especially those underrepresented in open source and geospatial communities.

Scope of work

The engineer will primarily contribute to the openstreetmap-website, with responsibilities divided into the following two categories:

Core Responsibilities

Analyze and understand the existing architecture and codebase of openstreetmap-website
Collaborate with the CSDF and project maintainers to define and prioritize development goals
Design and implement features that enhance the platform and empower community contributions
Triage and resolve issues reported by users and review incoming pull requests
Over time, the engineer may assume responsibility for deeper infrastructural areas and contribute to the long-term maintainability of the platform.

Collaboration & Communication

Maintain open and frequent communication with the CSDF and project maintainers through GitHub, mailing lists, and real-time chat
Participate in public discussions, support issue triage, and assist in release planning
Help document development workflows, decisions, and architecture changes

Profile

Required Qualifications

Proficiency with Ruby on Rails
At least 3 years of professional Web development or related software engineering experience
Experience working with large-scale, production-ready codebases (OpenStreetMap serves as much as 13 TB of data, growing all the time)
Experience collaborating in open source projects, working in public repositories, and engaging with contributors
Willingness to learn and use technologies in the stack as needed (e.g., JavaScript, SQL)

Preferred Qualifications

Previous contributions to OpenStreetMap (as a mapper or developer)
Enthusiasm for engaging with users of open source tools and platforms
Strong technical communication skills, especially in asynchronous, text-based environments (GitHub, chat)
Have previous experience with geospatial software and/or data

Contracting structure

Location: Remote (global)

This freelance/contractor position is available immediately, at approximately 80% time. It is funded through the end of 2026 by the Sovereign Tech Fund. Continuation will be evaluated based on impact and future funding availability.

The person will work from their premises and set their own schedule. However, your working hours will need to overlap at least minimally with those of the CSDF, who is based in the UTC–7/8 time zone. As the OSMF is a global organisation, working with people in different time zones and handling related scheduling constraints is expected. Communication will be in English.

To apply for this position, please send your CV with a cover letter to the OSMF Personnel Committee at pc@osmfoundation.org.

We look forward to hearing from you!

The Days are Long but the Years are Short

OpenStreetMap at 20

by Steve Coast

This essay is re-posted with permission from Steve Coast’s Substack.

Two decades ago, I knew that a wiki map of the world would work. It seemed obvious in light of the success of Wikipedia and Linux. But I didn’t know that OpenStreetMap would work until much later.

I was showing someone new to OSM how to add data to the map. I would ask for a place they knew well, zoom in to that area and then find something to fix. The key was to get a quick win by showing the map before and after they had made it better. Get a little shot of dopamine for making the world a slightly better place.

This person asked to look at Cuba.

This presented a challenge, and I had to manage expectations. OpenStreetMap at the time had okay maps of major Western countries but my expectation, as I explained to them, was that Cuba would be a blank empty slate.

Cuba was doubly tricky not just because of economic factors that limit peoples free time and ability to contribute to open projects, but also the internet was (effectively if not actually) banned and computers illegal.

Zooming in to Cuba that day was the last time I was surprised by OSM, and when I stopped worrying about it working as a project: Cuba had roads, parks, hospitals and everything else imaginable already mapped.

OpenStreetMap has grown exponentially or quadratically over the last twenty years depending on the metric you’re interested in. My involvement has waxed and waned like soul mates oscillating between rapture and, inevitably, wanting the best for each other in our post-relationship new lives.

The story isn’t so much about the data and technology, and it never was. It’s the people.

Like John Boyd said, it’s the people then the ideas and then the technology. Not the other way around.

People: The people that wanted to map just weren’t in the existing camps by definition. They largely didn’t work in geography at all. They just wanted a way to make a map better. Governments, universities and companies had lists of reasons why public mapping wasn’t possible, but no actual solution.

Ideas: Allowing volunteers to edit a map in 2004 was simply anathema and bordering on unthinkable. Map data was supposed to be controlled, authorized and carefully managed by a priesthood of managers.

Technology: For those not in the industry, you might not know that OSM essentially did the opposite of what academic and the leading technology platforms at the time advocated. It needed a data model designed for volunteers not paid editors. So, we did tags not ontologies, and nodes and ways, not web feature service.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. – Isaac Newton

OpenStreetMap managed to map the world and give the data away for free for almost no money at all. It managed to sidestep almost all the problems that Wikipedia has by virtue of only representing facts not opinions.

The project itself is remarkable. And it’s wonderful that so many are in love with it.

For me though, I’m far more fascinated with what are the other pebbles on the beach. What else can we make for almost no money that will radically change the world for the better?

If OpenStreetMap is a medium, what is the message?

For me it’s that we can go from nothing to something, or zero to one. Many of us love critiquing something that exists or maybe even improving it. But, my boyish naiveté was assuming that there were lots of other people out there also trying to build new things. Tautologically this simply can’t be true, for if everyone was making new things for any period of time we’d be much further along the various technological curves.

What stops us from doing new things? There seems to be a million reasons and two opposing forces keeping us in inaction: fear and vanity.

Fear of actually building something and showing it to people will push you from one side, and vainly falling in love with the idea itself will pull you the other way. These forces will perfectly balance like the tides. You’ll be stuck in the gravity well of some dead Lagrange point neither executing on the idea nor killing it.

Not everyone has ideas, but if you do, I encourage you to go do the thing.

When you do the thing, most likely you’ll have to kill it. New things tend to not work, or you have to change them drastically. OpenStreetMap’s first four or so major versions were all radically different from each other and relied on feedback from the world to make them into something that would work.

Killing the new things means you have to try many of them. This, too, is reflected in OSM, where I actually started about ten ideas at the time. OSM took off. One was taken over. The rest were strangled to death by reality meeting vanity.

So, celebrate all that we have achieved. It’s been amazing.

And then please turn the wheel and look to windward and consider how to kill it, by making something new or better.

–> Read this post at “Steve Coast’s Musings”

–> Sign OpenStreetMap’s 20th Birthday Card

–> Support or Join OpenStreetMap

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation, formed to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project, is financially supported by membership fees and donations, and organises the annual, international State of the Map conference. Our volunteer Working Groups and small core staff work to support the OpenStreetMap project. Join the OpenStreetMap Foundation for just £15 a year or for free if you are an active OpenStreetMap contributor.

A progress update on vector tiles from the Engineering Working Group

The OpenStreetMap Foundation’s Engineering Working Group has an update on the effort to create vector tiles for openstreetmap.org. Read on for why this work is important, what’s been done so far and how they are incorporating community feedback, and the technical details for those who want to know more.

The background

Currently, the openstreetmap.org website serves raster tiles, which are image tiles made up of pixels — think a downloaded image of part of a map. But the effort has begun to create vector tiles for the site, which will help improve how the map looks and how it works. You can read more about the background of the project here.

Vector tiles serve up maps as vectors: points, lines and polygons. They store geographic data (like what makes up OpenStreetMap) in a format that allows for dynamic styling and interactivity. For users, vector tiles will mean a new, modern-looking map style with seamless zoom on openstreetmap.org, the map can be updated more quickly when data changes, and it should perform better for users.

Looking further ahead, the most exciting part is what this vector tile project will make easy for volunteers and tile users: 3D maps, more efficient data mixing and matching and integration of other datasets, thematic styles, multilingual maps, different views for administrative boundaries, interactive points of interest, more accessible maps for vision-impaired users, and surely many other ideas that no one has come up with yet. You may recall that many of these have been long-term interests for people in the OSM community.

The plan

The goal of vector tiles project is to provide a vector tiles setup that can work for openstreetmap.org — that is, a worldwide, complex basemap site in heavy demand from users and services around the world, where the data underlying the map changes all the time.

Or to put it technically, to create a setup for a worldwide complex basemap under high load which requires minutely updates.

Paul Norman is leading the vector tiles project.

He is working on adding to his Tilekiln project which generates vector tiles from a PostgreSQL database (like OpenStreetMap’s), making use of the Shortbread schema, which is a data format for how to name layers & properties within a vector tile, and improving Themepark, which allows one to add OSM data to a Postgres database.

The work is split up into three steps:

1. First round of Tilekiln improvements and Shortbread Themepark improvements

2. Parallelism improvements

3. Shortbread publicly available in production

The first two steps are nearly done. Tilekiln now generates tiles in parallel, making it practical to generate tiles for the entire world. The next step is to start the deployment into OSMF hardware to prepare for production.

Technical details on step 1

For those interested in the technical details of what’s being worked on, there are five main components of the first step above.

1. Automated packaging of Tilekiln

2. Tilekiln metrics being published with a Prometheus exporter

3. Themepark Shortbread reviewed

4. A demo server running with minutely updates of Shortbread tiles, rendering tiles on-demand

5. Demo shown to community

Items 1 and 2 are complete without need of further discussion. For item 3, Paul found that the osm2pgsql Themepark Shortbread implementation needed more work than anticipated as it was missing a layer and had some issues.

Item 4 and 5 are complete. Paul’s demo server is running with minutely updates and the hardware requirements are more modest than expected.

The community has also been providing useful feedback, such as on Paul’s OSM Community Forum post.

The community offered a lot of suggestions, some of which have already been incorporated. The remaining, in-scope issues from the community are: Curved lines rendering as jagged and vector tiles being too large.

The jagged lines issue is due to how smooth curves are represented in vector tiles. It has mostly been addressed but similar issues are expected to crop up in the future. A target scale equivalent to the minimum scale of the standard tile layer has been set. Zooming in to an even lower scale is possible, but artifacts may start to appear.

Vector tile size will continue to be an issue that needs continual work, but the current tiles are particularly large. Since this part of the testing some changes have been made that cut the size in half. Tile size optimization will be an issue that needs ongoing work, as tile size is the biggest factor in user experience.

The tiles being produced are usable, but more work remains to be done. Now that the parallelism work is complete it’s possible to generate large sets of tiles in order to test, so Paul will be returning to working on the tile definitions to improve tile size and fix some remaining issues, but the current tiles are usable.

Background on the tools being used

Here is some information on the various tools used for this project.

Tilekiln is software written by Paul Norman for generating vector tiles from a PostgreSQL database. Alternatives are martin (or maybe t_rex). Tilekiln is in new development, although it uses a lot of standard PostgreSQL features to generate the vector tile data. Most OSM based maps (incl. osm-carto on osm.org) are generated from SQL database queries from a PostgreSQL database. Tilekiln generates vector tiles from similar queries. Tilekiln is new.

Themepark is part of the osm2pgsql suite of tools, to allow one to add OSM data to postgres, and share those processing steps between other projects. Many PostgreSQL based OSM map styles (like osm-carto) use osm2pgsql

osm2pgsql has been around for 15+ years in OSM, and is used in many many places. Although Paul has contributed code to it, he is not the main developer. osm2pgsql has gotten more advanced, and better, in the last few years. Part of the power is pre-processing the data, and Themepark is an attempt to make these pre-processing steps easier.

Shortbread is a “vector tile schema” created by Geofabrik. It’s a data format for how to name layers & properties within a vector tile.

This blog posts contains contributions from Adam Hoyle, Mikel Maron, Amanda McCann, Paul Norman, and Andrew Wiseman

Mappers, Universities, Companies, and nonprofits Contributed Over £373,000 to Support OSM in 2023

Last year, the global OpenStreetMap community, together with OSM’s corporate members and partners, donated an astounding £373,000 to support the map.

In an extraordinary show of support for OSM’s 19th birthday, the mapping community contributed over £113,000 through small donations. This enthusiastic broad base of community support resulted in approximately 3,089 donations from all over the world averaging £36 each. The OSM fundraising committee is especially grateful for the social media shares and the kind and encouraging comments on supporting.openstreetmap.com, in addition to the gifts. The positive response to the birthday fundraising campaign was a highlight of the year. Thank you!

OSM’s corporate partners also played a pivotal role, with total corporate memberships reaching £201,074. Additional, generous gifts, above and beyond corporate membership fees, from Microsoft, NextGIS, Smoca, and Elasticsearch helped bring us to the £373,000 total. We are also grateful to the corporate Advisory Board for their advice and collaboration which has been essential to the success of our partnerships.Thank you!

A special note of thanks goes out to NextGIS, which has pledged 10% of its profits from data sales to OSM, setting an impressive standard for its commitment to the project.

In an extraordinary show of support for OSM’s 19th birthday, the mapping community contributed over £113,000 through small donations. This enthusiastic broad base of community support resulted in approximately 3,089 donations from all over the world, averaging £36 each.

OSM is fortunate to be the recipient of mission critical, “in kind” support through donations hardware and other infrastructure. We are grateful to Fastly, who provide the content delivery network for the file service, and many others, including TomTom, Bytemark, AWS and University College London, as well as AARNet, AWS,Academic Computer Club, Umeå University, Appliwave, Bytemark, Equinix Amsterdam, Equinix Dublin, Exonetric, INX-ZA, NetAlerts, OSUOSL, OVH, and Scaleway and everyone else who contributes to OpenStreetMap.

We’d also like to add a special note of thanks to Kevin Bushaw, who gave us a steep discount on our new website, supporting.openstreetmap.org.

The funds raised in 2023 will go toward enhancing infrastructure, supporting our critical support staff including our SSRE, and helping build OSM into the future.

On behalf of OSM’s local communities, the OSMF board would like to thank the companies who sponsored SotMs in 2023, both regional and local. This kind of support is very important to local communities, because the OSMF itself cannot promise companies that their funding goes towards regional events, except where the money is earmarked as part of a Sponsorship Distribution Agreement. Companies who directly support regional events are making a positive difference for the community and the quality of the map.

Lastly, we want to point out that any generosity toward OpenStreetMap is generosity to the broader open source software and data community, not just the OSM project. The impact of your gifts extends far beyond the financial; it is a commitment to a world where open data serves as a cornerstone for creativity, problem-solving, and community building.

Thank you for supporting OpenStreetMap!

Nominate yourself for the OSM Foundation Board Elections by October 22!

Here’s an opportunity to get involved in the OpenStreetMap Foundation, the nonprofit that supports the OSM project!

The OpenStreetMap Foundation Board elections are coming up in December, and there are three seats that will be open. If you’re interested in running, the deadline to nominate yourself is coming up, October 22, 2022 at 23:59 UTC.

About the OpenStreetMap Foundation Board of Directors

The seven-person Board of Directors works on OSM Foundation matters on a volunteer (unpaid) basis and is elected by the OSM Foundation membership.

The board meets regularly to work on administrative, policy, and fundraising issues, to vote on resolutions and to support the OSMF Working Groups, which are also composed of volunteers. The Working Groups are always looking for help too!

For the December election, the terms of Board members Eugene Alvin Villar, Jean-Marc Liotier and Tobias Knerr are expiring, so their seats will be available. (They also may choose to run again.)

If you’re interested in running yourself, or know someone who might be, there is more information about nominations and the elections here. You can nominate yourself!

Board members serve two year terms and may be reelected a few times, with a term limit of three terms in the last eight elections. (You can get more information about board term limits in sections 33 and 34 of the OSMF Articles of Association. The Articles of Association are the rules and guidelines of the OSM Foundation.)

The Board elections start December 3rd and close December 10th. You can see more key dates here.

Monthly board meetings are open to OSMF members to observe or ask questions. You can find minutes of past meetings here.

Why you should run for the Board

We always need board candidates! Consider it yourself or ask someone else who you think might be good for the next OSMF board election, which will take place on the 10th of December, 2022!

Why run for the board? Below you can read the personal views of current and past board members:

What we need from the OSMF Board elections by board member Mikel Maron (2022)

Why run for the board – opinions of the 2021 board members mentioned during a board meeting (2021-08)

Joost Schouppe – past board member (2019-10)

Frederik Ramm – past board member (2019-11, see also previous 2017 post)

Heather Leson – past board member (2019-11)

(Please note that in order to run, you need to be a Normal OSMF member 28 days before the election, not an Associate one, and you must have been a member during the full 180 days before the election.)

If you’re not already a member of the Foundation, it’s a great way to support the OpenStreetMap project, voice your opinions and also become eligible to vote in Board elections. You can learn how to join the OSMF here, which can be free if you are an active contributor to OSM.

Note: translations for this post are to come.

About OpenStreetMap

Open Social Media at OpenStreetMap

The OSMF is pleased to financially support the en.osm.town OpenStreetMap Mastodon (or “Mapstodon”) service.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation has had a Free & Open Source Software Policy, and a committement to open communication channels. We exist to support the OpenStreetMap project.

Mastodon (aka “The Fediverse”) is a distributed social media network, based on the ActivityPub internet standard. It’s been featured on the New York Times, Vice and Wired. Think of Twitter, but based on open internet protocols, and allowing each community to define its own rules and build its own local community. The Fediverse has a reputation of being nicer and more respectiful than some of the more combative social media spaces.

The en.osm.town ~~Mastodon~~ Mapstodon instance was set up in July 2018 and has been steadily used by hundreds of OSMers over the years. Since the start, we’ve been using the excellent service from Masto.host to host this little corner of the fediverse. Some of the Mapstodon users have been spreading flyers at in person State of the Map conferences. Since this little community has been constantly active and helping each other, the OSMF decided to step up and help support this, and fund it directly.

Our own FOSS Policy Special Committee, and Communication Working Group had recommended this action.

The server was founded & administred by @amapanda@en.osm.town, with moderation from others. (Although Amanda is on the OSMF Board, this is separate from the Board). While the OSMF is funding this project, there will be no change to the moderation & administration of the server. The OSMF “supports, but does not control” OpenStreetMap.

If you want an easy way to mirror your posts to Mastodon, you can use a “Cross Poster” like the Mastodon-Twitter Crossposter or Moa.party. Many OpenStreetMap twitter accounts have set up cross posters, such as State of the Map, twitter @sotm is @sotm@en.osm.town, or the main OpenStreetMap Twitter account (@openstreetmap) is @openstreetmap@en.osm.town

So, sign up, get your pineapple, start tooting and boosting, and have fun! 🙂

Create a mastodon account on the instance
Follow @openstreetmap@en.osm.town, or @sotm@en.osm.town for our global State of the Map conference.
See what’s happening on en.osm.town right now (The “Public Timeline”)
Check out the #OpenStreetMap hashtag on the global fediverse
Read more about Mastodon on the OpenStreetMap wiki
Get a Mastodon mobile app
A more detailed Guide to Mastodon
Get an OpenStreetMap Mastodon flyer
Previously on blog.osm.org

OSMF and OpenCage – Joint press release

OpenCage is a silver level corporate member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, entitling them to this joint press release. If your organisation would like to support the OSMF more, please consider joining the OSMF as a corporate member, or read about other ways to give back.

Geocoding is the process of converting between addresses or placenames and geographic coordinates (longitude and latitude). Geocoding is a core geospatial functionality; an underlying building block that is critical to developing location based services.

OpenStreetMap Foundation corporate member OpenCage operates a highly-available, enterprise level geocoding API based on OpenStreetMap. We’re pleased to announce that OpenCage recently increased their commitment to the OpenStreetMap Foundation by upgrading to silver level corporate membership.

“For years our service has built on OpenStreetMap. We’re delighted to increase our ongoing support of the worldwide OSM community by increasing our level of commitment to the OpenStreetMap Foundation.” said Ed Freyfogle, OpenCage co-founder.

“It’s a nice milestone that the business has grown to the point that we could upgrade from Bronze to Silver. But beyond financial support the main work we do is opening the eyes of our customers – most of whom arrive knowing simply that they need geocoding, and without a detailed understanding of open data – to open data’s many benefits. Our customers around the world are proof that OpenStreetMap is commercially usable not in some distant theoretical future, but today” continued Freyfogle.

An example of that type of educational work is OpenCage’s recently published Reverse Geocoding Guide, which details the technical challenges of ongoing operation of a reverse geocoding service, while also documenting the advantages of using open data as the underlying data foundation for such a service.

OpenCage offers open source SDKs for accessing their geocoding API for over 30 different programming languages.

In addition to being corporate members of the OSMF, OpenCage are proud members of the UK (the business was started in the UK) and German (the business is currently based in Germany) local chapters, co-sponsor and contribute to the open source development of Nominatim (the primary OpenStreetMap geocoding software), and regularly sponsor OpenStreetMap events.

OpenCage also encourages geoinnovation by running Geomob, a regular series of in-person and online events with the goal of promoting geoinnovation in any and all forms – whether for “fun or profit”, as the event tagline says. Now in its thirteenth year, Geomob has become an established feature of the European geo event landscape, and regularly features projects using OpenStreetMap.

Early in 2020 the Geomob podcast was launched. The weekly conversations provide a chance to reflect on geo industry trends, discuss interesting new geo technology, and interview Geomob speakers. Podcast guests have included many members of the OpenStreetMap community, including Allan Mustard (chairperson of the OSMF Board), Tyler Radford (executive director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team), Sarah Hoffmann (maintainer of the geocoding tool Nominatim, which powers search on osm.org), several founders of businesses building on top of OpenStreetMap, and many more.

What is OpenStreetMap?

OpenStreetMap was founded in 2004 and is a international project to create a free map of the world. To do so, we, thousands of volunteers, collect data about roads, railways, rivers, forests, buildings and a lot more worldwide. Our map data can be downloaded for free by everyone and used for any purpose – including commercial usage. It is possible to produce your own maps which highlight certain features, to calculate routes etc. OpenStreetMap is increasingly used when one needs maps which can be very quickly, or easily, updated.

What is the OpenStreetMapFoundation?

The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation, formed to support the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data for anyone to use and share. The OpenStreetMap Foundation owns and maintains the infrastructure of the OpenStreetMap project, is financially supported by membership fees and donations, and organises the annual, international State of the Map conference. The OSMF supports the OpenStreetMap project through the work of our volunteer Working Groups. Please consider becoming a member of the Foundation.

OSMF and Cesium joint press release: OpenStreetMap, a map of buildings!

Note: Cesium is a silver level corporate member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, entitling them to this joint press release. If your organisation would like to support the OSMF more, please considering joining the OSMF as a corporate member, or read about other ways to give back.

Despite our project having “Street” in the name, there are 4 times as many buildings in OpenStreetMap as roads!

The newly released Cesium OSM Buildings from one of our newest corporate members Cesium is a global 3D building layer of more than 350 million 3D buildings derived entirely from OpenStreetMap. Cesium OSM Buildings is served as 3D Tiles, an open standard format for streaming 3D datasets, originally developed by Cesium.

“OpenStreetMap has amazing 3D building data in cities around the world. It’s a testament to the skill and hard work of mappers in this community,” said Mikel Maron of the OpenStreetMap Foundation Board. “We appreciate Cesium’s support and advocacy of the project as a corporate member, and by adding OpenStreetMap data to their platform, they further advance our mission to ensure that OSM data is as widely used as possible.”

*OpenStreetMap means rich metadata in most cities, like building name, address, and opening hours.* *Image © Cesium.*

Cesium, which began as a project at an aerospace software company, has been maintaining its open-source virtual globe, CesiumJS, since 2011. CesiumJS recently surpassed 1 million downloads and its developer community has built thousands of applications in dozens of industries.

Cesium’s offering joins a vibrant community of projects which make use of building data from OSM. The OSM Buildings project is a free and open source web viewer for 3D buildings based on OSM. Open 3D rendering software based on OSM also exists for Blender, and in many other projects. OpenBuildingMap is a building focused window to OpenStreetMap, providing a filtered subset of OSM data with just the building data.

There are many tools for adding building data to OSM, from the popular building_tools and Kendzi3D plugins for JOSM, to StreetComplete, which helps our large contributing community survey building details. You can also read how buildings are mapped (“tagged”) in OSM. Our annual conference (State of the Map 2020), had a presentation on “Buildings are the new streets”.

OpenStreetMap – more than buildings
OpenStreetMap is a international project to create a free map of the world. To do so, we, thousands of volunteers, collect data about roads, railways, rivers, forests, playgrounds, benches, fire hydrants and a lot more worldwide. Our map data can be downloaded for free by everyone and used for any purpose – including commercial usage. It is possible to produce your own maps which highlight certain features, to calculate routes etc. OpenStreetMap is increasingly used when one needs maps which can be very quickly, or easily, updated.

Thank you, OpenStreetMap sysadmins!

*Image by D.Kazazi*, *CC-BY-SA 3.0*, *trademarks apply*.

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day and we would like to thank our sysadmins for the awesome work that they are doing! 🙂

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Providing data to OpenStreetMap – a new guide for data owners

As more and more maps are built on OpenStreetMap data, OSM is becoming the most compelling way for public organisations and other data owners to get their information out to the greatest number of people.

Two local councils in the UK, Oxfordshire County Council and Buckinghamshire Council, were recently funded by the Open Data Institute to investigate using and contributing to crowdsourced open map data – like OSM.

As part of this, I worked with the two councils to draw up a straightforward how-to guide for other organisations that want to contribute their data to OSM. The guide covers all the prerequisites – working with the community, compatible licensing, and ongoing maintenance – as well as explaining the different approaches for integrating data, and discussing which approach will be most suitable in each context. It covers the issues most frequently raised by data owners over the lifetime of OSM so far, and shows where to find more help if you need it.

I hope it will serve as a useful reference for the many organisations who express an interest in working with OpenStreetMap, and encourage more successful schemes in the future. Many thanks to the ODI and both councils for their support!

Richard Fairhurst

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