In 2023, OpenStreetMap will participate once more as a mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code, a program to bring new contributors into Open Source software development. Originally targeted at students, the program now also accepts people new to Open Source in general.

We particularly welcome potential participants who are already involved with OpenStreetMap. You ideally have done some mapping and had an opportunity to get to know the community. You have used some of the software around OpenStreetMap and would now like to get involved in its development.

With the support of an experienced mentor, you will, over the course of a few months, add features to one of the Open Source tools which power the OSM ecosystem. Your work will improve software used daily by the OSM community, and Google will provide you with an attractive stipend for the summer. You will find more information about the program in general on the Google Summer of Code 2023 website.

Because of OSM’s diverse software ecosystem, you can choose from projects involving a variety of tools, technologies and programming languages. OSM tools planning to participate this year include editing software such as iD or JOSM, routing software such as OSRM or Valhalla, and the Nominatim search engine.

Applications are open March 20 to April 4 – but please get in contact with your mentors early so you can use the chance to improve your application. Visit our GSoC 2023 wiki page to learn what we’re looking for and browse our project ideas.

→ Learn more about GSoC 2023 with OSM

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.

Are you good at graphic design? Like to sketch, draw, paint, or take photographs? Do you draw comics or have a graphic novel going in your free time? Do you have training in data visualization, typography, and color theory? Are you the person who doodles on the back of little pieces of paper when other people are talking?

The Communication Working Group needs you!

We’re looking to add more volunteers to the CWG who can help us add visual storytelling to the blog, social media, and other channels to support OSM events, fundraising, developer projects, and other projects.

Your time commitment could be as little as a few hours on one project, or as much as an hour or two a week on a sustained project or projects over the next few months–it’s your choice.

Send an email to the Communications Working Group with the subject line “Visual Storytelling Team” and let us know a bit about what your interest is, including any links to your work that you want to share. Once we get a sense of who is interested and what kind of skills are available, we will set up a project list and process for sharing requests.

Many more details to come!

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

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.

Mastodon logo used here under the GNU Affero General Public License

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.”

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.

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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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

OpenStreetMap has been breaking records in May – the record for the most daily mappers, the most newly registered mappers in a day, and the most newly active mappers have been broken numerous times. 

On May 12, a new record for daily mappers was set with 6,999, and then two days later, the record was beaten again with 7,209 mappers. There have also been records set for newly registered mappers, with 6,259 on May 14 as well as newly active mappers, 1,019 on the same day. You can see more trends from the OSM Stats site: http://osmstats.neis-one.org/?item=members

We were wondering if any of these numbers might be due to unusual activity of (e.g.) mappers who were normally mostly mapping during weekends and due to Covid-19 lockdown they now map during the week or due to increased organised editing in particular countries. For this reason, we contacted Pascal Neis and asked him whether he could provide some insight. Pascal was helpful, quickly researched the matter and provided his insights below (thanks!).

According to Pascal, the mentioned week in May had a high activity of members contributing in Peru, Botswana, Central African Republic and other countries. In particular, there was a high amount of newly registered members who started contributing to the Cusco region in Peru. It is also noticeable that the new mappers contributed mostly on weekdays.

Pascal also took a close look at relevant hashtags and found some useful information: In Peru (not all, but) a significant amount of contributors utilized the #mapimpacto hashtag. Global Active Learning (GAL) School Peru, which received a 2020 HOT microgrant, co-ordinated HOT tasks there. In Botswana several mappers used the #COVBots hashtag. Besides this, we found that in India there was an effort by Educate Girls.

Going back to the newly registered accounts, this growth has been happening for some time — OSM has been growing for years, with about 1.5 million total contributors and more than 6.5 million registered users as of May 30. You can see detailed stats over time here.

It’s great to see new mappers joining our community. If you haven’t mapped in a while, why not take a look at your neighborhood, somewhere you’re familiar with, or somewhere new. You can see some options and learn more at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org. Also have a look at our good practice guide. And if you want to learn more about mapping with OpenStreetMap as an organization, check out the Welcome Mat at https://welcome.openstreetmap.org and remember to add any organised activities on the OSM wiki, according to the OSM organised editing guidelines.

Happy mapping!

Andrew and other CWG members, with input from Pascal Neis

Do you want to translate this and other blogposts in another language..? Please send an email to communication@osmfoundation.org with subject: Helping with translations in [language]

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. It has no full-time employees and it is supporting the OpenStreetMap project through the work of our volunteer Working Groups. Please consider becoming a member of the Foundation.

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.