I often get requests about the growth and competitiveness of OpenStreetMap in regards to commercial maps. While OpenStreetMap excels especially when it comes to details, people want to see figures that are more comparable to the commercial maps – mainly navigatable road networks.

I came across some internal evaluations of the recent planet files and thought I just share those figures figures with. These statistics are Europe related and show the values separated for Western and Eastern Europe.

In general we can report a healthy growth over the last 9 months – despite the license change that caused some loss of data.

The drivable road network continues to grow in Western and Eastern Europe. While some countries like Germany have more or less reached 100% coverage of the driveable road network, others still have potential. In Eastern Europe I want to stress the growth of Turkey by 39% and Russia by 19%. In Western Europe we see Spain growing by 18% and France by 19%.

Turn restrictions show a strong growth – Eastern and Western Europe alike. Saturation has not been reached in any country –even Germany has grown by 34%.

The overall growth of road segments shows an uptake after the license change had been completed.

Overall we see stronger growth in Eastern Europe, which means the gap between Eastern and Western Europe is narrowing.

This is showing just an extract of available data but allows extrapolation with a good confidence level. If you have questions don’t hesitate to contact me.

Also as last year, there will be a ton of socializing and meeting and greeting with the local OSM community Friday night and Saturday night. 

And there are sponsorship opportunities!  Want to sponsor a core developer who could otherwise not participate?  Want to buy the coders dinner and a few drinks?  Let me know. 

OpenStreetMap has just passed 1 million users! That’s a million people who have signed up on openstreetmap.org to join in with creating a free map of the world.

At first glance you may think that OpenStreetMap is a map. Those who know more will tell you that it’s actually a database; a flexible editable repository of free geospatial data. But above all OpenStreetMap is a community. A massive community in which people like you and me come together collaborate and help build this thing… and now there’s a million of us!

A massive community is what makes OpenStreetMap work. We need many people to sign up, and we need those people in every neighbourhood, in every corner of the globe, to chip in a little bit using our editing tools. In this way we have grown and progressed spectacularly throughout 2012. This wonderful video illustrates what a great year of map editing activity we had.

Who will join the OpenStreetMap community in 2013?

What is the best song for your music player while you survey data for OpenStreetMap? Can you keep yourself entertained and inspired with a great playlist while you survey, or is the music too distracting? Are there songs that remind you of mapping? In past, some have suggested specific songs as anthems for mappers.

The following songs each have the words open, street, and map in them, though not in the string we prefer.

• Map of Tasmania – Amanda Palmer
• Soldier – Destiny’s Child
• Movies – Lil’ Boosie
• Home to Me – Jimmy Robbins
• My Crew – Jean Grae

Are there more songs with the words Open, Street, and Map in them?  Which songs or music would you suggest as a mapping anthem, or to inspire and motivate your surveys? Use the comments below to discuss. I’ll add some CanCon suggestions tomorrow.

Back in July I wrote about building a new, friendly map editor for OpenStreetMap in JavaScript. Since then, and in particular in the last two months, the project has come on in leaps and bounds – and today marks the first alpha release.

Codenamed iD, it aims to provide an easy-to-use, comfortable editing environment for the OpenStreetMap newcomer that’s nonetheless fully featured – you’ll be able to edit any OSM data with it. Clear modes such as “Move map” and “Add point” make it easy to get started without having to read swathes of instructions.

So – try it out! You can play with a working instance at geowiki.com/iD. It’s connected to a test database, not the main OpenStreetMap database, so don’t worry – you won’t break anything.

If you find a bug, use github to check it’s not already been reported, and file one if not.

The fast progress over the past few months is entirely down to the work of Tom MacWright and Saman Bemel Benrud, John Firebaugh, and others. Some of them have been funded to work on this by a Knight Foundation grant from the Knight News Challenge programme.

As ever with OpenStreetMap, the code is fully open source, and we’re looking forward to the community getting involved with helping to build the project. For the first time since OSM was founded in 2004, this will give us a full suite of editing tools – iD and mobile tools for new users, Potlatch 2 and Merkaartor for intermediate editing, and JOSM for power users – so that anyone can bring their local knowledge to the map, whatever their expertise.

Read more about the alpha release in Tom’s blog post.