At the beginning of 2023 we announced OSMCha as a charter project of OpenStreetMap US. After almost 10 years of being generously hosted by Mapbox, OSMCha moved to a new home at the OpenStreetMap US. Going forward, OSMCha will run on infrastructure owned and operated by OSM US. We are excited about this new chapter for OSMCha and to work with community members and organizations to grow the project.
In the last few months, the Development Seed team has been working on modernizing the infrastructure code behind the OSMCha services, closely working with Mapbox. Since OSMCha’s original infrastructure was designed almost a decade ago, a migration was necessary.
The migration was successfully completed two weeks ago, and after a few days of minor adjustments with the infrastructure services, OSMCha is operating normally.
Another goal of this migration project was to reduce costs for running OSMCha in order to make it sustainable within the current OpenStreetMap US budget. The OSMCha database is substantial. It contains tens of millions of changesets, and we allow users to perform searches using various filter options. It is expensive to host a database of that size and provide excellent performance for the users.
The solution found to decrease the costs while continuing to provide a good user experience was to only allow seeing changesets from Jan 1st, 2023. The other changesets weren’t deleted, but we need more financial resources to be able to have a database that allows users to query a large amount of data.
We are grateful for the support provided by Mapbox throughout the years. Mapbox was the first company to believe in the OSMCha proposal, funded the initial development, and continued running the project, providing infrastructure and critical maintenance. Their support was crucial in making OSMCha a core tool used by the OpenStreetMap community every day. We are now seeking new partners to help us continue to develop and expand OSMCha. If you’d like to support OSMCha directly, contact the OpenStreetMap US team at admin@openstreetmap.us or donate.
