How do you use OpenStreetMap to understand and improve your world? Tell your story however it makes sense to you, whether that’s a flyer, digital zine, website, or ArcGIS StoryMap! There are four themes to guide your storytelling: Mapping for Mobility, Open Data for Healthier Ecosystems, Open Data for Resiliency, and Mapping for Your Community. The competition website has many more details about eligibility, resources to help you get started, and other useful information. Celebrate the diverse applications for crowdsourced and open geographic data with us!

A Few Important Details

• To participate in the Narrative Map Competition, you are not required to attend State of the Map US 2026. However, you may opt in to attend in person via the competition registration form and present your entry during the SOTMUS Poster Session. If you do wish to join the conference in person, you may register for SOTMUS at a discounted speaker rate. All submitted entries will be displayed at the conference.

• You can use any digital medium to tell a story with OpenStreetMap data. This can include creating a webpage, a flyer on Canva, or a slide deck using your preferred office suite. If you’d like to create an ArcGIS StoryMap, competition registrants can use Esri services for free through the duration of the competition.

• We want to see how you use OpenStreetMap data to make sense of your community, its built environment, resilience, or natural resources. When you use OSM, be sure to attribute the data properly!

Timeline

April 1, 2026: Registration opens

May 15, 2026: Registration closes

June 1, 2026: Deadline for submissions

June 12, 2026: Winners announced at State of the Map US

Visit the official competition website to learn more and register by May 15!

Esri is an Organizational Member of OpenStreetMap US at the Strategic Level, and a sponsor of State of the Map US 2026 at the Diamond Tier.

In March 2024, stakeholders across the sidewalk mapping community began meeting regularly to start building a set of shared priorities for future mapping and data collection efforts in the United States. The Pedestrian Working Group (PWG) includes representatives from academia, state and federal government, the nonprofit and private sectors, and plenty of individual volunteers. While the PWG is focused on mapping in the United States and the majority of members are based here, we’ve also been joined by mappers from across the globe.

This schema is a collection of pedestrian infrastructure mapping best practices and tagging norms currently in use in the United States, organized in four tiers aligned with different accessibility needs, navigation abilities, and source data quality. The tiers (bronze, silver, gold, and diamond) target levels of data usefulness that can be achieved incrementally. This allows for straightforward analysis of the current state of a region’s sidewalk data, or for local communities to set concrete goals and milestones in their mapping campaigns. The schema encompasses the built environment that pedestrians rely on as markers of safety, permission, and accessibility: sidewalks, crossings, and their related signals and buttons, tactile paving markers, curbs, traffic islands, and access aisles primarily. There is a corresponding PWG Sidewalk Mapping Guide, providing a more digestible overview for new sidewalk mappers.

This schema is not doctrine, nor is it definitive documentation of how the global OpenStreetMap community should map sidewalks. It is informed by the experiences of volunteer mappers and pedestrians primarily in the United States, where the overwhelming popularity of personal vehicles has led to systemic disinvestment in pedestrian infrastructure across many regions of the country.

In the past few months, we’ve seen multiple tools, programs, and presets designed to interact with the Pedestrian Working Group schema pop up. Here are just a few examples:

• Speedwalk, by Tobias Jordans (FixMyCity) and Dustin Carlino, is a web app that visualizes where sidewalks are separately mapped and where they are tagged as part of the adjacent roadway to help mappers identify areas that need attention.

• Kevin Ratzel created a “Pedestrian Working Group Visualizer” that uses Ultra to color-code sidewalks and crossings depending on which tier of the schema they align with.

• There are now JOSM presets by member and “Keeper of the Wiki” Amy Bordenave that make it easy to map according to the PWG schema.

Kevin’s Pedestrian Working Group Visualizer

The PWG is excited to continue improving on this schema in future versions and invites pedestrians, mappers, and pedestrian mappers to join the process. If you have feedback, you’re welcome to share your thoughts through these forums:

1. Come to a PWG meeting! We meet every third Tuesday of the month on Zoom at 3:00 pm Eastern. Attendance is open to all. Please fill out this form to get involved.

2. Propose a change or make a comment on the talk page of the draft schema, and we’ll discuss it in future meetings.

3. Send any questions or comments to pedestrian@openstreetmap.us

If you’d like to learn more about the process of drafting this Schema and what goes on in the Pedestrian Working Group, here are a few resources:

• The recording of “Walking the Walk: A Year of Progress with the OSM US Pedestrian Working Group” at State of the Map US 2025

• The recording of the July, 2025 Mappy Hour “Let’s Map some Sidewalks”

• The PWG meeting agenda archive

The Pedestrian Working Group would like to extend a sincere thank you to co-chairs Chad Blevins and Alyssa Castronuovo, to Jacob Hall for pioneering the tiered schema approach and brainstorming phase, to Amy Bordenave for overseeing schema development and documentation, and to everyone who joined a meeting, contributed to the development and improvement of the schema and guide, or helped create related pedestrian-mapping tools.

Interested in joining the conversation? Fill out our working group interest form.

Lyft is proud to join as a member and supporter of OpenStreetMap US. OSM is the backbone of our navigation engine, providing the agility of a community-driven map and the precision required for global logistics. By blending OSM’s open map with our own data, we’ve created a virtuous cycle where every Lyft ride helps harden the map, improving safety and routing not just for our drivers, but for the entire public ecosystem.

Shaun Morber, Director of Engineering, Mapping

The OSM US team is excited to see corporations like Lyft demonstrate a commitment to the availability and quality of open geospatial data. Thank you, Lyft, for investing in the map and people behind it through data improvements and financial support.

OpenStreetMap US is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization advancing geospatial data democracy in the United States by catalyzing collaborative action around OpenStreetMap among individuals, government agencies, nonprofits, corporations, and academia. Learn more about OpenStreetMap US and its membership program for individuals and organizations.

This year, Mapping USA featured 20 talks, 4 workshops, and 4 birds of a feather/office hours sessions bringing together mappers, developers, and open data enthusiasts from across the web. We’re especially excited that 62% of those presenters were first-time participants in our virtual conference series!

The Highlights

Learning about the subjects and themes that mappers are most interested in is one of the best things about Mapping USA. This year, mapping transit infrastructure was a key concern for walkers, bikers, bus riders, and drivers alike (see “Speedwalk: More Consistent Sidewalk Tagging” by Dustin Carlino, “Fast Charge: Accelerating EV Accessibility with Better Maps” by Kevin Ratzel, or “Advancing Transit Equity in Phoenix, Arizona” by Veronica Mandasari). Environmental sustainability was another recurring theme, with presentations on mapping wetlands across the United States, tracking invasive species, and a dual talk/birds of a feather session on infrastructure data for wildfire resilience. These sessions highlighted how mappers can support critical environmental efforts and community resilience.

The conversation did not stop when attendees logged off for the weekend. If you’re not on the OpenStreetMap US Slack, you’re missing a big part of Mapping USA! The #mapping-usa channel kept buzzing with questions for speakers, shared slides and additional resources, links to analogous projects, and plenty of enthusiasm for fellow mappers.

Now What?

In case you missed it (or want to revisit your favorite sessions), all available recordings are now up on the OpenStreetMap US Youtube channel in a dedicated playlist.

If you’re missing the Mapping USA vibes, we invite you to check out our annual in-person conference, State of the Map US. This year, we’ll be gathering in Madison, Wisconsin from June 11-13 for a weekend of mapping, networking, and building community.

Thank you to everyone who attended or presented at Mapping USA 2026, and a special thanks to those who included a donation in their event registration. Your support ensures that we can continue providing free events like this one to the OSM community.

Overture creates and distributes reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data. Overture is a significant user of OpenStreetMap data and views OSM as a critical source of data for several of its open data themes. By supporting the OSM ecosystem, Overture helps ensure the continued growth and quality of the collaborative mapping project that benefits its own mission.

Overture’s membership will be used to support OSM US tooling, namely MapRoulette, which is an essential tool that makes it easier for mappers to contribute to OpenStreetMap. MapRoulette provides bite-sized mapping challenges that help improve map data quality and completeness, helping both new and experienced contributors to make meaningful improvements to the map. Originally a Charter Project, MapRoulette is now a full program of OSM US and this membership is a step towards supporting the associated maintenance and overhead costs.

Overture Maps Foundation is proud to support OpenStreetMap US and the MapRoulette project. We use OSM data, and recognize the importance of investing in the tools and community that make collaborative mapping possible. MapRoulette has played a vital role in helping mappers improve and expand the map data, which benefits everyone.

Will Mortenson, Executive Director, Overture Maps Foundation

The OSM US team is excited to grow this partnership with Overture Maps Foundation.

OpenStreetMap US is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization advancing geospatial data democracy in the United States by catalyzing collaborative action around OpenStreetMap among individuals, government agencies, nonprofits, corporations, and academia. Learn more about OpenStreetMap US and its membership program for individuals and organizations.

• Working with the other board members in support of the OSM US community
• Supporting our Executive Director & the staff team in strategic planning efforts
• Supporting the mapping community through mailing lists and chat rooms
• Making a difference at the local, national, and international levels
• Facilitating interactions with other organizations, academics, government, and private companies, and supporting fundraising efforts.

There are two open seats in this election. The board members whose terms are expiring are Levente Juhász and Harrison Devine, both of whom are eligible to run this cycle. Board members who will continue to serve through 2027 are Kiri Carini, Matthew Whilden, and Jazzy Smith. Thanks to Harrison and Levente for their 2 years of service!

What makes a great board member?

Exceptional board members are passionate about the growth of the OpenStreetMap community in the United States and support our organization’s mission. Legal, fundraising, or financial management experience (particularly in nonprofit and open source spaces) is optional but highly beneficial to supporting the growth of our organization. Overall, a great board member prioritizes guiding the achievement of our organizational goals and aligning them with the needs of our community. Any active, paid member of OpenStreetMap US is eligible to become a Board member.

​The OpenStreetMap US board is a governance-style nonprofit board with volunteer board members focusing on the overall mission, strategy, oversight, and accountability. This free short course from Nonprofit Ready provides an overview of nonprofit board service and effective board leadership (which is not required for running).

Curious about board service? Reach out to our current Board Members to learn more and ask questions about board roles and activities. The board will also be presenting at the upcoming Mapping USA on January 30 - 31, a free event open to all, including non-members. Register here!

Requirements & Expectations

To be eligible for nomination:

• Be passionate about OpenStreetMap and its community and interested in shaping strategy and supporting governance.
• Be a current member of OpenStreetMap US by February 9, 2026. Join us today!

Elected Board members are expected to:

• Attend regular (usually monthly) one-hour virtual board meetings;
• Read materials provided by the Executive Director before board meetings.
• Communicate with the board and staff team regularly (usually via Slack);
• Represent community and organizational interests over personal interests;
• Contribute 1-5 hours per month to community engagement activities such as hosting a Mappy Hour, participating in a Working Group, actively supporting the community through mailing lists and communication channels, or writing a blog post.

Nomination Instructions

Nominations will open on Monday, January 26, 2026, and close on Saturday, February 8, 2026. To nominate yourself, please go to the election wiki page and add yourself to the list. You can also see more information about the schedule and process there.

Nominees are encouraged (but not required) to provide position statements upon nomination via links on the election wiki page or a statement embedded in the table. In addition to position statements on the wiki, nominees will also have the opportunity to state their positions, answer questions and meet other candidates during the virtual Nominee Town Hall.

Town Hall

We will host one virtual town hall with the candidates before voting begins (scheduled sometime between February 9th and 20th). During the virtual town hall, you will have a chance to ask questions and hear from the candidates. More information, including time and registration link, will be posted to the wiki closer to the date.

Election

To vote, you must be a paid, active member of OpenStreetMap US with Opt-In voting status by Sunday, February 22, 2026, at 11:59 pm EST. Only qualified members will receive a ballot.

If you have not set your voting status, please do so by the deadline above by logging into your OSM US member account on Neon. Not a member? Join today!

Voting will open at noon EST on Monday, February 23rd, and end on Sunday, March 1st, at 11:59 pm EST. New board members will be announced on March 2.

A Note on Systems & Processes

A member of the OpenStreetMap US Governance Committee will oversee the voting process. We will continue to use Ranked Choice Voting. Results will be confirmed by a member of the Governance Committee.

Best of luck to all the nominees! And thanks for voting!

​

In August 2025, funding for development of the Charter Projects ran out, which meant the end of the dedicated Charter Projects Engineer position, and forced us to place MapRoulette and OSMCha in maintenance-only mode. OSM US has continued to pay for hosting costs for these projects out of the OSM US budget, but both applications also need ongoing maintenance and development to remain reliable and improve over time.

After discussion with OSMCha’s creator Wille Marcel, and with MapRoulette’s creator Martijn van Exel, we’ve decided to transition OSMCha and MapRoulette from Charter Projects to OSM US Programs. This will allow OSM US to allocate a portion of our core operational budget to support the maintenance and development of both projects.

What’s the difference between a Charter Project and a Program? In short: Charter Projects operate with significant autonomy. They have steering committees, separate budgets, and fundraising expectations. They’re designed for tools that can sustain themselves through dedicated sponsorship. Programs, on the other hand, are initiatives that OSM US runs directly. We manage them as part of core operations and fund them from the general budget.

For MapRoulette and OSMCha, this means:

• the Steering Committees of both projects will be dissolved
• OSM US staff will manage both projects’ roadmaps, informed by community feedback
• development and maintenance will be funded from OSM US’s operational budget

Both applications will remain open source and free to use.

If your organization relies on MapRoulette or OSMCha, we’re asking you to become an Organizational Member of OSM US. Membership dues directly fund the staff time that maintains these tools, along with our other programs and services. We cannot continue providing free, high-quality tools to the OpenStreetMap community without organizations choosing to invest in their maintenance.

Individual mappers can support our work through Individual Membership, and everyone is welcome to join the #maproulette and #osmcha channels on the OSM US Slack if you have questions or suggestions about either project.

Thanks to Wille, Martijn and everyone has contributed their time to the development of these incredible tools over the years.

We’re switching things up in 2026 for a few reasons. First, we’ve received feedback from past years’ scholars that the amount of monetary support previously given isn’t enough to cover all of their travel expenses. Second, we recognize that international travel to the United States is especially precarious right now, and an increasing number of international applicants require a level of logistical support that OpenStreetMap US is unable to provide with a small team.

So, What’s Different?

This year, we’ll be offering State of the Map US Fellowships. Fellows will be awarded more – up to $1000 USD in reimbursement to be used for travel and lodging expenses – and can spend their lodging reimbursement wherever they choose, such as a private room at the conference venue or shared lodging with other fellows or attendees. We’re also inviting fellows to get more involved; in past years, scholars were asked to volunteer during the conference and submit a session proposal. This year, we also ask that fellows get involved in the conference planning committee, which meets every few weeks over Zoom. The planning committee does invaluable work, such as reviewing submitted talks and planning social events.

This all comes with different eligibility requirements as well. For State of the Map US 2026:

• All fellows must travel to and from the conference from within the United States.

• Fellows requiring a visa to travel to the United States must already have that visa during the time of application, and it must remain valid throughout the conference.

• Applicants must be 18 years of age or older at the time of application.

Additional Information

If accepted, all 2026 fellows will be eligible to receive:

• A General Admission ticket to State of the Map US 2026, plus admission to all networking and social events.

• Up to $1000 USD in reimbursement for travel and lodging expenses (with valid receipts).

State of the Map US fellowships are not just available for students and those in the academic world (though they are certainly welcome to apply). Past scholarship recipients have included…

• Federal and public sector employees impacted by recent layoffs
• Those considering a career change
• Members of geospatial communities such as GeoChicas and Women in GIS
• Newcomers to the OpenStreetMap community
• Nonprofit employees

If you would like to join us at State of the Map US 2026 but find attending to be cost-prohibitive, we invite you to apply!

All applications are reviewed anonymously and scored based on the quality of answers provided, and we always make an effort to support those from underrepresented groups in the OpenStreetMap community. Applicants are not judged based on the volume of their OpenStreetMap contributions or tenure in the community.

Important Dates

January 5th: Fellowship application opens (that’s today!)

February 6th: Fellowship application closes

February 16th: Call for Proposals closes

Late February: Fellows notified

June 11-13th: State of the Map US 2026 in Madison!

Each year, OpenStreetMap US receives hundreds of applications and inquiries regarding assistance to attend State of the Map US. We promise to do our best responding to all applicants in a timely manner, and ask that you refrain from emailing the planning team about the status of your application. These emails will go unanswered.

If you have additional questions, please email scholarships@stateofthemap.us!

Most Dependable: Layercake

Layercake is one of the most recent tools to come under the OSM US umbrella, thanks to the work of our Software Engineer, Jake Low. Meant to make it easier to interact with the OpenStreetMap data that’s important to you, Layercake provides thematic extracts in cloud-native file formats (currently buildings, highways, boundaries, and settlements). Thanks to chatter and volunteer contributions from community members, we’re working on adding new flavors–er–layers, in 2026! Check out the project’s Github issues to see what’s in the works, and try it out for yourself.

Most Spirited: The OSM US Advisory Council

OSM US formalized a new cohort of cheerleaders over the summer: The OSM US Advisory Council, consisting of Carrie Stokes, Brandon Liu, Bill Dollins, Diane Fritz, Lee Schwartz, and Kevin Pomfret. This group of volunteers is nominated by the Executive Director and approved by the Board of Directors to lend their expertise in areas such as nonprofit fundraising and geospatial technology. Unlike the Board, they have no decision-making power but provide additional insight and knowledge when executing the mission of OSM US. The first AC meeting was just held in October, so look for more from the group in 2026. We’re always excited to welcome new folks onto Team OSM US!

Most Likely to Brighten Your Day: OSM US Members

OSM US hit a major membership milestone in 2025: we hit 300 members for the first time this past June! That number includes both individual members and organizational members. Our individual membership program has been foundational to the success of OSM US literally since the beginning. Individual members shape the strategic direction and focus of the organization by voting for the Board of Directors each year and participating in member town halls where we get to see smiling faces in real life, not just smiley emojis on Slack.

In 2022, OSM US introduced our Organizational Membership program, with the goal of providing private companies, academic or nonprofit institutions, and government agencies a way to support the work of OSM US and the contributions of the US mapping community. This year, we were joined by the Ann Arbor Public Library, the American Geographical Society, BetaNYC, and TomTom as first-time organizational members. Organizational members are critical to the financial sustainability of OSM US and we are always excited to welcome new folks!

Most Widely Traveled: Mapillary x OSM US Camera Grant 2.0

The Mapillary x OSM US Camera Grant 2.0 wins “Most Widely Traveled” in 2025! Between the launch of the camera grant program in April and now, cameras have been sent to…

• 18 states
• 16 individual mappers
• 8 nonprofits, community groups, or academic institutions
• 8 municipalities or local agencies
• Collecting over 10,260 miles of imagery

Better Mapillary imagery means better data sources for OpenStreetMap contributors, especially when it comes to features that are difficult to verify with aerial imagery. It has been fantastic watching camera grantees build community and share their experiences improving street-level imagery in the places that matter to them. Check out the Mapper Highlight feature on a few of the 2025 grantees to learn more.

The application form is still open as we send out the final cameras of version 2.0!

Best Duo: State of the Map US and Mapping USA

In recent years, State of the Map US and Mapping USA have become quite the harmonious duo. Unable to travel in person for SotM US this year? Don’t worry - Mapping USA is right around the corner! Have an idea for a SotM US talk but are nervous about presenting in a more traditional conference environment? Try it out at Mapping USA first! This year, past State of the Map US presenters were even able to share their experiences and brainstorm potential sessions at Mapping USA 2025.

As we continue planning conferences and events into the new year, the OSM US team is proud to offer opportunities for different budgets and accessibility needs to connect with the wider OpenStreetMap community.

Teacher’s Pet: TeachOSM

It makes sense why TeachOSM is the Teacher’s Pet of 2025 – a major priority for the program is to provide support for the common roadblocks educators face when implementing OpenStreetMap into their curricula. On top of regular Education Working Group meetings and workshops, TeachOSM members directed a unique educational focus at State of the Map US this past summer (including an education track, birds of a feather, and inaugural poster session), and provided invaluable feedback and testing of an early stage of the TeachOSM Sandbox.

Notes from the Class of 2010

As we close out the 15th year of OpenStreetMap US, we want to highlight the voices of those who have been integral to the organization since the beginning. Here are some notes from the Class of 2010:

“Over the last 15 years, mapping parties have evolved from GPS/JOSM-based events where we were adding major streets on foot, into parties where we dive into specific issues. We’ve also seen several companies adopt and extend OpenStreetMap in some amazing ways. Technology is a big part of OpenStreetMap, but it’s always been about the community. As the map starts to feel more ‘complete’ there will be even more chances for special projects and groups to organize around new use cases, and the community will be there.”

Jim McAndrew, who served on an early OSM US Board of Directors

“I was first introduced to OSM back in 2008 at a mapping party! I watched the transition between OSM as a hobby project and the rich, publicly available platform for social good that it has evolved into today. Back then, OSM felt like a blank canvas. People rose to the occasion to fill in the map. It was anarchy in both the best and worst ways early on. Fast forward, and I am impressed by the direction of OSM US today. Trails, sidewalks, and the government working group. People are coming together on issues that fly below the radar, yet are vitally important. The working groups serve a community-building function. That’s something OSM US can really be proud of.”

Steven Johnson, who served on the first OSM US Board of Directors

See You Next Year!

Many thanks to those who supported OpenStreetMap US in 2025! Whether you joined a Mappy Hour or working group, donated to the organization, became a member, contributed to a task on the OSM US Tasking Manager, or welcomed new mappers in the OSM US Slack, we’re grateful for your participation in the OSM US community. We’re excited for the year to come!

If you’d like to continue supporting OpenStreetMap US into the new year, now is a great time to donate, become a member, or follow our monthly newsletter to keep up to date with upcoming events, program updates, and tech news.

YouthMappers is a global network of student-led university chapters dedicated to filling gaps in open geospatial data. The students and educators behind each chapter address environmental, economic, social, and humanitarian challenges in their region, relying heavily on projects like OpenStreetMap. As a Charter Project, YouthMappers can remain focused on their mission, while OSM US provides a legal home: offering administrative support, financial oversight, and a flexible governance model.

Programs like YouthMappers introduce new generations of contributors, researchers, and users to OpenStreetMap and to the capacity of open geographic data. Each chapter promotes resilience, community engagement, and digital democracy by empowering students to map what matters most to them. For many years, YouthMappers students have been a vital cohort of the OSM US community from attending annual conferences, tackling mapping projects in the states, and sharing their knowledge in groups like TeachOSM and the Pedestrian Working Group.

YouthMappers at State of the Map US 2023 in Richmond, Virginia.

This year, YouthMappers celebrated their 10-year anniversary, marking a major milestone for the network that has grown to include more than 400 chapters in 80+ countries. As YouthMappers looks ahead to its next decade, this partnership with OSM US represents a key moment to strengthen the network’s foundation and support its continued growth and expansion. Despite losing foundational support following the dissolution of USAID earlier this year, YouthMappers’ dedication to their mission and global community of mappers has not faltered. As a Charter Project, YouthMappers will be able to rely on OSM US’s status as a 501(c)(3) non-profit when fundraising and managing the logistical intricacies of their organization. This framework will bring additional collaboration opportunities for students and those seeking to support the network’s activities.

Support YouthMappers

As YouthMappers enters its next decade, there are several meaningful ways to support the network through OpenStreetMap US. Donations can be directed toward specific priorities or applied where the need is greatest, including:

• The YouthMappers Validation Hub, hosted at The George Washington University, which ensures high-quality OpenStreetMap contributions and provides advanced technical training for students from chapters around the world

• Supporting Regional Ambassadors, who help coordinate chapters, build local capacity, and strengthen regional networks

• Student travel to conferences, including State of the Map US 2026, ensuring students can share their work, build professional connections, and participate fully in the OSM community

• Areas of greatest need, allowing YouthMappers to respond flexibly to emerging opportunities and challenges

Additionally, you can see what chapters are up to on their social media channels, or even apply to start your own chapter!

OMS US is grateful for the opportunity to support YouthMappers as they continue their important work. Any project in the OpenStreetMap ecosystem is invited to apply to become a Charter Project; applications are always open and reviewed on a rolling basis. Visit the Community & Charter Projects page to learn more.

Timeline

• December 15, 2025: Call for Proposals opens

• January 5, 2025: Fellowship application opens

• February 16, 2026: Call for Proposals closes

• Mid-March: Speakers notified

• June 11-13, 2026: State of the Map US

Session Formats

This year has the widest range of session types on offer yet. In addition to the classic lightning talks, longer talks, workshops, mapathons, panels, and birds of a feather sessions, we’re also bringing back the popular poster session from State of the Map US 2025!

Attendees of SotM US 2025 at the inaugural Poster Session.

Need Inspiration?

Maybe you’ve never been to State of the Map US before and you’re not quite sure what folks would like to hear. Well, there are two great reasons why you should submit a session this year:

1. More than a quarter of our conference attendees each year are first timers, and

2. We can practically guarantee you that if there’s a topic in the OSM ecosystem you’re passionate about, there are others out there who share your interest.

Almost all of the past presentations from State of the Map US are recorded and up on the OSM US Youtube Channel. It’s a great place to get a sense of the breadth of topics folks cover over the course of three days.

Presenters from Kendall County, Illinois giving their talk “Hold on to your Pearls Grandma, We’re Switching to OSM!” at SotM US 2025.

Please Note

Keep in mind that by submitting a session proposal you acknowledge and accept the following:

• You must be able to give your talk, workshop, or other session in person in Madison. If you are only able to present virtually, please check out our virtual conference series, Mapping USA. While talk submissions are closed for MUSA 2026, we hope to see you in 2027!

• You will cover your own travel expenses and conference registration. Speakers are able to register at the early bird ticket rate of $200.

• Your session may be recorded on video and published on the internet.

• You have read and will abide by the OpenStreetMap US Code of Conduct.

Have questions? You’re welcome to join the #sotmus channel on the OSM US Slack or email the program committee at sotmus@openstreetmap.us.

If you’re submitting a session proposal on behalf of a nonprofit, corporation, academic institution, or government agency, we invite you to take a look at our Sponsor Prospectus. Sponsors are vital to maintaining the high quality of State of the Map US while offering lower admission than other industry conferences.

BetaNYC helps New Yorkers access information and utilize technology for the public interest, using tools like OpenStreetMap. When empowered with these tools, residents can hold their government accountable while improving their economic opportunities. The organization helps New York’s governments and community organizations work for the people, by the people, and for the digital era.

“BetaNYC is proud to become an OSM US Community Member because OSM is the platform for our community teachings. Additionally, it’s the platform that enables us to represent what currently exists, while also allowing us, as a collective, to envision what our future could be.”

Jazzy Smith, Chief of Staff, BetaNYC and OSM US Board Member

The OSM US team is excited to grow this partnership with BetaNYC.

OpenStreetMap US is a 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization advancing geospatial data democracy in the United States by catalyzing collaborative action around OpenStreetMap among individuals, government agencies, nonprofits, corporations, and academia. Learn more about OpenStreetMap US and its membership program for individuals and organizations.

Amy Bordenave with the University of Washington Taskar Center for Accessible Technology in Seattle, Washington

Tell us about one of your recent excursions to gather street level imagery.

Two capture sessions come to mind! One, a walk around the neighborhood north of Green Lake in Seattle. This was done following OSM Seattle’s meetup to celebrate the 21st birthday of OpenStreetMap. Special thanks to those who joined, including Clifford Snow of the Data Working Group! It was really nice to meet new people and to catch up with people I hadn’t seen since State of the Map US 2025 in Boston. Two, a walk up and down the central main street of Carnation, Washington. Following our participation in the Seattle Design Festival (we also captured all of the festival grounds!) we traveled out to Carnation, a lovely small town in a picturesque rural area, and led a Walkabout with the town’s Mayor as we shared some of the work we’ve been doing at Taskar Center to map pedestrian infrastructure in the state of Washington. Then, I walked all of the way up and down the town’s quaint main street.

Have you used your captured images to improve OpenStreetMap? How so?

Yes! Mapillary coverage makes it much easier to improve pedestrian infrastructure mapping in OpenStreetMap, especially when new construction adds features not yet visible in aerial imagery, or street-level imagery captures small-scale details like surface quality or obstructions that require an on-the-ground perspective to map. I really enjoy seeing the street art and murals around Seattle, and these are often hidden away. With the Mapillary Camera Grant hardware, I can not only easily capture these but also add them to OpenStreetMap, such as these!

Explain your current workflow using the granted equipment. Do you have any tips for new Mapillary contributors?

The process is pretty straight-forward:

1. Identify survey area - use Mapillary to filter for areas without 360 coverage within the last 5 years.

2. Plan a route - currently done by hand or in-the-moment, but I’m looking into using Wandrer, StreetFerret, or something similar.

3. Gear up - make sure camera and phone are charged, wear high-vis clothing, and don’t forget to carry a water bottle for hydration!

4. Travel to location - if necessary, I usually take public transit and answer StreetComplete quests along the way.

5. Capture time! - I suggest keeping a map up on your phone and recording a GPS track. I use CoMaps for this.

6. Transfer, process, and upload - move images to an ingest folder, remove duplicates, and upload using the Mapillary Desktop Uploader.

Additional advice: Read through and follow Mapillary’s guide.

Sean Whitcomb in Phoenix, Arizona

Being part of the OSM US Mapillary camera grant has led to major improvements in the Mapillary coverage in Phoenix and allowed me to ride my bike in new areas of the city I never would have explored otherwise. Since I was awarded the GoPro Max camera, I’ve been focused on capturing 360° imagery of residential streets and bicycle paths in the Phoenix area. Phoenix has decent Mapillary coverage on arterial streets, but is missing many residential streets. Most of the existing imagery is several years old, and almost none of it is 360°. You can see all the streets I’ve added (in light blue) since I received the camera.

What does your current workflow look like?

I started this project with the camera on a pole in a backpack while I rode my bike. This was nice because the camera was held high, keeping me out of the frame for the most part. But it was hard to stabilize and resulted in lower quality imagery. So now I attach the camera to my bike helmet. The helmet is visible in the shots–especially with my extra-wide Phoenix sun-blocking brim–but the imagery is clearer.

Once I am in the location where I want to gather imagery, I turn on the camera and sync it with the GoPro Quik app on my phone. I put it in Preview mode so I can see what the camera sees, and I can make adjustments to the position. I also start a GPX track using the free GPX Tracker app to record where I’ve been on this trip. By comparing this track to the coverage map on the Mapillary app, I can be sure I’m gathering all the images I’ve planned to capture on this trip without missing anything. Then I ride my bike up and down streets or trails, pausing the camera when I’m backtracking or covering areas that have previously been captured.

What do you plan to capture next?

This winter, I’ll be working with the local PHXGeo group to capture imagery at Papago Park, a desert preserve that is home to over 1000 saguaro cacti. The park is the site of an annual saguaro survey meant to document this vulnerable population as it struggles with rising temperatures and extreme drought. Most of the saguaros in the park have not been photographed, and I’m hoping to remedy that with the help of Mapillary imagery. Check out this Mappy Hour video to learn more about the Phoenix saguaro mapping project.

Zeyu Wang in Seattle, Washington

Has capturing Mapillary imagery taken you to an area of your city you didn’t previously explore?

When I first received the camera, it happened to be right before a trip to Hawaii, so I decided to bring it along to Honolulu. It turned out to be the perfect opportunity to test the new equipment. I mounted the camera on a convertible and explored the outskirts of the city, focusing on areas that didn’t yet have up-to-date imagery. It felt great to contribute fresh coverage to those less-documented parts of Honolulu.

What are some ways that this program has improved your mapping experience, workflow, or contribution quality?

Before the grant, my only option for capturing imagery was using my phone. That meant holding it for long periods of time and constantly worrying about keeping it steady. With the Mapillary Camera Grant Program, I was really impressed by how thoughtfully the package was put together—it included different accessories for different use cases, whether mounting it on a car or using it handheld. The GoPro Max has been especially valuable since it captures 360° videos and photos, providing a panoramic view similar to Google Street View rather than just a single perspective. Overall, it has made the capturing process not only easier and more efficient, but also much more enjoyable with the new equipment.

Thank you to all of the grantees for improving Mapillary and OpenStreetMap! To submit your own application for the OSM US & Mapillary Camera Grant, complete this form.

Hop in the virtual Mapmobile, it’s time for Mapping USA 2026! Every year, Mapping USA gathers hundreds of OpenStreetMap contributors, data users, and enthusiasts online for two days of presentations, workshops, and other mappy activities; in 2025 we were joined by over 150 folks in the OSM community for 25 talks, 3 workshops, 1 mapathon, and 4 office hours/birds of a feather sessions.

The Call for Proposals is Open!

You can submit your session proposal now through November 24th at 5:00pm Eastern Standard Time.

All are welcome and encouraged to participate in this year’s event. Even if you’ve never presented at a conference before, we encourage you to submit a proposal! Check out the talks from Mapping USA 2025 if you’re looking for inspiration.

Register Today

As always, Mapping USA is free for anyone to attend. If you are not currently an OpenStreetMap US member and you’d like to support the team behind Mapping USA, a $10 USD donation is greatly appreciated. That $10 will go towards conference logistics and the OSM US-supported tech and programs featured during the conference.

Save your spot and fill out the RSVP form!

A big thanks to Lauren Nishizaki for this year’s logo (and the logo for State of the Map US 2025)!

Questions? Feel free to email events@openstreetmap.us or connect in the #mapping-usa channel in the OpenStreetMap US Slack.

The Tileservice already provides tiles for OpenStreetMap US-supported projects, including Americana, OpenTrailMap, OSMCha and SliceOSM. By making the Tileservice available to the public, we hope to help developers in the OSM community overcome the technical barriers to creating new maps and applications based on OSM data.

What’s Available

The Tileservice provides:

• Vector tilesets derived from OpenStreetMap data in several schemas, suitable for making interactive maps
• Raster tilesets for hillshading and other specialized purposes
• Fonts suitable for use with MapLibre and compatible renderers

Documentation, including a list of available tilesets and demo maps of each, is available at tiles.openstreetmap.us.

Usage Policy

The service is free for low volume non-commercial use. Our goal is to help hobbyist developers create new tools and maps for the benefit of the OpenStreetMap community. This Starter Tier is available to anyone, without an API key.

If you wish to use the Tileservice commercially or at higher volume, you can apply for access to our Partner Tier. Partners are expected to make a recurring donation to OpenStreetMap US to help offset the cost of providing the Tileservice.

All users need to provide proper attribution to OpenStreetMap, OpenStreetMap US, and relevant data sources. Our complete usage policy covers technical requirements and terms of service.

Contributions Welcome

The entire Tileservice (including both the code for generating tiles and the code for serving them) is open source, and available on GitHub. Bug reports, new feature ideas, and pull requests are welcome. And donations (or sponsorship on GitHub) are greatly appreciated and will help us continue to offer this service at no cost.

The OpenStreetMap US Tileservice represents our commitment to fostering innovation in the OpenStreetMap community and making geographic data freely accessible. We’re excited to see what you create with this resource!

How it works

Interested participants can join CompleteTheMap by filling out this application form. Once the challenge period begins, hit the road knowing that every mile of your imagery contributions within the challenge period will count towards your total. Potential prizes include:

• Mapillary and/or OpenStreetMap US swag
• Electronic gift cards
• Discounts and complimentary tickets to State of the Map US 2026
• A GoPro MAX 360º camera

Your contributions will be totaled using the Unique Captured Miles (UM) method per each user. This means that the same road segment captured multiple times by the same Mapillary user will only count once. However, multiple users may capture overlapping road segments. This way, you’ll score points for exploring new roads and neighborhoods each day. The Mapillary team will share weekly UM leaderboards with CompleteTheMap participants throughout the challenge period.

Important dates

Registration deadline: September 15, 2025

CompleteTheMap challenge period: September 15 to November 15, 2025

Results announced: Late November 2025

How to get involved

Complete the application form before September 15th!

Before registering, here’s what you need to know:

• All applicants must be either an individual contributor, non-profit organization, or community mapping group. No for-profit or government entities are allowed to participate.
• Eligible participants must have a Mapillary account prior to the challenge start date on September 15th.
• The Mapillary team will calculate UM per user only for imagery collected during the challenge period (September 15th through November 15th). All captured imagery must be updated by November 15th, 2025 at 23:59:59 EST to be eligible.
• Participants must agree to receive communication via email from Mapillary and OpenStreetMap US to provide updates and further details during the campaign.
• Mapillary and OSM US reserve the right to disqualify imagery that does not follow the Mapillary Imagery Capture Guidelines (such as blurry images).

Best of luck to CompleteTheMap participants – We can’t wait to see all the fresh street-level imagery you collect!

Please direct questions about the CompleteTheMap challenge and application process to hello@mapillary.com, and be sure to check out Mapillary’s own blog post about the challenge!

Looking to upgrade your street-level imagery capture workflow and equipment? We’re sending GoPro Max 360 cameras and accessories across the United States with the ongoing OpenStreetMap US & Mapillary Camera Grant Program. Check it out and submit and application!

“AGS convenes a diverse global community of innovators, thinkers, and practitioners to create and curate geographical knowledge, and advance geographic science and technologies to address society’s challenges and opportunities… Most notably AGS’s commitment to our fall symposium Geography 2050 and our TeenMaptivists Initiative are great examples of our work.”

“AGS utilizes OSM for their TeenMaptivists Initiative, which introduces high-school students to the power of open mapping, and its impact on communities both locally, and globally. Currently, our network includes 15 high schools across the U.S., which have worked together to add over 311,000 points to OpenStreetMap throughout the 2024 - 2025 academic year. We highly value the opportunity to partner with OSM US to continue our mission of building the next generation of geographic leaders.”

John Konarski, Chief Executive Officer, American Geographical Society

OpenStreetMap US Organizational Memberships reinforce the tools and programming the OSM community relies on, and we are grateful for AGS’s investment in these shared initiatives. The AGS TeenMaptivist teachers work closely with the TeachOSM program here at OSM US; many educators coordinate their students’ mapping efforts using the TeachOSM Tasking Manager, which enables teams of mappers to break down large mapping tasks by geographic area. Likewise, OSM US is currently working with educators through our Education Working Group to inform the development of the OSM Classroom, a dedicated tech stack to facilitate training, validating, and grading of student mappers. The OSM Classroom will rely heavily on the existing infrastructure of the TeachOSM Tasking Manager as well as OSMCha, an OSM US Charter Project.

OSM US is excited to forge this new partnership with AGS. Welcome, American Geographical Society!

OpenStreetMap US is a 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization advancing geospatial data democracy in the United States by catalyzing collaborative action around OpenStreetMap among individuals, government agencies, nonprofits, corporations, and academia. Interested in organizational membership? Email membership@openstreetmap.us.

Some topics we plan to discuss in the Working Group (based on responses from a recent survey) are:

1. Managing burnout
2. Navigating a project’s lifecycle
3. Finding opportunities for collaboration between projects
4. Sharing knowledge between primary developers and volunteers interested in contributing

The first meeting of the Maintainers Working Group is on Monday, September 8th at 2:00pm Eastern on Zoom, and you can RSVP here. Initially the Working Group will meet bi-monthly, with the option to adjust meeting frequency based on participant interest.

Participation is open to all, no matter the popularity of your project or if you’ve just contributed your first line of code. All are welcome to join the discussion, share your experience, and learn from others. As with all OpenStreetMap US Working Groups, attendees are expected to follow the OpenStreetMap US Code of Conduct. Hope to see you there!

Interested in connecting with other mappers, developers, and enthusiasts in the OpenStreetMap ecosystem? OpenStreetMap US hosts a number of working groups, including topics like pedestrian infrastructure, bringing OSM into the classroom, imagery, and more. All are welcome!

How does TomTom utilize OpenStreetMap?

In 2023, TomTom expanded its Orbis Maps Platform globally, incorporating various data sources, including OSM data, to enhance coverage and detail. OpenStreetMap contributes valuable base maps, pedestrian pathways, and visual features, which complement TomTom’s proprietary data. This integration is especially beneficial for applications in urban planning, disaster response, and mobility services.

What inspired TomTom to become an organizational member of OpenStreetMap US?

At TomTom, we believe in the power of open data and community collaboration to shape the future of mapping. Joining OpenStreetMap US as an organizational member is a natural extension of our commitment to support the global OSM ecosystem. We’re proud to contribute in part by engaging directly with local mapping communities around the globe, empowering individual contributors, and championing data quality. Together, we can build richer, more accessible maps for everyone.

What future TomTom projects/programs/collaborations are you excited about?

We’re excited about the growing opportunities to support OpenStreetMap through global sponsorships of local chapters, and by working with partners like HOT OSM, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and Missing Maps to aid humanitarian and disaster response mapping. We’re also passionate about spreading awareness of the value of local mapping—whether that’s through universities, municipal partnerships, or supporting YouthMappers chapters worldwide. Leveraging the expertise of our mapping team to help identify and address quality issues globally, we’re committed to collaborating across the OSM ecosystem to continuously improve the richness and reliability of the map.

The OSM US team looks forward to this growing partnership. Welcome, TomTom!

OSM US Organizational Memberships are available for companies, educational institutions, nonprofits, and government agencies looking to demonstrate their support for OpenStreetMap in the United States and invest in the project’s future. Is your company or organization interested in learning more about OpenStreetMap US organizational membership? For more information, email membership@openstreetmap.us.

OpenStreetMap US is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization advancing geospatial data democracy in the United States by catalyzing collaborative action around OpenStreetMap between individuals, government agencies, nonprofits, corporations, and academia.

Advisory Council members are nominated by the Executive Director and approved by the Board of Directors on a rolling basis. Members are chosen based on their professional experience, roles, or expertise in the OSM & geospatial communities. Members are asked to serve a minimum of a 2-year term, with a limit of 4 years of service before a 1-year break.

Help OSM US welcome our inaugural members: Bill Dollins, Brandon Liu, Carrie Stokes, Diane Fritz, Kevin Pomfret, and Lee Schwartz. Each member brings unique experience and expertise to the council:

Bill Dollins, an experienced technology executive with a strong background in the design, implementation, and management of geospatial systems, is the founder and President at Cercana Systems — a boutique consultancy providing strategic and technical geospatial expertise to organizations in the public, private, and non-profit sectors.

Brandon Liu is a cartographic technologist and open-source developer, founder of Protomaps, and creator of PMTiles and SliceOSM, who brings expertise in cloud-native map infrastructure and innovative approaches to delivering and visualizing OpenStreetMap data.

Carrie Stokes has worked in international development, geospatial technology, and the environment for thirty years. Most recently, she served as the Chief Geographer at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) headquarters in Washington, DC.

Dr. Diane Fritz is an associate scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado and teaches remote sensing at the University of Colorado. Her broad scientific background, ranging from a biochemistry undergraduate degree in genetics to a PhD in geological sciences, enables her to communicate effectively about geospatial applications across academic disciplines.

Kevin Pomfret, a seasoned attorney based in Washington, D.C., navigates the complex legal and policy intricacies surrounding geospatial information and other types of data, including AI, data privacy, cybersecurity, and intellectual property, as well as national security.

Dr. Lee Schwartz is the former Geographer of the Department of State and Director of its Office of the Geographer and Global Issues in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

The OSM US team is excited to work with this new council to strengthen the organization as we strive to advance geospatial data democracy through OpenStreetMap.

How did OSM Utah get started?

Martijn: “OSM Utah got started in 2011. I had just moved to [Salt Lake City] and discovered that there were a few active mappers, but no local meetups. I started hosting monthly meetups in local cafes. Usually, 1 or 2 people would show up, sometimes nobody at all. Over the next few years, we slowly built a more active community. We accomplished quite a few things beyond just creating the best map of Salt Lake City! We managed to get permission from the state GIS office to use all their data for OSM, we imported useful data like addresses and fire hydrants, we presented OSM to state lawmakers and GIS professionals, hosted workshops at the annual state GIS conference, and most recently, we created our own website.”

What does an OSM Utah meetup usually look like?

Daniel: “Our meetups are pretty low-key, but it feels good for the chance to see other mappers face to face. We like to meet up at food halls where everyone can choose what food/if they want to get food without pressure. There’s chatting about what we’ve been mapping recently, questions about what others have been mapping, and what we could improve about our own mapping. There’s also a surprising number of people who discover us organically through different online channels and come to the meetup to learn about what OSM is (we’ve had at least one new person for the last 5 meetups in a row!).”

Jessie: “OSM Utah meetups are usually really casual. People map, ask each other questions (I usually ask the most questions), and talk about changes to the map in Utah and how to reflect them… I’d highly encourage people to have a shared space to chat and/or meet in person! Sometimes being the first person to ask a question is the easiest and best thing to do. We also have some people who come who are not heavy OSM mappers and are just interested in learning about OSM and don’t map, and that’s okay too!”

Previous OSM Utah meetups

Are there any local projects OSM Utah is helping to address with OpenStreetMap?

Earlier this year, a representative from Snyderville Basin Recreation reached out to OSM Utah on the #local-utah channel of the OSM US Slack looking for advice on a possible import of new trail geometry and revised tags in the area. Through discussions on Slack and in an OSM Utah in-person meetup, the group helped the Basin Rec employees update the trails with some dedicated mapping time, showing them around OSM and explaining how integrating data from other sources works:

Aleya: “I work in the Trails and Open Space department at Basin Recreation… We started our project on OSM when we noticed that some of the trails we manage were misrepresented on the Park City Trails map. Social trails were marked as official, rerouted trails were not up to date, and even the names of some were incorrect. We knew that Park City uses OpenStreetMap as their basemap and wondered if we could edit our trails to better reflect how they are today. Our team had no previous experience with OSM so it was a big learning curve. After speaking with an OSM US board member, reading many wiki pages, as well as reaching out to the OSM community, we had a better grasp on how to use our data and knowledge of the area to start implementing the edits we wanted in OSM. We also discovered the local Utah chapter who host monthly meetups where our team was able to meet some folks who helped with our edits and saw our project start. They were a great group of people who were super helpful and made us feel a lot more comfortable with reaching our goals in OSM! We have completed most of our main edits and now hope to keep our trails up to date with OSM when we are in our off season.

A really cool outcome from this project is that not only were we able to successfully edit our trails on OSM, this also helped us improve our trail system on the ground. With the help of OSM mappers we were made aware of a trail that had such little use it was nearly impossible to see from aerial imagery. Because of this, our trails crew went out with volunteers on National Trails Day to rework it and make it accessible again! Trails are a huge part of life here in Utah and as land managers and naturalists we believe proper mapping is a necessary step to ensure sustainable trail use, protecting vegetation and wildlife habitat, while also keeping outdoors accessible for everyone.”

What are some other mapping projects going on in the state?

Daniel: “For myself, I recently finished a massive project of reviewing every road in Salt Lake County that still had a tiger:reviewed=no tag, which by the time I finished involved touching over 11k ways by one query. Every single road involved I made sure to align to the latest imagery and updated its name tags… Check out our wiki page on the topic of our streets for more. I’m still working on gathering information on formally proposing these tags to see where else they could be useful… Depending on the day and how much motivation I had, I also would add lanes, turn:lanes, surface, maxspeed, or traffic_calming=* details. I also have spent a good chunk of time working on bus routes for our local transit agency, UTA. According to their data, they now have 84 routes and 5k+ stops, so that’s an ongoing effort to get the routes to the highest detail with every stop.

Other notable local mappers [in OSM Utah] include:

• HashFerret, who… started importing addresses from the National Address Database… and filling in building outlines along the way, really helping with how complete the map looks.

• There’s also troysalt, [a board member at Sweet Streets SLC, an advocacy group for safe, inclusive transportation and people-first public spaces] whose efforts are focused on biking infrastructure, sidewalks, and curb ramp accessibility. He was the one who made it first to mapping Salt Lake City’s newest bike lanes along 200 South, which sport our first islands for bus boarding on the other side of the bike lane.

• Aweech… has been doing a lot of surveying recently, especially at Daybreak’s newly opened baseball field for the Salt Lake Bees team, and all the new infrastructure (including a light rail station) that are going up around it”

Learn more about OSM Utah

If you’d like to learn more about the people behind OSM Utah and all of the wonderful work they are doing across the state, check out their website (notably, their 2024 Year in Review), and join the conversation on the #local-utah channel of the OSM US Slack! If you’re in the Salt Lake City area, their next Map Night is August 5th.

“I joined OSM Utah because I got a remote job that uses OSM a lot (I work at Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team). I learn better in person and wanted to feel connected to the greater OSM community so I started going.” Jessie Pechmann

Do you know a mapper or mapping group worthy of a highlight? Reach out to newsletter@openstreetmap.us.

In addition to offering a fiscal home for projects, the Charter Project program provides crucial ongoing technical, infrastructure, and engineering support. To that end, in 2024 OSM US was able to hire a dedicated Charter Project Engineer (Jake Low), made possible through donations from corporate partners. This funding enabled major technical improvements to our Charter Projects, including a new, faster backend for OSMCha, and making MapRoulette’s codebase and documentation more friendly to contributors. The funding also covered the significant server costs associated with running these applications, which have tens of thousands of active users.

Unfortunately, funding for the Charter Project Engineer role runs out on August 1, and has not been renewed by its original sponsors. Without further funding, we will be unable to continue making new technical investments in these Charter Projects. We will also have to take immediate steps to reduce their ongoing operating costs, such as downsizing servers or restricting use of APIs that support third-party integrations.

The Tragedy of the Commons

The Charter Projects represent shared infrastructure that generates enormous value for the entire OpenStreetMap ecosystem. MapRoulette and OSMCha together serve more than 40,000 OSM contributors a month. MapRoulette’s users have made more than 300,000 map improvements in 2025 alone, and OSMCha reviewers flag over 1,000 bad changesets each month. Data consumers rely on the OSM community to keep the map accurate and up-to-date, and the community relies on these tools to do so. In addition, companies integrate these tools directly into their data workflows: creating millions of MapRoulette tasks to focus community efforts on data improvements they care about, and using OSMCha’s APIs to identify harmful edits and filter them out of data they use when creating maps and other user-facing products.

Yet the responsibility for maintaining these tools falls almost entirely on volunteers and small nonprofits like ours. While some companies and organizations have stepped up as excellent stewards—and we’re deeply grateful for their support—many others haven’t yet recognized the need to invest in the digital infrastructure they depend on. It is disappointing to see so many companies extract millions of dollars in value from OpenStreetMap data and tools, but then refuse to reinvest a small fraction of that value to support basic maintenance for the software that they rely on.

The situation is hardly unique to OSM US’s Charter Projects; most tools and services in the OSM ecosystem are largely supported by volunteers or with extremely limited funding. The result is predictable: essential infrastructure slowly degrades, while those who benefit most contribute least. The volunteer ethos that makes OpenStreetMap extraordinary becomes a convenient excuse for companies to avoid paying for its maintenance.

The Cost of Inaction

Without dedicated engineering support, these projects will degrade. Services like MapRoulette, OSMCha, and OpenHistoricalMap do not run themselves. Servers will crash and need to be recovered. Dependencies will break, forcing patches. API keys will need to be rotated. What starts as delayed feature development becomes service instability, then unreliability, and eventually obsolescence.

For volunteer mappers, this means losing tools integral to their workflows. For companies, it means losing APIs and integrations their products depend on, and the erosion of the digital commons that supports their businesses. Funding continued development would cost far less than rebuilding these capabilities internally or licensing commercial alternatives.

Difficult Decisions Ahead

If we cannot secure funding for our Charter Projects, we will be forced to take actions that prioritize keeping these tools online and functional for our volunteer mapping community while scaling back support for commercial and high-volume users. This may include:

• Discontinuing access to APIs that support corporate workflows (e.g. bulk creation of challenges in MapRoulette or batch access to validation info in OSMCha)
• Eliminating technical support for commercial use cases
• Halting new feature development to focus on infrastructure stability and maintainability

These aren’t changes we want to make. They represent a step backwards for the ecosystem we’ve all worked to build. But without the funding to devote staff time to these projects, the alternative is worse: watching these critical tools slowly become unreliable and eventually unusable for everyone.

A Call to Action

The Charter Project program has shown what’s possible with dedicated funding. With proper support, these projects can thrive, evolve, and continue serving the OpenStreetMap community for years to come. Without it, we risk losing essential pieces of the software landscape that supports our digital commons.

Organizational Memberships are crucial to the sustainability of this program and of OpenStreetMap US. We are asking organizations that depend on the tools we maintain to become Members, and for existing Members to consider increasing their level of support or making an additional donation.

Our mission at OpenStreetMap US is to support and grow the OpenStreetMap project and community, both in the United States and beyond. This work benefits thousands of companies, big and small. We hope that these companies will choose to participate in the upkeep of the digital commons from which we all benefit.

This year, the OSM US team wants to look back on SotM US by highlighting your experiences as scholars, scavenger-hunters, educators, GIS professionals, first-timers, and OSM-lovers. Below are excerpts from a variety of blog posts, social media posts, and quotes from folks in the community – thank you for sharing your reflections. Think of this blog post as a digital postcard of sorts!

Lindsey Peña – Chief Operating Officer at NSGIC and conference scholar

“Have you ever experienced that amazing moment when you ⚡ZING⚡ with someone? During Andrew Middleton’s “Know Your Audience!” presentation at [State of the Map US] I experienced just that with Tee Barr. During the hands-on arts and crafts session (yes…markers, paper, tape and scissors were involved! ✂️), attendees were paired up and given the task to create a map of the room we were sitting in with a particular animal perspective in mind. Andrew made the rounds assigning animals…a horse 🐎, a mouse 🐁, and for me and Tee, it was the pigeon…”

Lindsey and Tee during Andrew’s Thursday workshop

(Read Lindsey’s full post on State of the Map US 2025 here.)

Mike Migurski – Chief Technology Officer at CARTO and SotM US veteran

“I’ve attended SOTM US since the first one In Atlanta and it’s consistently been one of my most valuable conferences each year. When I was working in an agency, a non-profit, a startup, or a major corporation the annual conference has always included the mappers, engineers, and community organizers I needed to stay connected with OpenStreetMap. OSM US does such a great job of keeping all these groups in its close orbit so everyone’s working toward the world’s best map.”

Jamie Tadrzynski – Educator in Nevada, conference scholar, and poster presenter

“I was lucky enough to attend the State of the Map US Conference in [Boston] last week with OpenStreetMap US and present some of my work with the Teen Maptivists initiative. My students and I have been researching food deserts in the city of North Las Vegas and in southern Nevada. It was such an interesting experience to be surrounded by professional and hobbyist geographers and lean more into the world of geospatial technologies. Coming from a more traditional historian-trained background, it has been eye opening to see the parallels of geography and history and intertwine the two…”

Jamie showcasing their poster on mapping food deserts in Las Vegas, Nevada

Jamie in a group photo with other educators and conference scholars

(Read more about Jamie’s thoughts here.)

Meagan Briganti – GIS Director at Kendall County, Illinois, speaker, and scavenger hunter

“[The] scavenger hunt was incredible! it was a wonderful way to explore the city and a great way to spend time with friends… The conference was incredibly refreshing and inspiring! Seeing so many people genuinely passionate about mapping and their community was awesome! It reminded me why I fell in love with Geography/mapping in the first place.”

(Be sure to check out Meagan and Josh Carlson’s talk: Hold on to your Pearls Grandma, We’re Switching to OSM!)

Jazzy Smith – Chief of Staff at BetaNYC and member of the OSM US Board of Directors

“At the heart of SOTM US are the people. What always sticks with me are the stories and the minutia of their day-to-days: what brought them here, what they care about, how mapping shows up in their lives, how their lives show up in the map. I always leave touched by what folks choose to share — their art, their struggles, their neighborhoods.

I met Clifford Snow, known for his large contributions in the Pacific Northwest. He’s also a glass-blowing artist — his OSM username is Glassman. I attended his talk on Safe Routes to School, where he discussed how OSM can be used to map key pedestrian infrastructure around schools: speed limits, traffic calming, crosswalks, and more. Clifford’s talk was a reminder that good mapping reflects the needs of local communities. Something as simple as walking to school — often treated as just another challenge — can become something we care for and improve through mapping.

Clifford giving his talk on Safe Routes to School on Friday

I didn’t get to see Tim Feller’s talk in person, but I heard it was phenomenal — and from my interactions with him, he is a thoughtful and hilarious person. His presentation, Mapping for Neurodiversity: A Call to Innovate, invited the OSM community to consider how mapping can better serve people who are neurodiverse. He introduced neurodiversity as an umbrella term that embraces a wide range of cognitive differences — including autism, ADHD, dyslexia, Tourette’s, and more — and challenged us to consider how we describe features, choose datasets, and collaborate. His talk explored sensory-friendly mapping, inclusive cartography, and game-based learning, and from what I heard, folks left inspired and thinking differently about what inclusive mapping can look like.”

(Read the rest of Jazzy’s blog post on the BetaNYC website.)

Looking for more State of the Map US content? View conference photos on the OpenStreetMap US Flickr, and watch recorded talks on our Youtube channel.

OpenStreetMap US wants to fill that gap! The SOTMUS Public Service Scholarship is open to current and recent government employees to attend State of the Map US 2025 in Boston, June 19-21, 2025. Participation from our public partners will help OpenStreetMap continue to thrive as a key component of the US spatial data infrastructure. Let’s maintain crucial networks, strengthen government capabilities, and make a positive impact in the lives of dedicated geospatial professionals. Interested in making an investment? Additional donations would allow us to extend the scholarship’s reach so consider supporting today!

Scholarship Details

At the time of publication, OSM US has received enough funding to support four scholarships, but the call for funding is still open. Scholarship recipients may receive:

• Support towards travel expenses (up to $250 reimbursement, lodging/transportation receipts required).

• A conference ticket to State of the Map US 2025 (a $280 value).

We ask that scholars commit to actively participate in the conference through birds of a feather sessions, networking opportunities, and socials. Scholars are also encouraged to volunteer at the conference.

Who is Eligible?

This scholarship is the first of its kind and is dedicated to supporting current or former government employees based in the United States who have been impacted by recent budget changes. The scholarship program’s goal is to maintain crucial networks and strengthen government capabilities while mitigating costs that would have otherwise prohibited attendance. Scholars must be US-based and are either currently employed by or have worked for a government agency within the last 4 months. Scholarships will be awarded on a rolling basis, so submit your application today!

Please note: OSM US awarded 18 scholarships to SOTMUS 2025 earlier this year in an annual process open to everyone. You can read more about that scholarship program here.

How do I Apply?

Complete this application form! Scholarships will be awarded on a rolling basis, so don’t delay. The selection committee will notify recipients as decisions are made, or by early June.

Deadline to Apply: The application will close when all donated public service funds are distributed, or June 6 - whichever comes first.

A Request to Applicants

OSM US historically receives hundreds of applications for scholarship programs that a small team must review. Your patience is appreciated through the review process. We will notify ALL APPLICANTS about their acceptance status in a timely manner. Please do not email us asking about the status of your application. These emails slow down the process for everyone.

If you have other questions about the application process, please feel free to contact us at scholarship@stateofthemap.us.

Background

In OpenStreetMap, a changeset is a group of related map edits, made by a single user and typically in a single editing session. When you click “Save” in iD or “Upload” in JOSM, you’re creating and uploading a changeset. This changeset contains all of the edits you made to individual elements on the map. It also has metadata, like your OSM username, a timestamp, and the description you wrote about your edits. Changesets are stored in the OSM database and record the history of edits to the map over time.

OSMCha is an application for viewing OpenStreetMap changesets. To do this, OSMCha needs data about everything that was modified: specifically, it needs to know the complete old and new versions of all elements that were affected by the change, directly or indirectly.

To show changes to the shapes of elements (left) and changes to their tags (right), OSMCha needs to know what both the old and new versions of those objects were for a given changeset.

Changesets from openstreetmap.org don’t contain all of this information “off the shelf”. When you download a changeset from openstreetmap.org via the API (which looks like this), it only contains the new versions of elements, not the old versions. It also does not contain elements that were modified indirectly (e.g. moving some nodes that are part of a way changes the way’s shape, but does not actually generate a new version of that way, so only the nodes would be included in the changeset). These changeset files are optimized to be small in size and easy to compute (they directly match OSM’s underlying data model), but because of this they don’t contain enough detail for visually presenting the scope of the changes to a human. The changes in the planet.openstreetmap.org replication files have this same limitation.

To get the data required to visualize changesets, OSMCha needs to process changesets from the OpenStreetMap API and “augment” them with additional context. These “augmented diffs” are computed in advance and then fetched by the osmcha.org website when you view a changeset.

How OSMCha used to work

Until recently, OSMCha relied on Overpass to generate these augmented diffs. Overpass is a queryable database system for OSM (and the same technology that powers overpass-turbo.eu). For each new changeset, OSMCha would run an Overpass query to find the old and new versions of each element, and store the results in an S3 bucket called real-changesets. The osmcha.org website would then fetch data from this bucket whenever you viewed a changeset.

Sidenote: In principle the real-changesets data was free for anyone to use, but it was stored in a bespoke JSON-based format designed specifically for OSMCha, and so in practice OSMCha was the only software that ended up using this data.

There were some problems with this approach. Overpass is an impressive and flexible tool, but it’s not meant for this kind of workload, so building augmented diffs in this way is expensive and fairly slow. The Overpass query we use is also prone to false positive matches if two changesets occur in the same area in a very short time window, which means OSMCha occasionally shows changes that aren’t actually part of the changeset you’re looking at.

But the biggest problem turned out to be that this process would frequently fail. This could happen when processing very large changesets, which would cause our Overpass server to run out of memory, or if our Overpass server happened to be under heavy load. It could even happen if there was a network blip between the Overpass server and the machine building the diffs (these two servers were on different continents).

When processing of a changeset failed, it meant there would be no data for that changeset in the real-changesets bucket. If you try to load that changeset on osmcha.org, the website will detect that the data is missing and fall back to running the same Overpass query to try and compute the data it needs. This is what was happening any time you tried to view a changeset on OSMCha and it took 30+ seconds to load: you were waiting for an ad-hoc Overpass query to complete, since the changeset wasn’t found in the real-changesets bucket. Ironically, this was happening regularly enough that it created a vicious cycle: users on the website would encounter missing changesets, which would trigger requests to our Overpass server, creating additional load and making the real-changesets pipeline more likely to fail again.

How OSMCha works now

Last month, I finished and deployed a major change to the way OSMCha works. Instead of using the real-changesets data, osmcha.org now loads augmented diffs from a new service called adiffs.osmcha.org. These augmented diffs are in a standard format called Augmented Diff XML, which is supported by various other software in the OpenStreetMap ecosystem.

OSMCha no longer uses Overpass to build these diffs. Here’s how it works instead:

1. A server stores a full mirror of the OpenStreetMap database in OSMExpress format. OSMExpress is a database file format designed specifically for OpenStreetMap data. It makes it possible to efficiently update data in place, allowing you to keep a local copy of OSM in sync with the main database.

2. Every minute, we download a replication file from planet.openstreetmap.org, which contains all of the edits that were made to OSM during the previous one-minute window. The replication file only contains new versions of modified elements, and does not contain elements that were modified indirectly, so we need to augment it. We also need to split it up into a separate diff for each changeset.

3. The OSMExpress database contains the old versions of all of these modified elements, so we can construct an augmented diff by pairing up the old version of each element (from the OSMExpress database) with the new version (from the replication file). We can also use the OSMExpress database to find elements that were indirectly affected (like ways whose nodes were modified) and include those in the augmented diff.

4. Once these diffs are built, we upload them to the adiffs.osmcha.org server so that they are available for the osmcha.org website to load and use.

5. Finally, we use the replication file to update the OSMExpress database, overwriting the old versions of modified elements with new versions, inserting elements that were created, and removing elements that were deleted. This brings our local data in sync with the openstreetmap.org database, so that we’re ready to process the next replication file in a minute.

This new process for building augmented diffs is about 10 to 100 times faster than using an Overpass query. It also uses less memory; so far, we haven’t seen any examples of the process failing because it ran out of RAM while processing a changeset. Since it uses less CPU and RAM, we can comfortably run the new process on less expensive hardware. And since it’s less prone to failure than the old system, it means that a pre-computed augmented diff is nearly always available for the osmcha.org website to load, so OSMCha can show you any changeset you want almost instantly.

The augmented diffs on adiffs.osmcha.org are available for anyone to use. Please reach out to us if you’re interested in building software that makes use of this service.

Graph showing augmented diff requests on adiffs.osmcha.org over the last 7 days.

What else changed

Although osmcha.org looks mostly the same after the change, a lot of work went on “under the hood” to switch from the real-changesets data to the new adiffs.osmcha.org data.

• OSMCha no longer depends on the changeset-map package, which used to provide all of OSMCha’s map rendering capabilities. The way changeset-map works turned out to be closely coupled with the real-changesets JSON format, and the way it was integrated into the OSMCha codebase was also complex and tricky to modify. So instead I reimplemented the map rendering behavior (and only the map rendering behavior) in a new package called maplibre-adiff-viewer. This package is easy to embed into other projects, so you can use it anywhere you’d like to render augmented diffs in the style of OSMCha. As an example, I used it to create the osmcha-cli command line tool, which you can launch from your terminal to view any augmented diff file in your web browser (no website required).

• As its name suggests, maplibre-adiff-viewer is a plugin for MapLibre GL JS, an open-source map rendering engine. The changeset-map package depends on an old version of the Mapbox SDK; newer versions of Mapbox SDK are not open source, so migrating to MapLibre made sense for OSMCha.

• To comply with Mapbox’s Terms of Service, and to improve user privacy, OSMCha no longer loads map tiles, stylesheets, fonts, icons, or other resources from mapbox.com. Instead, these assets are loaded from OSM US servers, or directly from satellite imagery providers (for satellite basemaps) or openstreetmap.org (for the OSM Carto basemap).

Overall, these changes took about 200 hours to develop. OSMCha is an OpenStreetMap US Charter Project, which means that OSM US provides funding to develop and maintain OSMCha. If you benefit from OSMCha, consider donating to support its development (OSM US is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization).

What’s next

There are more improvements coming soon to OSMCha, including:

• Upgrading the backend to Django 5.2 (it currently uses Django 2.2)

• Making the changeset list load faster by tuning the SQL queries used to retrieve this data (in particular, by switching to cursor-based pagination instead of offset-based pagination)

• Optimizing polygon-based filtering of changesets, so that it’s faster to view recent changes in your area of interest

• Improving accessibility of the web interface for people who navigate using a keyboard, rely on a screen reader, or who have color vision deficiency

If you are interested in helping to shape the future of OSMCha, here are some ways you can get involved:

• Join the #osmcha channel on the OSM US Slack to ask questions or share feedback

• Make a feature request or report a bug on our GitHub repository

• Support OSM US financially by becoming an Individual Member. Membership fees directly support our operations, including software development and maintenance

• If your company relies on OSMCha, consider funding development by becoming an Organizational Member

Finally, I’d like to say thank you to everyone who uses OSMCha. By volunteering your time and knowledge to review edits to OpenStreetMap, you are helping to make OSM the most accurate source of geographic information available anywhere. I hope that these changes to OSMCha make it faster and easier for you to review edits in your queue. Please continue to provide feedback so that we can make OSMCha serve you better.

Give a brief history of MapRVA.

After a bunch of Richmond-based mappers met each other at the State of the Map US conference in 2023, I think there was some interest in meeting up. A few months later a community member named Robert reached out on the OSMUS Slack to see if anyone was interested in an RVA meetup. A few of us agreed, and MapRVA has grown ever since!

We’ve had some regulars show up for most meetings, and others come and go. Our membership has generally increased since we started, especially after we published a map of the famed Richmond Water Crisis. We represent a wide range of mapping interests including:

• Bike and pedestrian infrastructure
• Security cameras and ALPRs
• Mapping schools, especially college campuses
• Food pantries around Richmond
• …and much more!

Some of our members are long-time OpenStreetMap contributors, others are local GIS professionals or academics. We welcome anyone, regardless of their experience level, to join in the fun and learn about mapping with us.

“My favorite thing about being a part of MapRVA is learning about all kinds of neat mapping projects outside of my usual areas of interest. School mascots, waterways, pirate bike trails, street name etymology, OpenHistoricalMap, MapRoulette - every meeting brings new collaborations and ideas. 😊”

Kevin Finity

What do MapRVA meetups usually look like?

We try to strike a balance between informal meetups at breweries or restaurants, and more work-oriented meetups where people bring their laptops and get some OpenStreetMap edits in. The latter usually happens at libraries or even one of our homes. More recently we’ve held some virtual “Map & Yap” Zoom calls, which have been great for connecting with community members who might not make it in-person.

Sometimes our meetups are just two people, one time it was over a dozen! We sometimes come to a meeting with a specific task to work on together, e.g. a Maproulette challenge. Other times we just catch up, and hear about the different projects folks are working on!

“My favorite thing about MapRVA is meeting some way cool people and, as a lifelong map lover, being able to scratch my nerd itch with friends. We’re a ragtag group that can make a big impact, as seen by the water crisis map!”

Evan Robohm

The Water Crisis? What was that about?

In January 2025, Richmond experienced a week-long water crisis, during which our city lost water service. It was a confusing time, with little communication from the government about the extent of the outage. MapRVA cobbled together an online survey asking residents to report if they had water at home. We published a map on our website visualizing this data, which caught the attention of local news outlets including our local NPR station (image below).

Come see our talk “How we Mapped the Richmond Water Crisis” at State of the Map US in June to hear the whole story!

Tell us more about the projects folks in MapRVA are working on!

A big focus for us is mapping bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure in Richmond. We host discussions of how to best tag these features in our city, and then work together to keep the relevant OpenStreetMap elements up-to-date. Sometimes this involves a Tasking Manager project to add sidewalks, or a Maproulette challenge to assure the quality of bike lanes. We also maintain OSMCha filters for relevant tags so that we can keep an eye on new contributions.

We are also creating thematic maps for subjects like surveillance apparatuses and community fridges/pantries, powered by OpenStreetMap. These maps are built using Ultra (developed by our very own Daniel Schep!), which enables us to rapidly iterate on both the map data and cartographic styling. Our goal is to make contributing to these maps easier for Richmonders, so that more folks can help map the things they care about.

“Similar to others, my favorite thing about MapRVA is being surrounded by people who are curious. People have different things they may be interested in, but are always excited to see (literally and figuratively) what else is out there.”

Mike O’Brien

Any advice for mappers looking to start meetups in their area?

1. The OpenStreetMap US Slack has been a great place to organize. We also reached out to some active editors directly, which was a surprisingly effective recruitment strategy! (Shout-out to Meet Your Mappers, a tool designed for this purpose!)
2. Meetups can be simple. Meeting at libraries or other public spaces is usually free, and accessible to anyone. Get a friend to join you, and advertise your meetup in online OSM spaces.
3. Follow your own interests. Contributing to and discussing local map data that you care about will attract like-minded folks. It’s ok to chip away at different projects, pass them around the group…remember to have fun!

Editor’s note: OpenStreetMap US also has a microgrant to fund mapping meetups in the United States!

How can I get involved in MapRVA?

• Join the #local-rva channel on the OpenStreetMap US Slack to chat with us
• Follow our fediverse account for meetup and project announcements
• To read more about our work, check out our website!

Thank you for Daniel Schep, Jacob Hall, Kevin Finity, Mike O’Brien, Evan Robohm, and all of the members of MapRVA for their time and insight! Do you know a mapper or mapping group worthy of a highlight? Reach out to newsletter@openstreetmap.us.

Street-level imagery is vital to the OSM community’s pedestrian-centered mapping efforts. This data allows mappers to verify details difficult to detect through aerial imagery, but that pedestrians and folks with mobility aids rely on daily (such as curb cuts, traffic signals and signs, and tactile pavings). OpenStreetMap US is excited to expand our support for this corner of the mapping world in addition to the Pedestrian Working Group and the upcoming Charting the Course theme at State of the Map US 2025.

The primary goals for round 2 of this program are to:

1. Facilitate the capturing of updated, high-quality street-level imagery in major metropolitan areas across the United States.

2. Create a community of imagery contributors that fosters the sharing of knowledge and resources.

3. Make OpenStreetMap better with broader availability of open geospatial data.

This round also brings some exciting updates to the Camera Grant program:

• Sharing is caring: This year, you are encouraged to apply for a Camera Grant on behalf of your mapping-minded friends. We’re hoping to send cameras out to nonprofits, local governments, classrooms, and other community-oriented groups and organizations so the cameras can become a shared resource for mappers across the country.

• Community dashboard: If you become a 2025 Camera Grantee, your Mapillary contributions will be live on the OpenStreetMap US website! Other mappers and imagery contributors will be able to see your local impact in real time.

• Sustainability in mind: We understand that there’s a wide range of ways to contribute to the OpenStreetMap ecosystem, and capturing street-level imagery may not be your niche forever! If you find your camera sitting on the shelf for a while, OpenStreetMap US will help you identify other mappers in your area to loan or send the equipment to.

What’s included?

As a 2025 grantee, you’ll receive the 360° camera plus accessories to help you mount it to a bike or car. Each grant package includes:

• 2025 GoPro MAX 360° camera¹

• Triple suction camera mount

• Selfie stick

• Tripod mount adapter

• 256GB MicroSD card

How do I apply?

You’re in luck – applications open today! Before submitting yours, please review the Grantee Agreement and get in touch with grants@openstreetmap.us if you have any questions.

We’re looking for folks who have experience contributing to OpenStreetMap and Mapillary with a clear plan for how they’ll use the granted equipment. Applications will be reviewed by OpenStreetMap US and accepted on a rolling basis until all 40 grantees are selected.

¹ Update: As of October 20th, 2025, the OSM US & Mapillary Camera Grant Program will include the GoPro MAX2 360° camera, released in September, 2025.

This grant program is made possible with support from Meta.

What activities are funded?

There are three opportunities for funding through OSM US Microgrants:

Travel: Travel Grants are available to support the transportation, lodging, and registration costs for folks speaking about OpenStreetMap at conferences, symposiums, or other professional or academic networking events around the country. Learn more about the Travel Grant ➔

Events: Event Grants are available to new and existing local OpenStreetMap community groups to fund the cost of advertisement, food, space and equipment rental, and other expenses related to hosting meetups, mapathons, mappy hours, and training sessions. Learn more about the Event Grant ➔

Education: In collaboration with TeachOSM, Education Grants are available for two or more academic institutions or organizations looking to collaborate (either virtually or in person) on a mapping project to engage students. Learn more about the Education Grant ➔

OpenStreetMap US is hoping to support newly formed local mapping groups, folks sharing their OSM-based research, educators bringing OSM into their classrooms, and many more mappers across the US!

Do I need to meet any requirements?

There are a few requirements all grantees must meet to ensure the financial sustainability of this new program and that support goes to the US mapping community:

1. Someone must be an active member of OpenStreetMap US (at any tier) both at the time of application, and the time of your grant-funded activities.
   1. If applying for a Travel Grant, you must meet the requirement as an OSM US invididual member.
   2. If applying for the Event Grant on behalf of a community group, one member of the group must meet the requirement as an OSM US individual member.
   3. If applying for the Education Grant, either one educator or organizer can meet the requirement as an OSM US individual member or one of the participating institutions or organizations can meet the requirement as an organizational member.
2. Your grant-funded activities must occur within the United States. Virtual events funded through the Events Grant can be open to international participants, but must be US-focused.

Each grant category has their own additional requirements and guidelines, which you can review on their respective webpages.

How can I apply?

First, look at the grant cycles available this year and determine which application season aligns with your planned event or travel. OpenStreetMap US will not fund any activity that has already occurred by the time of application or grantee notification, so please keep that in mind when applying!

Here is the grant cycle timeline for 2025:

Second, decide which microgrant you’d like to apply for (Events, Travel, or Education) and review the dedicated webpage for that grant detailing specific information you’ll need to know before applying. You may submit an application for more than one grant category in a cycle, but they must not be intended to fund the same event or travel.

Finally, fill out the application form! OpenStreetMap US can’t wait to see what ideas, projects, and opportunities land in our inbox!

Grant applications are reviewed and selected on a quarterly basis. Please see the program webpage for the 2025 application deadlines and other relevant information. All grants are awarded at the discretion of the OSM US staff and Board of Directors. Questions? Email grants@openstreetmap.us.

As with past trends in OpenStreetMap, most edits were made by a small but dedicated group of contributors. I wanted to understand why certain cities have better data than others and identify which variables are contributing to the increases. Here is a look into the data and a few of the most impactful efforts underway contributing to the increase.

Footways | 2023 vs. 2024

The chart below compares footway edits over time in 10 US cities. Every city saw an increase, with Austin, Phoenix, Washington, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Miami growing over 50%. These gains will be hard to sustain year over year as sidewalk networks become more complete, but don’t worry, there is still plenty of mapping to do!

Crossings | 2023 vs. 2024

We see a similar trend with crossings in every city except Los Angeles. Crossings are super important to pedestrian safety and navigation while being particularly difficult and time consuming to map. Crossings often require local knowledge or recent street images to identify tags such as markings, signals, and curbs.

Unmarked crossings are a big challenge to mappers but critical for routability. Local laws dictate how pedestrians can cross at unmarked locations, which makes it difficult to establish consistency within OSM.

This example shows an unmarked crossing in an area with marked crossings. Unmarked crossings are important for routability and must be added judiciously while considering pedestrian safety.

As we look at increasing trends and the rate at which pedestrian data are being generated, below are a few focused efforts underway to improve pedestrian data.

Pedestrian Working Group

On March 5th, 2024, OSM US launched the Pedestrian Working Group (PWG). After working with the community and witnessing different styles of mapping pedestrian data it became evident we needed better guidance to build data fit for purpose. Over the past year the PWG conducted a survey identifying core requirements and designed a draft tiered schema that calls for differing levels of detail based on the intended use case. The PWG is currently soliciting feedback on the schema and identifying partnership opportunities with individuals and organizations committed to improving pedestrian safety with data. Sign up to join the PWG and contribute to making this concept a reality.

Super Mappers

In February of last year I met mycota (Sean), a Environmental Science professor from Arizona dedicated to improving pedestrian data. He mapped a big portion of downtown Phoenix and his individual contributions accounted for 20% of the footways and 15% of the crosswalks added last year. Go Sean!

After meeting Sean I came across more Super Mappers who reside in cities where they map. These mappers are a tremendous resource as they understand local pedestrian regulations, understand areas of need, and perform quality checks to improve data consistency. New York City has a core group of mappers who do a great job with quality monitoring.

Last September kaleidoscopica from Austin Texas posted the message below on Slack. I looked into the numbers and kaleidoscopica was responsible for contributing 1,682 km out of the 1,854 km of footways added in 2024, that’s 90%!

The Walkabout

In the Fall of 2023 Meta launched The Walkabout Initiative, hosting mapathons, webinars, and collaborating with organizations and local mappers to build routable networks in major cities. They had projects in 5 of the top 10 cities focusing on the densest downtown areas. Projects were managed through the Tasking Manager, and Map Roulette used to surface Machine Learning outputs to validate and add missing features. Check out the latest release of Rapid for new “pedestrian friendly” editor improvements.

Walkabout project area that covered all of Brooklyn, NY and took about 9 months to complete. The local community played a big role in mapping and validation.

YouthMappers

Through the Walkabout initiative, YouthMappers and Meta launched a paid internship program with students from George Washington University. The idea was to provide students with practical workforce experience by learning how to map pedestrian features, and supporting community mappers with the heavy lifting associated with adding separate geometry. Since the program launched students have completed 12 Walkabout projects adding 4,396 km of footways – that’s 56% of the total contributions in 2024 for the top cities.

Internship kickoff meeting at George Washington University, April 2024.

Organizational Efforts

In addition to the efforts listed above, I’d like to mention the great work from a number of organizations I’ve coordinated with over the past year who are taking an active role in the quest for better data.

Taskar Center for Accessible Technology: Seattle has some of the highest quality data in the US, thanks in part to a multiyear effort by the Taskar Center who have been hard at work building accessmap, a highly customizable pedestrian navigation map. They are currently expanding coverage of accessmap with data generated through Machine Learning.

Vision Zero: Over the past decade several US cities have adopted the goal of eliminating all pedestrian related fatalities. Cities are forming committees, states are passing legislation, and federal dollars are funneling down to support local initiatives and data generation.

NC-BPAID: National Collaboration on Bicycle, Pedestrian and Accessibility Infrastructure Data was launched in 2023 as a collaborative that aims to develop geospatial data specifications related to bicycle, pedestrian, and accessibility infrastructure in the United States. The goal is to enable the coordination and sharing of data on a national scale.

Get Involved!

We have a long way to go to make pedestrian data complete and usable in cities and towns across America. This is a tremendous effort, and we need more mappers, organizations, and governments to get involved to make OSM the best source for pedestrian infrastructure data available. Here are a few actions you can take now to move this initiative along.

• We need more mappers! Pedestrian data is tedious and time consuming to map but fun once you get past the learning curve. Search “pedestrian” on the OSM US Tasking Manager to find a list of projects. You can also check Map Roulette or use tools like Street Complete to make it easy to improve tags from the field.
• Having recent satellite or aerial imagery is essential. Many major US cities have access to 3”- 6” aerial that’s compatible for editing OSM. There are sources out there currently not being used. Please help us identify those sources so they can be included by default into editors.
• The same goes with Street-level Imagery (SLI), which is critical for accurate mapping. Tools like Mapillary make it easy to contribute SLI, and are integrated with most OSM editors.
• Open pedestrian infrastructure data provided by governments can help improve OSM provided compatible licensing. Open datasets are used to validate features like crosswalks and curbs, and geometries can be added with Rapid.
  • If you have or know of any open pedestrian datasets please reach out to me, someone in the Pedestrian Working Group, or post in the OSM US Slack sidewalks channel. From there we can review the data license and identify ways it can be used to improve OSM.

If you like mapping I’d encourage you to take a look at pedestrian data where you live and consider attending State of the Map US 2025 this June in Boston, MA. The theme is “Charting the Course” and there will be plenty of talks highlighting the successes and challenges of accessible and multimodal transportation. I’d like to thank all the great folks I’ve worked with over the past year, especially mappers and members of the PWG who are committed to making OSM the best single source of geospatial data on earth.

Do you have a project, mapping campaign, event, or story worthy of a guest blog post? The OSM US team invites you to check out the guest post guidelines, and reach out to team@openstreetmap.us with your idea. We’d love to feature you!

The last OSM US Community Survey took place in 2019. If you’re interested in seeing how the 2024 responses match up, you can read the blog post reviewing the 2019 survey here.

A big thank you to everyone who participated. Your feedback, perspectives, and opinions are valued!

The following percentages represent the proportion of all 128 survey responses.

What are People Mapping?

Where in North America are OSM US community members contributing to the map? This map shows where Community Survey respondents have been editing. About 100 mappers who responded to the Community Survey chose to share their OSM usernames with us. The map shows OSM features (tagged elements) that were last edited by one of those users, aggregated into a heatmap.

Try zooming into the map! You might even be able to make out some areas where your own contributions to OSM are visible.

Mapping pedestrian infrastructure has a lot of momentum going into 2025, matching the popularity of mapping points of interest (POIs), and just barely beating out roads (68.7%)! For those 93 sidewalk mappers out there, we invite you to contribute to one of the many locally-organized pedestrian-focused OSM US Tasking Manager projects, like these ones in Kendall County, Chicago, and Richmond!

The majority of survey respondents enjoy mapping where they live/have lived (97.6%), and/or places they have traveled to (87.5%). Some of the “other” responses include “Wherever MapRoulette takes me,” “Under-mapped places like those highlighted by https://en.osm.town/@SmallTownUSA,” and a number of entries for places related to the mapper’s profession.

Most survey respondents contribute as a desktop/remote mapper (92.2%) and/or a field/mobile mapper (79%).

You can see a fairly even distribution between people who have been involved in OpenStreetMap for 1-5 years (26.6%), 5-10 years (24.2%), and 10-15 years (27.3%). An extra welcome to the 9.4% of respondents who have been involved for less than 1 year!

It appears the most widely used OSM US-supported projects are OSMCha (55.5%) and MapRoulette (66.4%) (both OSM US Charter Projects).

Demographics

California is the most-represented state in the 2024 Community Survey out of the 124 people who gave their location with 11 responses, followed closely by Virginia (10) and Washington State (9). There were 33 states represented, plus DC! Most states had more than one respondent, and if you have yet to meet that local mapping friend, join the OSM US Slack and your #local-[state] channel.

The majority of survey respondents identified as white (79.9%), male (80.5%), and between the ages of 35-39 (18.8%). This result highlights the need to continue and expand efforts to create welcoming and accessible spaces for the BIPOC, queer, and marginalized mappers, researchers, data users, community leaders, educators, and project maintainers in our community. The OpenStreetMap US team has centered this as a 2025 priority.

The largest number of respondents identified as a local community member/leader (46.1%), followed by OSM US Working Group member (17.9%) and new to the OSM community (14.1%).

Long Answer Questions

Here are some highlights from two of the long answer questions asked in the Community Survey. They represent common themes, unique stories, or funny responses that the OSM US team simply enjoyed reading. Some responses have been edited for clarity.

Frequently Asked Questions

The last survey question provided space for folks to ask questions or give additional context to prior responses. Here are the answers to the most common questions asked:

Can I join a Working Group even if I am not a member?

Yes! Anyone is welcome to join OpenStreetMap US Working Groups. For most Working Groups, just complete the Working Group Interest Form and you’ll be added to upcoming calendar invitations. You can find the Education Working Group on Meetup!

Is there anything to learn from the State of the Map US 2025 for a new person?

Definitely! This year, the first day of the conference will be entirely workshop sessions for OSM users and editors of varying skill levels. Birds of a Feather sessions and social events are also fantastic spaces to get to know people with similar interests and ask questions directly to the folks who maintain the tools and projects you use. There’s something for everyone at State of the Map US, whether you’ve mapped all the sidewalks in Chicago or just opened iD editor for the first time!

Are there any [name your city/state/area] groups active currently that I can get involved with?

Maybe! Here are the best ways to find active mapping groups in your area:

• Find relevant #local-[city/state/area] channels on the OSM US Slack.
• Check OSMCal for any online or in person events. The platform is used by local mapping groups all over the globe.
• Look at the OSM Community Index and zoom in to your location.

If you’re unable to find a group, that’s a great reason to start one yourself! OSM US is launching a microgrant program for new and existing local communities across the United States in the coming weeks. Subscribe to the OSM US monthly newsletter to be notified of when applications open!

Can OSM US leave X and get on Bluesky?

Heard! OSM US is taking a break from posting on X, but you can now find us @osmus.bsky.social!

1. The Team Grew

OSM US welcomed Jake Low, Software Engineer, and Alyssa Castronuovo, Program Coordinator, in August! Jake is an on-staff maintainer for two OSM US Charter Projects (OSMCha and MapRoulette) and, as a long-time Trails Working Group member, he is helping shape the future of the Trails Stewardship Initiative. Alyssa works with the team on OSM US events like Mapping USA and Mappy Hours, and coordinates the behind-the-scenes of current (and future) programs including Mapping for Impact and Community Projects.

2. State of the Map US 2024

Mappers, community members, and open data enthusiasts came together the second weekend of June in Salt Lake City, Utah to celebrate The Great Outdoors at State of the Map US 2024. All corners of the mapping world were discussed – from what it means to map the world’s largest miniature railroad to how MapRoulette can strengthen communities.

To read more, check out the conference recap post!

3. OSM US Launched the Community Project Program

In September, OpenStreetMap US created the Community Project Program to amplify grassroots innovation. This initiative provides small-scale projects with benefits like increased visibility, nonprofit affiliation, a monthly stipend, and long-term support. It complements the Charter Project Program, which supports larger initiatives with greater organizational needs.

Since the start of this program, OSM US has welcomed three projects aboard:

• OpenStreetMap Americana: A cartographic style inspired by paper highway maps, built using open-source vector tile technology.
• OSM Merge: A conflation tool built for improving trail and rural road data.
• SliceOSM: Made-to-order and freshly baked slices of ‘osm.pbf’ regional extracts.

Applications remain open year-round. If you have a project or tool that benefits the OpenStreetMap ecosystem, check out the guidelines and apply!

4. OSM US Welcomed New Members

OpenStreetMap US offers membership opportunities for individuals and organizations at different tiers. Members provide sustained support for the programs, tech, and advocacy OSM US staff and volunteers work on throughout the year!

Individual members participate in OSM US board elections (which are coming up!), receive discounts on ticketed events, and more. This year, OSM US welcomed 118 first-time members, and the number of current members increased 29.8% from 2023!

Organizational members give critical and sustainable support to OSM US from government agencies, academic institutions, and private companies throughout the year. 2024 saw incredible growth in membership; Kendall County, Illinois Dept. of Gis became the first Community Member! MassGIS became the first state department Organizational Member, and Meta, Esri, and the National Parks Service became top-level Strategic Members.

The OSM US team is so grateful for both new and returning members in 2024, thank you for supporting the organization!

5. The Pedestrian Working Group took its First Steps

Since the first meeting in March, the Pedestrian Working Group has made great strides toward a map full of sidewalk geometry, kerb nodes, and tactile paving. This diverse group of stakeholders is working towards a tiered tagging schema to help mappers, local governments, data analysts, and more to determine the quality of their local sidewalk data in OpenStreetMap. Take a look at their draft wiki page!

The Pedestrian Working Group meets on the third Tuesday of every month at 3:00 pm EST. If you’re interested in joining, sign up here.

6. OSM US Charter Projects Thrived

OpenStreetMap US supports OpenHistoricalMap, OSMCha, and MapRoulette via a fiscal sponsorship model to ensure the continued growth of these key projects. Hear directly from the teams behind these projects about their 2024 highlights:

OpenHistoricalMap:

OpenHistoricalMap is growing by leaps and bounds as we celebrate our 15th birthday. Over the past year, our date-annotated data has grown by more than half with the help of 255 new historical mappers. We now have the most comprehensive coverage of historical U.S. county and time zone boundaries anywhere on the Internet, serving as scaffolding for extensive and growing coverage of local boundaries in New Jersey, Michigan, and elsewhere. Abroad, mappers are similarly building out coverage of the British Empire, Holy Roman Empire, and various other polities from past centuries. Additionally, the OHM advisory group has been working behind the scenes to facilitate solutions to community needs and establish partnerships with academia and GLAM institutions. For the first time, OHM partnered with the OSMF to participate in the Google Summer of Code, resulting in editor improvements that mappers use every day.

Learn more about what OpenHistoricalMap was up to in 2024 (like the new Railway style, integration with Gramps Web, and more) on the new OHM forum!

OSMCha:

After welcoming OSMCha as a Charter Project in late 2023, the project migrated to entirely OpenStreetMap US infrastructure. This allowed the team behind OSMCha to make necessary improvements to decade-old code and reduce project costs for a more financially sustainable future. To signify this migration, OSMCha released version 1.0!

MapRoulette:

In 2024, over 500,000 changesets were made with the #maproulette hashtag! The MapRoulette team has been hard at work constantly improving the user experience for the folks contributing all those changesets. Since the start of 2024, MapRoulette now features Rapid editor integration and a major database upgrade has reduced unscheduled downtime to near zero.

Jake joining the OSM US team was a shared 2024 highlight for both MapRoulette and OSMCha!

Did you know you can donate directly to OpenHistoricalMap, OSMCha, and MapRoulette? If you use any or all of these platforms throughout the year, please consider supporting their ongoing maintenance and development!

And the year’s not over! In just the next few weeks…

• The OpenStreetMap US Community Survey closes on January 3rd.
• Mapping USA, OSM US’s annual virtual conference, is on January 24th & 25th. Register for free here!
• Early bird ticket sales and the Call for Proposals close for State of the Map US 2025 on January 31st.
• Three board seats are open in the upcoming OSM US elections!

It’s clear the OSM US team has much to be thankful for in 2024, and plenty of reason to head into the new year eager to continue advocating for the tech, projects, and people in this wonderful community. Help the OSM US team hit the ground running in 2025 by joining as a member, or making a donation before the new year!

Interested in keeping up with all things OSM US in the new year? Subscribe to our monthly newsletter!

Here’s to the mappiest year yet!

• Supporting the Executive Director & staff team
• Supporting the mapping community through Slack, email, mailing lists and chat rooms
• Facilitating interactions with other organizations, academics, government, and private companies and supporting fundraising efforts

As a reminder, board members now serve staggered, two-year terms. There are three board seats subject to this election. The board members who have terms expiring are Diane Fritz, Priyanka Miller and Matthew Whilden. Matt and Priyanka are eligible to run this cycle, but Diane must wait 1 year before running again. Board members who will continue to serve through 2026 are Harrison Devine and Levente Juhász. A big thank you to the outgoing board members for their service and dedication to OSM US!

What Makes a Great Board Member?

What makes a difference is being passionate about supporting the OpenStreetMap community in the United States and the mission of OSM US. Legal, fundraising, or financial management experience (particularly in nonprofit and open source spaces) is optional but highly beneficial to supporting the growth of our organization. Overall, a great board member prioritizes guiding staff and fellow board members in achieving organizational priorities and aligning these with the needs of our community. Any active, paid member of OpenStreetMap US is eligible to become a board member.

The OpenStreetMap US Board of Directors is a governance-style nonprofit board with volunteer board members focusing on overall mission, strategy, oversight, and accountability. This free short course from Nonprofit Ready provides an overview of nonprofit board service and effective board leadership (completing the course is not required for running).

Curious about board service? Join our information session with existing board members on January 24th at Mapping USA. Hear from existing board members to learn more and ask questions about board roles and activities. Mapping USA is a free virtual conference that is open to all, including non-members. Register here!

Requirements & Expectations

To be eligible for nomination:

• Be passionate about OpenStreetMap and its community, and interested in shaping strategy and helping with governance.
• Be a current member of OpenStreetMap US by February 10, 2025. Join today!

As an elected board member, you will be expected to:

• Attend regular (usually monthly) one-hour, virtual board meetings.
• Read materials provided by the Executive Director before board meetings.
• Communicate with the board and staff team regularly.
• Represent community and organizational interests over personal interests.
• Contribute 1-5 hours per month to community engagement activities such as hosting a Mappy Hour, participating in a Working Group, actively supporting the community through communication channels, or writing a blog post.

Nomination Instructions

Nominations will be open from Saturday, January 25, 2025, through Sunday, February 9, 2025. To nominate yourself, please go to the election wiki page, and add yourself to the list. You can also see more information about the schedule and process there.

Nominees are encouraged (but not required) to provide position statements upon nomination via links on the election wiki page or a statement embedded in the table. In place of position statements on the wiki, nominees will have the opportunity to state their positions and answer questions during the virtual Nominee Town Hall.

Town Hall

There will be one virtual Town Hall with candidates the week of February 10, 2025, before voting begins. During the Town Hall, you will have a chance to ask questions and hear from the candidates. More information, including time and registration link, will be posted to the wiki closer to the date.

Election

To vote in the OpenStreetMap US board elections, you must be a paid & active voting member of OpenStreetMap US AND have selected Opt-In for your voting status. You must meet these requirements by Sunday, February 23, 2025, at 11:59 pm EST to receive a ballot and vote in this year’s election.

If you are an active member but have not indicated your voting status, you must do so by the date and time listed above. Questions about your membership or voting status? Please log into your Neon account to confirm. Not a member? Register here!

Voting will start on Monday, February 24th at noon EST and end on Sunday, March 2nd at 11:59 pm EST. We will announce the new board members on March 3rd.

A Note on Systems & Processes

The OpenStreetMap US Governance Committee will oversee the voting process. We will continue to use Ranked Choice Voting. Results will be confirmed by a member of the Governance Committee.

Best of luck to all the nominees! And thanks for voting!

1. Increase SAFETY for outdoor enthusiasts on public lands
2. Improve EQUITABLE ACCESS to trails for all citizens
3. Promote RESPONSIBLE RECREATION for the protection of our natural environment and out of respect for tribal and private lands

The dedicated Trails Working Group has found that both government sources and OSM trail data can be incomplete, out of date, or missing important metadata. To address this issue, OSM US and its partners have been developing an accessible workflow through multiple pilot programs for land managers, park rangers, and volunteer trail stewards to improve the trail data being used in third party applications, reducing the risk that hikers get lost or end up in dangerous situations.

Wrapping up the Utah Pilot

Planning for a statewide Utah campaign began in October 2023. Since then, OpenStreetMap US and its partners have been working on building relationships, technical requirements, and initial mapping workflows within Utah while simultaneously developing and providing the resources necessary to expedite and scale the Initiative to a national level.

After solidifying trail tagging schema through the previous Washington State pilot, Bryce Canyon National Park and surrounding priority areas were chosen as pilot locations, which were updated using OpenStreetMap US Tasking Manager Tasks #447, #451, and #452.

The objectives of the pilot were to:

1. Validate the Trail Stewardship Initiative’s recommended trail tagging schema by expanding its application to areas of high recreation use on Utah public lands
2. Continue testing the existing workflow to identify roadblocks for tagging improvement on trails
3. Expand adoption and support for the Initiative with federal and state public land management agencies, local advocacy groups, and other key stakeholders in Utah

Thanks to pilot participants, over 1,100 miles of trail were updated in Utah! Trails in all five of Utah’s national parks (Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, and Arches), as well as most trails in Dixie National Forest and popular recreation areas near Moab, have been reviewed and the following information added:

• Which entity operates or maintains the trail (operator=*)
• If it is a formal or informal/social trail (informal=yes/no)
• The name of the trail (name=*)
• If access to the trail is prohibited or discouraged by the land owner or manager (access=private/discouraged/no/permissive/unknown)
• If access to the trail is designated or allowed for foot traffic, bikers, horses, off-highway vehicles, and more (foot=designated/yes/no, etc.)

Thank you to the mappers, hikers, land managers, and volunteers who contributed their knowledge to this pilot project, and to all of the members of the Trails Working Group!

Where to Next?

The Utah pilot furthered our hypothesis that in order to improve the accuracy of the nationwide trail network in OpenStreetMap, the Trails Stewardship Initiative should invest in tooling and documentation that empowers hikers, land managers, and mappers alike to better steward trail data. Volunteers who participated in the pilot project highlighted several difficulties they experienced when mapping trails in OpenStreetMap:

1. Inaccuracies in the trail data may not be immediately apparent when looking at OpenStreetMap (the default OSM Carto style, for example, does not visually distinguish between official and unofficial trails), so issues can easily go unnoticed.
2. Certain trail data (such as access and allowed modes of travel) must be sourced from official maps or datasets. When this data is entered into OSM manually, the process is slow and prone to data entry errors.
3. The complexity of trail mapping and the lack of clear documentation is often a barrier to entry for new mappers, outdoor enthusiasts, and land managers interested in improving the maps they rely on.

To help address these issues, OpenStreetMap US and the Trails Stewardship Initiative have been building several new tools and planning a trail-focused community initiative:

OpenTrailMap

To better identify gaps in trail data across the United States, OpenStreetMap US is developing OpenTrailMap. Today, OpenTrailMap is a trail visualizer that depicts all of the OSM trail data in the United States, including path segments and points of interest such as trailheads and ranger stations. Users can select a trail to view its attributes in a detailed, friendly interface, simplifying the process to identify and address issues in trail data. If a trail manager or trail user spots an error, they can fix it themselves, or they can drop a note and submit a request for an experienced mapper to address the problem.

As OSM US is able to secure funding, further development is planned for OpenTrailMap to feature application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable it to talk with other apps: namely, third party recreation apps that consume OSM data. The goal is for users of those apps to be prompted to edit or suggest issues with their trail using the accessible OpenTrailMap interface.

OSM Merge

OpenStreetMap US recently welcomed OSM Merge as part of our Community Project Program. OSM Merge is a software package for data conflation of official rural road and trail data from the US Forest Service, the National Parks Service, and various state and local governments. Instead of searching for and manually transcribing this official data into OpenStreetMap, mappers can focus on reviewing and validating. This allows for vast improvements to be made to the OpenStreetMap data that rural emergency response teams and recreationists rely on.

The Digital Trail Ambassador Program

The paid staff and volunteers managing and maintaining trails across the United States are often unaware of the crowdsourced nature of OpenStreetMap and its widespread use by third-party navigation apps, let alone how to correct or update OSM themselves. These folks hold the greatest knowledge about their respective trail systems, and are often the ones left assisting lost or endangered hikers following incorrect and unverified information. To bridge this knowledge gap, the Trails Working Group is finalizing a vision for the Digital Trails Ambassador program, intended to connect the land users and managers looking to update trail data in OpenStreetMap with experienced mappers in their area.

The Path Ahead

The Trails Working Group is currently drafting a 2025 Road Map, to include strategy for piloting the Digital Trail Ambassador Program and fundraising for the further development of OpenTrailMap. Starting in 2025, the Working Group will convene a general meeting once a month, with smaller subcommittee meetings to address specific initiatives. With more than 100 folks showing interest in the Working Group, the monthly meeting will be a space to build relationships, share ideas, and catch up on all things trails across the nation. We’re always looking for new voices and perspectives in the room, so we invite you to sign up and join!

If you are invested in the success of the Trails Stewardship Initiative and would like to see the program expand to areas important to you, please consider donating to the Trails Stewardship Fund.

Happy trails!

SliceOSM is a new OpenStreetMap US Community Project that lets you draw an area on the map and download a fresh up-to-the-minute extract of OpenStreetMap data for that area in OSM PBF format. Originally developed in the Protomaps project, SliceOSM seeks to make regional extracts of up-to-date OSM data available to everyone.

SliceOSM makes it easy to download extracts of OSM data in the same standard OSM PBF format that is used for the official Planet file. The planet file is available from planet.openstreetmap.org, but it’s nearly 80 GiB, which can make it challenging to use. With SliceOSM, you can download a much smaller extract of OSM data for your local neighborhood, city, or national park, and then use any tool that supports the .osm.pbf format to work with the data. For example, you can use osm2pgsql to import the data into PostGIS, use Planetiler to create vector tiles from the data, load it into GraphHopper or Valhalla to plan routes, or use QGIS or DuckDB to perform analysis.

You can find SliceOSM at slice.openstreetmap.us. You can also read more about the history and tech stack of SliceOSM on the Protomaps Blog.

What is the Community Project Program?

OpenStreetMap US launched the Community Project Program in September to strengthen the volunteer-run projects and tech that support the vibrant and creative OpenStreetMap community.

Do you have a potential Community Project? Check out our guidelines and submit an application!

Contributing

Project maintainer Brandon Liu is looking for developers interested in improving the user interface and convenience features for SliceOSM. Check out the GitHub, and join the conversation at #sliceosm on the OSM US Slack!

Tool Updates

Over the past year, Public Domain Map has been rebuilt from the ground up with the goal of making the tool more user-friendly, robust, and scalable.

On the backend, all mapping previously occurred in a single OpenStreetMap-like database. Now, each project exists in its own database. This means that mappers will no longer need to untangle unrelated data and can focus on one task at a time. Project managers can quickly spin up as many Public Domain Map databases as needed, and can easily seed those databases with data in PBF or OSM XML formats. Data exports are also much simpler.

On the frontend, Public Domain Map has been further integrated into the OSM US Tasking Manager. Project creators can now select which of the active Public Domain Map databases to target when setting up a project. Notably, mappers no longer need to set up a separate account to participate in Public Domain Map tasks. You can simply log in with your existing OpenStreetMap account in Tasking Manager and grant access to the Public Domain Map server.

Thanks to the wide web of collaborations at OpenStreetMap US, these improvements were developed in tandem with the TeachOSM Sandbox, a reusable OSM training environment intended for use in education. Stay tuned for more details about the TeachOSM Sandbox in the new year.

The North Carolina Emergency Management Pilot

OpenStreetMap US is currently piloting the Public Domain Map workflow with North Carolina Emergency Management (NCEM) to map building footprints in Cumberland County. The NCEM team needs building footprint data to assess damage after natural disasters and identify occupied buildings during mass search and rescue efforts, among other uses. In partnership with OpenStreetMap US, NCEM launched Task #495 through the OSM US Tasking Manager to crowdsource these footprints, splitting Cumberland County into manageable grid areas to be tackled by volunteer mappers.

In September, OpenStreetMap US hosted a virtual Mappy Hour with Gary Thompson, Deputy Hazard Mitigation Chief at NCEM. Gary illustrated how his team uses OSM data to develop their regional flood plan map. With building footprint data, Gary described how their map can “visually show which buildings are in or out of the flood hazard area” and “add information about each building… to determine how much impact is going to occur if a 100-year flood event occurs.” Hear more from Gary in the recorded Mappy Hour on the OSM US YouTube.

Thank you to the over 50 volunteer mappers and NCEM staff who have contributed to this pilot project so far! However, there are still a lot of buildings left to be mapped. We invite you to start mapping in Public Domain Map, and don’t forget to square those corners!

What’s Next?

In terms of tooling, the next and final major stage of development is the creation of a conflation workflow to bring Public Domain Map data into OpenStreetMap. This data is a strong candidate for importing into OSM, since it is guaranteed to be recent, reviewed by a government authority, tagged in the OSM schema, compatible with OSM tools, and permissively licensed. Of course, Public Domain Map data will need to be conflated and reviewed against existing data before it can be imported.

OSM US is also looking into the use of Public Domain Map in cases where the type of data being collected is not suitable for OpenStreetMap. This could include temporal, socio-geographic, opinionated, novel, speculative, or purely fictional data. For example, a public works department could spin up a Public Domain Map instance to allow residents to map maintenance issues in their city. A researcher could ask study participants to map every place they saw a beaver in their local park. A tabletop RPG club could collaboratively create a fantasy map for their next game. The possibilities are many.

In 2025, OSM US will be relaunching the Public Domain Map Working Group. The group will be an opportunity for stakeholders to convene and discuss further opportunities for public domain crowdsourcing, and members will be tasked with supporting the development of the initiative.

Get Involved!

Are you looking to use Public Domain Map? Reach out to info@publicdomainmap.org.

Interested volunteers can stay up to date on the current Public Domain Map pilots by joining the #publicdomainosm channel on the OSM US Slack.

As is the nature of all OpenStreetMap US work, this is a collaborative project. If you have ideas on how we can improve communications, instructions, or any aspect of this project, please share it with us either by feedback form or the info email above.

“My goal is improving the quality of remote highway data in OSM as an aid to emergency response. For larger wildland fires, many of the firefighters are from out of state. They depend on good maps since they aren’t familiar with the area. There is a mix of mobile apps used, but most all of them have OSM as an optional basemap. So improving OSM improves access and safety for firefighters.”

Robert Savoyein Routt Ground-Truthing

What is OSM Merge?

OSM Merge is a software package designed for data conflation: the task of comparing two datasets to match up features that exist in both, and identify discrepancies between them or create a hybrid dataset with the best data from each. OSM Merge is aimed specifically at conflating rural road and trail data from various official sources (like the US Forest Service, National Park Service, as well as state and local governments) and comparing the data with OpenStreetMap. The results can be used to identify errors in OSM that should be reviewed by mappers, or to prepare imports of missing attributes onto existing OSM Features.

The goal of OSM Merge is to improve OSM’s accuracy in rural and backcountry parts of the United States. Much of the road and trail data in remote parts of the US comes from the TIGER import in 2007 and 2008, and hasn’t been reviewed or updated since. Better data sources now exist for remote areas, and OSM Merge creates a workflow where mappers can use these new data sources to efficiently review and update data in OSM. The software is ready to process data for the entire United States and works fully offline.

In addition to the software itself, OSM Merge provides pre-processed input data files on osmmerge.org to make running the software easier and to support building additional conflation workflows using the same datasets.

Trails Stewardship Initiative

For the past few years, the OpenStreetMap US Trails Stewardship Initiative has been working to develop scalable workflows to improve trail data in OSM for recreational users and emergency response teams alike. OSM Merge and the TSI share a common goal of improving OSM data quality in remote areas of the United States. We are excited to partner together to bring new tools and workflows to the mapping community and empower mappers to make OSM the best source of road and trail data in the country.

You can learn more about how Rob fits OSM Merge into his mapping workflow on his blog.

What is the Community Project Program?

OpenStreetMap US launched the Community Project Program in September to strengthen the volunteer-run projects and tech that support the vibrant and creative OpenStreetMap community.

Do you have a potential Community Project? Check out our guidelines and submit an application!

Contributing

Interested in contributing to this tool? Rob’s looking for folks willing to squash bugs and get in the weeds to improve all that OSM Merge has to offer. Check out the project’s GitHub.

Timeline & Deadlines

• November 18: Call for Proposals Opens
• January 31: Deadline for submissions
• Mid-March: Speakers notified of the decision
• End of March: Program Announced

Session Formats & Topics

Newcomers and OSM experts alike, we want to hear from you. OpenStreetMap is powered by a diversity of projects and innovations outside of this year’s mobility theme, so please consider proposals about anything else OSM, open data, or open source. Past topics have included:

• Mobility applications of OSM – accessibility, walking, transit, biking, kayaking, driving
• OpenStreetMap basics and how to’s
• Mapping all the things (rails! trees! shops! trails! boundaries! imports!)
• Indigenous mapping
• Demo that cool tool you built for OSM
• OSM in recreation – hiking, biking, water sports, etc.
• Civic tech – OSM at your school, in education, in government 
• User experiences – how have you been using OSM data?
• Community experiences, such as stories from your local OSM group
• The state of the map in [FILL IN YOUR STATE]
• Corporate and institutional contributions to OpenStreetMap
• OSM in the field

With space for featured speakers, panels, 15-minute talks, 5-minute lightning talks, workshops, and birds-of-a-feather topics, there’s something for everyone. Feel like your idea is a little different? Please submit it anyway and surprise the program committee!

Open Education Track

This year we are featuring an Open Education Track to bring together educators, students, researchers, and those interested in the role of geospatial and OSM in education. Submit your ideas for anything related to open education – using OSM in your classroom, teaching fellow community members, engaging with OSM in higher education, challenges or learning opportunities, or tools you might want to share with others. You name it, we want to hear it!

Workshop Day

New this year, Thursday, June 19th will be a dedicated Workshop Day. All long-form workshops (60+ minutes) will be held at The Foundry from 1pm to 6pm, followed by the welcome social from 6pm to 8pm. More information can be found on the conference logistics page.

Want to demo a tool or share a quick how-to? Consider proposing a 15-minute presentation for Friday or Saturday instead.

Who should submit an idea?

You! If you have never proposed a topic for a conference before, please don’t think it’s not for you. Every year, about half of the speakers at State of the Map US are given by first-timers. The typical SOTMUS attendee is passionate about maps and surely interested in your story! Need some inspiration? Check out talks from past conferences.

Propose a Session

Want to propose a session but need some financial support to attend? Scholarship applications are open! Plus, all speakers will be able to register at the early bird ticket rate.

Have questions? You can email us at sotmus@openstreetmap.us or chat in the #sotmus channel on Slack.

We look forward to seeing you in Boston!

State of the Map US is an opportunity for OpenStreetMap professionals, hobbyists, and enthusiasts to connect, learn from, and collaborate with each other – this year in Boston, Massachusetts from June 19-21, 2025! As a scholar, you’ll get the chance to participate in networking opportunities, listen to talks on developments and projects within the OSM community, and join additional gatherings and special events.

Hear from some of last year’s scholars about their experience:

“In each workshop, without exaggeration, I learn something new. A new perspective or use case for OSM, a new relationship that can be formed between government data and community data, even considering what value authority is! It can get very philosophical, humorous, endearing, mind-blowing, compelling.”

Jazzy Smith

“The organizers worked really hard and did a fantastic job to put this conference together. The workload was light and engaging, so I had plenty of opportunities to enjoy the sessions and meet new people even while volunteering.”

Naeema Haque

OpenStreetMap US is fortunate to have support from our conference sponsors and OSM US members to make these scholarships available. We try our best to make this conference financially accessible for all who are interested in attending, so please apply if the cost is prohibitive to your participation. Similarly, we welcome OSM enthusiasts of all stripes. Whether you would consider yourself an advanced or very beginner mapper, we would love to welcome you to Boston. You can read more about eligibility requirements and other details below.

Scholarship Details

Scholarship recipients may receive:

• Support towards the cost of your travel, based on your location (up to $500 reimbursement)
• Complimentary lodging for 3 nights in the Boston University dorms
• A conference ticket to State of the Map US 2025
• Admittance to special gatherings and opportunities

We ask that scholars commit to either give one lightning talk, or complete two volunteer shifts during State of the Map US (you are also welcome to submit a proposal for a longer talk when the Call for Proposals opens). Feel free to invite your friends and fellow mappers to apply for a scholarship, and take plenty of photos to share on your social media channels! We may also ask that you write a guest blog post about your experience at the conference.

Who is Eligible?

Anyone is welcome to apply for a scholarship to State of the Map US 2025. The goal of the scholarship program is to encourage diversity within our community and mitigate costs that would have otherwise prohibited a scholar’s attendance. We are especially interested in supporting members of the following groups:

• Educators
• Recent high school graduates that are members of a youth organization (such as FFA, 4H, NHS, Boy/Girl Scouts)
• Current or recent university/college students, especially those that are members of geography or geospatial-focused student groups
• Individuals that are community organizers or members of a community-based organization (outside of OpenStreetMap)
• Individuals that are members or provide leadership for local OSM US communities.

How Do I Apply?

Complete this application form! Scholars needing visas must submit their application by December 31, 2024. Scholars who do not need visas can have their application in by January 31, 2025. The selection committee hopes to notify recipients in mid-February.

A Request to Applicants

Every year, we receive hundreds of applications that are reviewed by a small team of staff and volunteers. We ask for your patience through the review process. We will notify EVERYONE if they are accepted or not in a timely manner. Please do not email us asking about the status of your application, these emails slow down the process for everyone.

Questions?

If you have questions about the application process, please feel free to contact us at scholarship@stateofthemap.us.

The 2024 Community Survey is a chance to hear from a broad range of voices about your experiences, perspectives, and ideas for the future. It will ask about your participation in the OSM project, general demographic questions, and any feedback you have for the OSM US team. Many of these questions will be directly compared to responses gathered in the 2019 survey to better understand our progress towards a more inclusive and diverse OSM community.

We believe that diverse input is critical to ensuring that our work continues to align with the needs and aspirations of this community. In early 2025 we will share these survey results on the OSM US website, and discuss them further during Mapping USA on January 24 & 25, 2025. Your results will be viewable to the OpenStreetMap US staff and Board of Directors, and open-ended responses will be shared without identifying information attached.

You can take the survey here.

This survey is intended for the OSM US community, but we will publish international responses if relevant. The survey will close on January 3rd, 2025, so please spread the word and encourage others to participate. Thank you!

Grab a cozy blanket, a mug of hot cocoa, and log in for the fifth year of Mapping USA with OpenStreetMap US! Join fellow mappers, advocates, educators, and OSM enthusiasts for two days of virtual presentations, workshops, and more. As always, we hope that this virtual event will enable many to attend that otherwise would not be able to join an in-person conference.

Submit Proposals through November 25, 2024

Have a neat project or tool to present on? Want to lead a workshop, mapping party, or birds of a feather session? Whether you have been a core contributor since the beginning or are brand new to the world of OpenStreetMap, we invite you to submit a proposal!

Looking for inspiration? Check out 2024 Mapping USA talks.

Registration

This year, in order to best support conference logistics and the programs and tech highlighted at Mapping USA, there is a suggested $10 donation for non-members to attend the event. You can register for Mapping USA 2025 here.

Consider becoming a member today to invest in the year-long work of OpenStreetMap US! If you aren’t already a member, OSM US Regular Membership is $20 annually and provides a 20% discount to all paid events like State of the Map US.

Questions? Email events@openstreetmap.us or chat in the #mapping-usa channel on OSM US Slack. We look forward to seeing you virtually in January!

OSM Americana began in 2021 as a project inspired by the cartographic aesthetic of American paper maps. Today, there is a strong community of contributors dedicated to digitally representing this historic map style down to the last highway shield. 

In 2022, the project took advantage of the vector tile technology that powers the interactive map and integrated language-appropriate labels chosen by the user, making this distinctly American map familiar to those beyond the English-speaking world.

“OSM Americana’s Community Project status is a recognition that the mapping community benefits from seeing their work in action. With OSM US’s support, we can continue building a grassroots cartographic laboratory that celebrates this community’s creativity and innovation – and also make it easier for new contributors to join and help us shape the map together.”

Brian Sperlongano, Co-creator of OSM Americana

OpenStreetMap US launched the Community Project program last month to support the volunteer-run projects and tech that support the vibrant and creative OpenStreetMap community. OSM US is excited to collaborate with the OSM Americana team and work to strengthen the visibility and financial sustainability of this project.

If you are interested in contributing to OSM Americana, check out OSM Americana on GitHub and join the #americana-map-style channel on OSM US Slack.

Do you have a potential Community Project? Check out our guidelines and submit an application!

As I was attending the State of the Map US conference in Salt Lake City this June, I often heard that a lot of people were there for the first time. I was not one of them, though. This was my second SotM US conference. Still, what is a German PhD candidate doing at a conference in the middle of the US?

To set the scene, I first got involved with OpenStreetMap (OSM) back in 2013 when I was studying Geography in Münster, Germany, and signed up for the GIS course. At the time, I had no idea that ten years later I would be pursuing a PhD at the FAU in Erlangen, Germany, in digital and political geography. And now I am also focusing my research on OSM! When I started my PhD a few years ago, my research group was mainly looking at volunteered geographic information and the strength of local knowledge, particularly in OSM but also in other projects. But I soon realized there is a lot more to OSM than just local mappers mapping local data. I got to know the whole OSM community and started focusing my research on the challenges and opportunities for the community and the project as a whole, given its growing significance and interactions with (big) companies.

I would like to revisit the question of why I returned to SotM US as a “second-timer.” Last year, I had the chance to deepen my research in the US with a Fulbright fellowship. That is also when I met folks at the SotM US in Richmond. I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to come back. To be honest, I went back to SotM US not only to present my research or say hi to them again but also to network because I’m now also open to a job.

And it was a huge success! It is always great to spend time with this community. I ran into folks I already knew from previous SotM conferences or from interviews that I conducted, but I also met lots of new people. Everyone was friendly and interested at every gathering, and sponsors were well-integrated into the programming and invested in strengthening the community. I was also really excited to have the opportunity to speak at a Birds of a Feather event during the conference. Jyotsna Budideti invited me to share insights about my work, research, and impact at the Women in Geospatial session. It was great to learn more about the network and to share insights and success stories about our personal experience in the geospatial with my co-speakers Jazzy Smith and Camilla Green as well as the audience.

What else did I take away from this SotM US 2024? I think the overall topic of the conference, “The Great Outdoors,” was well chosen. It focused a lot on trails, which I enjoyed. Walking and cycling were also a popular topic at the social events. It was great to see people from different groups—public authorities, researchers, locals, and biking enthusiasts—all coming together around this shared interest. I had some great conversations with attendees about it, and even got to go on a discovery tour with one of them to the mountains bordering the campus/venue of the conference.

I am really excited to see what the future holds for OSM. I think it’s going to be amazing! This conference has already been a great reminder of the amazing diversity of the OSM community, and how we can all come together within it. As a speaker at the last SotM US conference said, OSM is a successful multilingual project - people from all over the world are contributing. There are not many projects like that, which makes this one all the more special. I am thrilled to be part of this community and hope to continue to be part of it in the future.

Join us next summer for State of the Map 2025 in Boston! Receive updates here and view the sponsor prospectus here.

• October 2: Call for sponsorships open!
• October 31: Scholarship application opens
• October 31: Early bird tickets go on sale
• November 18: Call for proposals opens. Get inspired by checking out previous talks here.

Sign up for updates here! Interested in supporting the event? Check out the sponsor prospectus here!!

OpenStreetMap US is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization advancing geospatial data democracy in the United States by catalyzing collaborative action around OpenStreetMap between individuals, government agencies, nonprofits, corporations, and academia. Organizational memberships are available for companies, educational institutions, nonprofits, and government agencies looking to demonstrate their support for OpenStreetMap in the United States and the project’s future. We offer a variety of membership benefits including invitations to participate in OSM US-led working groups, discounts on event sponsorship, and more!

Today, the NPS continues to manage the National Park System, which includes 431 sites covering more than 85 million acres. National park sites are in every state, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. In additional to National Parks, the National Park System also includes National Monuments, Battlefields, Military Parks, Historical Parks, Historic Sites, Lakeshores, Seashores, Recreation Areas, Scenic Rivers, and Trails, and the White House.

Joining OSM US as a member provides NPS with the opportunity to advance the quality and availability of open geospatial data to enhance resource protection and visitor experience. The membership also highlights the importance of open data for the protection of our national parks and the safety of more than 300 million annual visitors.

Welcome National Park Service!

OpenStreetMap US is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization advancing geospatial data democracy in the United States by catalyzing collaborative action around OpenStreetMap between individuals, government agencies, nonprofits, corporations, and academia. Organizational memberships are available for companies, educational institutions, nonprofits, and government agencies looking to demonstrate their support for OpenStreetMap in the United States and the project’s future. We offer a variety of membership benefits including invitations to participate in OSM US-led working groups, discounts on event sponsorship, and more! Learn more about OpenStreetMap US and its membership program for individuals and organizations at https://openstreetmap.us/get-involved/membership/.

In 2020 we launched our Charter Project program, where community tools can grow within the 501(c)(3) framework of OpenStreetMap US. This program has expanded to encompass three amazing platforms: OpenHistoricalMap, MapRoulette, and OSMCha. 

What is a Community Project?

Over the past few years, we’ve been thinking about how to empower a more diverse array of projects in the OpenStreetMap community. In harmony with our Charter Project program, we designed the Community Project program to bolster the many lower-budget, smaller-scale creative projects started and supported by passionate volunteers.

OpenStreetMap US is looking to partner with community members to support their tools and initiatives that align with the OSM US mission and provide long-term benefits to OSMers around the globe. We’re committed to providing projects with a sustainable long-term home where they can grow and flourish.

Community Projects benefit from increased publicity, affiliation with a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, association with an official OSMF local chapter, preferential access to our Tileservice, and a $25 monthly stipend. Maintainers also retain operational control of their work. Check out our Community Projects page for more information about benefits and eligibility.

Our Charter Project program remains available for mature projects that have greater organizational needs, such as hiring staff or expending large budgets. If a Community Project grows large enough it may transition into a Charter Project.

Apply Today!

The OpenStreetMap ecosystem thrives on collaboration and innovation, which is why we are so excited to launch this new opportunity to strengthen your project and our community. Applications are now open and are reviewed on a rolling basis. We invite eligible projects to review the Community Project Guidelines and fill out the application form. We can’t wait to hear what you’ve been working on!

“As a Strategic Member, Esri plans to build on the successful partnership we’ve had with OSM US.  Over the past several years, we’ve collaborated on OSM in various ways.  Esri expanded our popular Community Maps program to enable GIS users to easily share their data with the OSM community, which has resulted in numerous ArcGIS datasets being made available for editing in Rapid and JOSM.  Esri has provided access to our latest high-resolution World Imagery, including imagery from commercial providers and various state and local governments, for use in iD and other popular editors.

In addition, Esri hosts OSM data in ArcGIS Online so it is easily accessible to over 650,000 organizations and millions of users around the world for their professional and humanitarian use.  Esri builds and hosts both 2D and 3D basemaps that feature OSM data that we make freely available in our software.  Esri also hosts feature services of OSM data that we provide under the OSM ODbL license, which are being used to support many public facing maps and apps.  Esri is also a General Member of the Overture Maps Foundation, in which OSM data plays a crucial role.

Over the next year, we’d like to expand the amount of GIS data and high-res imagery that is available to OSM mappers for the U.S. and beyond.  We intend to optimize the way we replicate OSM data into our online mapping platform so we can keep pace with edits as they are happening.  Most importantly, we will continue promoting the value of the OSM project so we can help grow the OSM community for many years to come.

Deane Kensok, CTO Content, Esri

OSM US Organizational Memberships are available for companies, educational institutions, nonprofits, and government agencies looking to demonstrate their support for OpenStreetMap in the United States and invest in the project’s future. Is your company or organization interested in learning more about OpenStreetMap US organizational membership? Email membership@openstreetmap.us.

OpenStreetMap US is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization advancing geospatial data democracy in the United States by catalyzing collaborative action around OpenStreetMap between individuals, government agencies, nonprofits, corporations, and academia.

“As a Strategic Member, Meta will continue to build on its successful partnership with OSM US. Over the past few years, we have collaborated in various ways, including funding essential OSM infrastructure and tools such as MapRoulette and OSMCha, partnering with OSM US to distribute cameras through the Mapillary Camera Grant Program, which has led to millions of new street-level images in the US, and helping to establish the OSM US Pedestrian Working Group.

In addition, Meta leads the development of Rapid Editor and the MapWithAI Tasking Manager, supports work on JOSM and is a Steering Member of the Overture Maps Foundation, where OSM data plays a crucial role. Meta’s products, such as Instagram, Facebook Marketplace, check-ins, and Facebook Safety Check, are made possible with open map data.

Over the next year, Meta will continue The Walkabout Project, working closely with local communities to map sidewalks and crosswalks. Mappers have already added thousands of crosswalks and sidewalks, but there is still much work to be done. We are using machine learning to identify gaps where mapping is needed and welcome all partners who share our goal to map America’s sidewalks. If you’re interested in Meta’s broader mapping efforts, please visit Maps at Meta.

Edoardo Neerhut, Product Manager, Meta

OSM US Organizational Memberships are available for companies, educational institutions, nonprofits, and government agencies looking to demonstrate their support for OpenStreetMap in the United States and invest in the project’s future. Is your company or organization interested in learning more about OpenStreetMap US organizational membership? Email membership@openstreetmap.us.

OpenStreetMap US is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization advancing geospatial data democracy in the United States by catalyzing collaborative action around OpenStreetMap between individuals, government agencies, nonprofits, corporations, and academia.

Alyssa has always had a deep passion for maps and found every excuse to center them in her work for her Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies degrees at William & Mary. She started contributing to OpenStreetMap in 2021 by using StreetComplete on neighborhood walks, and has been falling deeper down the rabbit hole ever since.

In her free time Alyssa loves playing board games, knitting, cuddling her cat, and exploring the parks and restaurants of Richmond with her partner.

“We see our new partnership with OpenStreetMap US as a symbiotic relationship, our mutual efforts yielding strategic and operational benefits for both. Our expectation is that, because OSM data are continuously updated and community driven, the partnership will help fill gaps within our data supply chain for streets and trails layers. In turn, we expect to provide OSM with comprehensive, high quality information regarding these same datasets, providing access to data from local authoritative sources. Together, we will provide improvements to essential data infrastructure and empower citizens to think spatially.”

Cy Smith, State GIO & MassGIS Director

OSM US Organizational Memberships are available for companies, educational institutions, nonprofits, and government agencies looking to demonstrate their support for OpenStreetMap in the United States and invest in the project’s future. Our membership tiers are designed to meet the needs of organizations of different sizes and budgets and offer a variety of membership benefits including invitations to participate in OSM US-led Working Groups, discounts on event sponsorship, and more.

OpenStreetMap US is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization advancing geospatial data democracy in the United States by catalyzing collaborative action around OpenStreetMap between individuals, government agencies, nonprofits, corporations, and academia.

Jake will be collaborating with the mapping community to understand and identify ways we can support you all, so don’t hesitate to reach out! You can find him on OSM US Slack or under the username jake-low in the OSM community.

Before joining OpenStreetMap US, Jake worked at various software companies on all kinds of products, from distributed file systems to text-to-speech engines to backcountry navigation apps. Most recently, he spent three months at Recurse Center, a self-directed educational retreat for programmers, where he built some OSM-related tools and learned about video game VFX programming.

Jake is also an active contributor to OpenStreetMap and is a member of the OSM US Trails Working Group, a collaboration between mappers, land managers, and navigation app developers which aims to improve the accuracy of trail data in OSM.

Jake is based in Seattle, Washington. When not at his desk, you can find him at one of the local coffee shops or hiking in the Cascade Mountains.