As you might have noticed, we often feature guest authors on the OpenStreetMap US News feed. We love guest posts! Our feed is not only used to share the current work of the organization, but also interesting content from the broader community. We have had some wonderful contributions, and believe they can help build our community, start conversations, and teach us new things.
Have you thought about sharing your story? We invite all contributions, and are happy to work with you on crafting a great post. Hopefully this post will provide some guidance to help you decide if our site is the right fit, and encourage all of you to share your story! There is no set schedule for guest posts, but we will space guest posts out to a maximum of one per month.
Recent examples include:
- Mapping Made Easier with RapiD 2.0!
- Mappers answer the call to improve rail safety
- Mapping the 9/11 National Memorial Trail
What makes a great post?
- Posts must be original. We want to sound the trumpets when we share your unique content, so please make sure it is not published elsewhere.
- Word length can vary, we recommend looking through the examples for reference. Most of our posts run 1000-2000 words in length. Stories and updates tend to be shorter, whereas guidance on how to map or technical overviews of a project are typically longer.
- Your post should be relevant to the OpenStreetMap community in some way. Have you been mapping in your community? Organizing events? Building new things with OSM? Using OpenStreetMap in new ways? We want to hear about your experiences and why OpenStreetMap is important in your life.
- We highly suggest you accentuate your post with a header photo and even a few images within the post.
- Your post should not be an advertisement or endorsement for your business. Any links to other sites must benefit readers with absolutely zero links to spammy websites.
- All posts should be edited for grammar and spelling, and authors are also asked to include a call to action or other way that readers can get involved and connect.
If you have any questions on these guidelines or if you aren’t sure your content is the right fit, please feel free to reach out. Thank you for your contributions!
