From web protocols and working techniques, to databases and cloud providers, some expertise is so omnipresent most individuals don’t even realize it exists. The identical will be mentioned about OpenStreetMap, the community-driven platform that serves corporations and software program builders with geographic information and maps to allow them to rely rather less on the proprietary incumbents within the house — sure, that principally means Google.
OpenStreetMap is the handiwork of Steve Coast (pictured above), a College School London “dropout” (Coast’s personal phrases) who has since gone on to work in varied map- and location-related roles at Microsoft, TomTom, Telenav, and — as of immediately — Singaporean ride-hailing agency Seize.
Coast isn’t immediately concerned on a day-to-day foundation at OpenStreetMap any extra, however in a weblog submit on Friday marking his creation’s twentieth anniversary, he acknowledged two previous success tales from the open supply realm that satisfied him that one thing like OpenStreetMap might need legs.
“Twenty years in the past, I knew {that a} wiki map of the world would work,” Coast wrote. “It appeared apparent in mild of the success of Wikipedia and Linux. However I didn’t know that OpenStreetMap would work till a lot later.”
Whereas OpenStreetMap is just a little like Wikipedia for maps, the comparability with its encyclopaedic counterpart is considerably superficial — certain, they’re each gargantuan collaborative tasks, however there’s a world of distinction between sharing your geeky information of micronations and mapping out geographic options on a world scale.
In the present day, OpenStreetMap claims greater than 10 million contributors who map out and fine-tune every thing from streets and buildings, to rivers, canyons and every thing else that constitutes our constructed and pure environments. The place to begin for all that is information derived from varied sources, together with publicly out there and donated aerial imagery and maps, sourced from governments and personal organizations equivalent to Microsoft. Contributors can manually add and edit information by means of OpenStreetMap’s modifying instruments, and so they may even enterprise out into the wild and map a complete new space out by themselves utilizing GPS, which is helpful if a brand new avenue crops up, for instance.
As sole creator, Coast was the driving pressure behind all of the early software program growth and advocacy work, ultimately establishing the U.Okay.-based non-profit OpenStreetMap Basis to supervise the undertaking in 2006. In the present day, the Basis is supported primarily by donations and memberships, with lower than a dozen volunteer board members (who’re elected by members) steering key choices and managing funds. The Basis counts only a single worker — a system engineer — and a handful of contractors who present administrative and accounting assist.
OpenStreetMap’s Open Database License (ODbL) permits any third-party to make use of its information with the suitable attribution (although this attribution doesn’t at all times occur). This consists of big-name firms equivalent to Apple and VC-backed unicorns like MapBox, by means of a who’s who of tech corporations together with Uber and Strava, the latter tapping OpenStreetMap information for roads, trails, parks, factors of curiosity, and extra.
Extra just lately, the Overture Maps Basis — an initiative backed by Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and TomTom — has leaned closely on OpenStreetMap information as a part of its personal efforts to construct a viable different to Google’s walled mapping backyard.
There’s little query that OpenStreetMap has been successful these previous 20 years, successful that wouldn’t have been doable with out the web and folks’s need to create one thing beneficial that’s owned by everybody.
“OpenStreetMap managed to map the world and provides the information away without cost for nearly no cash in any respect,” Coast notes. “It managed to sidestep nearly all the issues that Wikipedia has by advantage of solely representing information not opinions. If OpenStreetMap is a medium, what’s the message? For me it’s that we are able to go from nothing to one thing, or zero to 1.”
Apart from affordability and accessibility, there may be at the least one different good motive why an open map dataset ought to exist — and all of it comes all the way down to the notion of who will get to “personal” location. Ought to company juggernauts equivalent to Google actually get to manage all of it? By any cheap estimation, a location monopoly shouldn’t be a optimistic factor for society — as OpenStreetMap contributor and free software program advocate Serge Wroclawski notes:
“Place is a shared useful resource, and while you give all that energy to a single entity, you might be giving them the facility not solely to let you know about your location, however to form it.”
