Anika Begay
From Internet protocols and operating systems to databases and cloud services, some technologies are so ubiquitous that most people don’t even know they exist. The same can be said of OpenStreetMap, the community-driven platform that provides companies and software developers with geographic data and maps so they can rely a little less on proprietary rights holders in space. Yes, that mostly means Google.
OpenStreetMap is the work of Steve Coast (pictured above), a University College London “alumnus” (in Coast’s own words) who has since held various cartography and positioning roles at Microsoft, TomTom, Telenav and, to date, Singaporean ride-hailing company Grab.
Coast is no longer directly involved with OpenStreetMap on a day-to-day basis, but in a blog post on Friday marking the 20th anniversary of its creation, he cited two previous success stories in the open source world that convinced him that something like OpenStreetMap could succeed.
“Two decades ago, I knew a wiki map of the world would work,” Coast wrote. “It seemed obvious in light of the success of Wikipedia and Linux. But I didn’t know OpenStreetMap would work until much later.”
While OpenStreetMap is a bit like the Wikipedia for maps, the comparison to its encyclopedic counterpart is a bit superficial. Sure, they’re both giant collaborative projects, but there’s a world of difference between sharing your geeky knowledge of micronations and mapping geographic features on a global scale.
Today, OpenStreetMap has more than 10 million contributors mapping and refining everything from roads and buildings to rivers, canyons, and everything in between our built and natural environments. The starting point for all of this is data derived from a variety of sources, including aerial imagery and publicly available and donated maps from governments and private organizations like Microsoft. Contributors can manually add and edit data using OpenStreetMap’s editing tools, and can even venture out into the wilderness and map an entire new area themselves using GPS, which is useful if a new road pops up, for example.
As the sole creator, Coast was the driving force behind all the early software development and advocacy work, eventually founding the OpenStreetMap Foundation, a UK-based nonprofit, to oversee the project in 2006. Today, the foundation is supported primarily by donations and memberships, with fewer than a dozen volunteer board members (elected by the membership) guiding key decisions and managing finances. The foundation has just one employee, a systems engineer, and a handful of contractors providing administrative and accounting support.
OpenStreetMap’s Open Database License (ODbL) allows any third party to use its data with proper attribution (though that attribution isn’t always the case). This includes major companies like Apple and VC-backed unicorns like MapBox, through a who’s who of tech companies including Uber and Strava, the latter of which draws on OpenStreetMap data for roads, trails, parks, points of interest, and more.
More recently, the Overture Maps Foundation, an initiative backed by Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and TomTom, has relied heavily on OpenStreetMap data as part of its efforts to create a viable alternative to Google’s walled mapping garden.
There is no doubt that OpenStreetMap has been a success over the past 20 years, a success that would not have been possible without the Internet and the desire of people to create something of value that is owned by everyone.
“OpenStreetMap has managed to map the world and distribute the data for free, with virtually no cost,” Coast notes. “It has managed to avoid almost all of Wikipedia’s problems, in that it only represents facts and not opinions. If OpenStreetMap is a medium, what is the message? To me, it’s that we can go from nothing to something, or from zero to one.”
Beyond accessibility and convenience, there’s at least one other good reason why an open map dataset should exist, and it all comes down to who “owns” location. Should corporate giants like Google really have control over everything? By any reasonable estimate, a location monopoly is not a good thing for society.
As OpenStreetMap contributor and free software advocate Serge Wroclawski points out: “Place is a shared resource, and when you give all this power to a single entity, you’re giving it the power not just to tell you where you are, but to shape it.”
