OpenStreetMap
Yesterday, I reached the point of one million map changes and twenty-thousand changesets. Leading up to this milestone, I tracked my progress on How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap? and carefully planned to make a single edit that would be my one millionth in my twenty-thousandth changeset. I eventually made a gimmicky changeset referencing my first mapping experience. Mission accomplished! However, despite the impressive numbers, my initial sense of accomplishment faded, replaced by nagging existential questions. Have the countless hours I devoted to OSM truly been worthwhile? Why have I been doing this? What is it exactly that I have been doing? … What is OpenStreetMap, really? And there it is, a question that seems very simple, but is not. It is the same question that hides far below the surface in Xvtn’s OSM Iceberg Meme. Inspired by this meme, user rtnf put it this way: “Is it a map? A dataset? A community? A trademark that encompasses an entire ecosystem consisting of the dataset, the tagging scheme, the rendering infrastructure, and the subculture around its mappers, developer-mappers, and third-party data consumers?? What is OSM, really?”
When you invite someone to go to openstreetmap.org for the first time, the first thing they read is “OpenStreetMap is a map of the world”. The next thing you usually want to explain to them is that OpenStreetMap is NOT (just) a map of the world. We then continue showing off different rendering styles, different editors, different tagging schemes … We pride ourselves being part of a secret society, where only the sworn in know what it is actually about. We giggle when we see the Iceberg Meme because it is “so true”. We say things like: “If you have been doing this for years, you will understand”. All of this without being able to answer a very simple, fundamental question: What is OpenStreetMap?