A bit over a year ago, I received a phone call: We would like to have some project about nature and forests, where people can like go out and add data about those. Oh, it has to be really simple to use.

Some months and some funding later, the first version of MapComplete was born. While it had a specific focus then, it has grown a lot. Today, MapComplete is a map viewer for a certain theme, where the configuration for that theme decides what features are visible with which icons. When a map feature is clicked, known information is shown and the user is invited to add more information and to add pictures.

By now, there are about 20 themes for multiple topics, such as bicycle shops and pumps, playgrounds, public bookcases and much more. And it is relatively easy to create and load your own theme.

The ease of use and flexibility has lead to a steady increase of contributors that way. Thursday 15th of april was the day the editor saw its 500’th contributor:

These 500 contributors made over 3000 changesets. The most popular (official) themes (in 2021) have been cyclofix (with bicycle pumps, cycle repair stations and more), trees, benches, bookcases, surveillance cameras (that one had an uptick after a documentary about them in Belgium), drinking water, artworks and defibrillators.

Want to see more statistics and fancy graphs? Regularly updated stats can be found here

Give it a try yourself on mapcomplete.osm.be, embed it in your site or make your own theme. If you have questions, get in touch via Telegram where the dev and some community members are.

And stay tuned, some more themes are in the pipeline, made by community members too.