These are super disorganized thoughts. To clarify the title, I'm targeting people who may be interested in contributing to a project like OpenStreetMap but aren't interested in the narrow focus of things like roads, sidewalks, bike paths, houses, etc. I aim to capture some of the insane breadth and detail OpenStreetMap accommodates, but without just throwing you at the wiki and telling you to go nuts. That said, here's a list the wiki maintains of some map features. Note that these are standardized essentially by consensus/usage, so if you think something's missing, you can bring it up in forums like the wiki and try to gain consensus to formalize it into a standard.

TL;DR: We map everything*; if there's some infrastructure or natural formations you happen to have a special interest in, you can probably help. Obviously I think it's extremely important as a way of democratizing information and tearing down corporate hegemony, so understand that bias. The bias, too, is that OpenStreetMap in its ideal form is a fuckton better than something like Google Maps. If you ever progress to mapping as a hobby, you begin to realize how comparatively trash Google Maps actually is for very basic things like creating a walking route, accessibility, etc. It's not just that we can make it open – it's that we can do it better.

Keep in mind, too, that you can add as much or as little data as you want. If you want to map the species name of every tree, feel free; if you want to trace over a building and just call it a "building" with no other details, that's helpful too. So don't get intimidated; it's about what you can do, not what you can't.

• Electrical – OpenStreetMap straight-up maps the global electrical grid. It's incomplete, but the tools are there, and there's a lot already done. By helping this, you're creating an open dataset in an area that's otherwise often extremely opaque. Your data may be the literal best open data that exists. There's a whole grassroots project dedicated to this called Map Your Grid. And here's a well-made tutorial using the powerful tool JOSM.
• Micromapping – There are a metric fuckload of things that can be done here. You can map where garbage cans, drinking fountains, benches, street lamps, vending machines, photo booths, defibrillators, life rings near beaches, ATMs, fire hydrants, even manholes are. Benches as an example do show up on renderers like Carto (the one on the OSM website) and can be genuinely useful to individuals. Benches, waste/recycling bins, and drinking water are especially nice in public parks. They fill things out visually, but they're also really nice if you're thirsty or have an aluminum can burning a hole in your hand.
• Directory – A huge reason Google Maps sees so much usage is a feedback loop where users expect to be able to find business information like hours, and business owners maintain that information. So you're fighting an uphill battle, and this is one of those fields where Google – by nature of having an army of business owners waiting hand and foot on their GMaps entries for free – is likely to remain dominant outside of, say, a small town. Nevertheless, a good-enough experience (or even a similarly premium one with a lot of coordination and legwork) helps dislodge Google's hegemony (and obviously, if you use it, to be useful to you).
  • Apps like StreetComplete are designed to streamline this specific kind of editing.
  • If you know people who manage businesses, let them know: they automatically have an edge in the niche OpenStreetMap arena just by taking five minutes every once in a blue moon to make sure their entry is up-to-date there. Especially when doing it alongside GMaps, you're adding nearly zero time and effort.
  • If you're adding timely information like opening hours, be sure to leave a check_date= parameter (on iD, this is "last checked date") saying when you last checked this information. This helps others decide how worth their while it is to re-check a business' information.
  • Edit: Okay, I guess this is "conventional", but to me, it's less "stereotypical".
• Transit – this one's maybe too far into the "roads, sidewalks" etc. that some people aren't interested in, but I figured I'd mention it. You can create bus routes, add pretty specific information to airports (even down to e.g. holding positions), boat infrastructure like slipways, railroads and train stations, etc. You don't have to care about cars, bicycles, or walking to help improve transportation. (Although I would suggest bicycles are underrepresented on Google Maps and OpenStreetMap and that you can do a lot to help if you care about cycling infrastructure.)
• Golf courses – Love them or hate them, there are a lot of fucking golf courses. For people who hate golf, mapping features presents data for environmental researchers. For people who love it, it presents a clean way to quickly visualize a course. (Open-air mini-golf works too, which can be nice if someone's wondering whether they should try out a course.) Either way, you can go into a decent level of detail, and it does look pretty on the map regardless of its ecological destruction. You can also add disc golf courses if that's more of your thing.
• Fluviological – OpenStreetMap maps rivers, but we do a lot more than that. We map down the level of e.g. intermittent streams, ditches, culverts, etc. There are tools like topographic map layers that can help you with this in a more advanced way, but you know, if there's a small little insignificant creek that flows by your house, it'd still be really cool to have it on the map. You might be pleasantly surprised to follow it and see where it ends up.
• Public bookcases – We do really map these. It's the "take a book, leave a book"-type. If there's one near you, put it on the map so people can find it – god knows when I've checked that Google Maps only captures a scant few of them. ("Micromapping" too, but this gets its own thing because I like it.)
• Theme parks – Yes, we map these. Yes, you can go into a lot of detail, including tracing out roller coasters and water slides and adding individual attractions. You'd think these, being high-profile, would be picked clean of things to map, but that's really not always true, and it's surprisingly satisfying to just trace a waterslide. (To that end, local swimming pools are also ripe for mapping.)
• Fences – Especially in sprawling suburbs, fences can give a more complete picture of the area, often giving a rough idea of where property lines are. Overall they just give things more definition, and since renderers like Carto show gates, it can help someone trying to find one.
• Ballot drop-off boxes – Some municipalities will have boxes where you can drop off ballots, and we map these too. On a related note, library drop-off boxes are also tracked.
• Building entrances – Entrances tell the map exactly where people can enter a building (and who's allowed), which can help for larger, more complex facilities like hospitals. With these, the router knows exactly where to walk you to for your destination.
• Agriculture – In addition to drawing farmland, you can designate a specific crop. If you have one nearby and know what it's growing, feel free.
• Public art – we track artwork like sculptures etc. We track names, artist names, materials, etc. The next time you see a (semi-permanent) public work of art (including murals), feel free to add it to the map. It's really nice to just stop and look sometimes.
• Edit: A big one I forgot to mention on its own is accessibility metadata. Things like entrances, curbs, etc. can have this sort of information. For example, a curb can have the style of curb (flush/lowered/raised/rolled), tactile paving (y/n), and wheelchair accessibility.

A bit of philosophy: I think OpenStreetMap can be broken down in to four different sort of overlapping "fields", namely map, navigation, directory, and research data. These overlap heavily, but by my definition (to reemphasize: these are not entirely or even mostly distinct):

• "Map" is the thing you actually see rendered (by some renderer) when you look at OpenStreetMap's data. It lets you look with your human eyes at an abstract representation of the world in a 2D plane (edit: or some renderers are 3D). What's especially useful if you care about this is to focus on the 2D polygons that make up areas. Is there a courtyard in a building not being shown? Make the building a multipolygon and add man_made=courtyard, so now it renders more accurately. Maybe neaten up the boundary of a nearby pond. For lines, you can do things like zoom in and better trace pathways and waterways, which can often be very rough approximations nobody ever fixed. Finally, for points, you can, as an example, do micromapping like benches that show up at higher zoom levels.
• "Navigation" is concerned with getting between places. Obvious overlap with "map", but here I mainly mean routing algorithms. What's the best way to get between locations? What's the travel distance and time? Are there obstacles to look out for? Etc. You can especially help this by adding more detailed infrastructure like traffic signals, speed limits, etc. For micromobility, it's often especially helpful to find small things people missed, like a new footpath that acts as a shortcut for the router to take you through. Whatever you do, though, do not tag for the router! E.g. while we do map well-trodden "desire paths", don't put a crosswalk where there isn't one because you think it'll make your route 30 seconds faster.
• "Directory" is concerned with essentially a business etc. directory – one where you can look at, say, a restaurant and say what its hours are, if it does delivery, what type of food it serves, if there's free Wi-Fi etc. You can help this by keeping information up-to-date if you see something is wrong or incomplete.
• "Research data" is there to be a giant heap of structured data for e.g. research. Not looking at the map render, not individually reading entries for e.g. a nice park to go have a picnic at, but just throwing the raw values into an analysis. This obviously makes its way into all three of the other fields, but I keep it as a separate entity because of how much of it is outside those common applications. An example is infrastructure that people looking at a typical map, router, or directory won't care about like e.g. the electrical grid. Very few people are going to care that a power line runs in front of their friend's house or find that worthwhile to map over other options, but somebody trying to analyze the grid might very much care on a macroscopic level. The main thing to know about contributing for this specifically is that, while your edits can help locally, you're mainly playing a small part in a much larger game that needs all the help it can get.

I think that some people may find a strong affinity for one field over the others, which is why I delineate them here. Note that there are various pieces of editing software to do all of these depending on your use case.

* That's public information and relatively static. Don't be a creep, don't map the dog house that blew onto your lawn in a hurricane, and you'll be fine.

Anyway, this was just a smattering of different ideas.

Why YSK: Contributing to a project like OpenStreetMap really changes how you look at the physical environment, and I think it's for the better. It just makes you consider so many things you never would've, and I think it's a worthwhile experience. As someone who never played it, I can say that it scratches whatever draw Pokémon Go had to me but would've quite never fulfilled. Especially for the built environment, it gives you an excuse to explore new things.

This is really interesting to me but also overwhelming. I'll try to work through it later and follow up with questions.

Just keep in mind this was just a bunch of random ideas, so it's all very surface-level and not at all a guide. None of these actually fully tell you how to do the thing, so being confused is 100% normal.

I didn't read every word. I definitely like the amount of info.

Dog parks.

Fire hydrants... in particular for regions that get enough snow to bury the hydrants. So civilians can help dig out an access path.

I’m not a smart ape. Is simple contribution through tools like Organic Maps helpful to OSM? My impression has been that contribution with good quality is complicated with the one OSM tool that I tried.

Unequivocally, yes, very helpful. The strength of projects like OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia comes from their numbers– from parallelism.

Think of it like a race against the physical infrastructure: looking at the specific things you contribute, you are vastly outpacing the infrastructure. If you notice a speed limit has changed and correct it, that's probably set for an extremely long time relative to the age of the project. You've fixed in 30 seconds what will remain for perhaps a decade. Once you're maintaining the infrastructure and not just building it out, the race is won on breadth of effort, being able to quickly respond to small issues. Small issues only consistently get noticed if there are a lot of people on the look-out. You're one of those people.

Source: seen too much shit.

I think the TLDR of the entire post is this:

• anyone can edit the map, and it can be fun to do.

• So open the app and see if anything is missing or wrong, and add your info to anything that feels good to do

Absolutely. Anything you can contribute would be an improvement. If you see a shop that's not on the map, and you don't have time to add anything but a point showing that it's there, add it anyway. An approximate point in space with a name attached to it is good enough to get directions to, and getting directions is the reason I open OSM like 90% of the time. And it can always be expanded on later by people with more time and specialized mapping skills! Don't be discouraged by the massive effort some mappers go to, just add what you can because everything you add is useful to someone

In the Organic Maps app just tap the button with 3 lines (≡) in the lower right corner, then tap "add place". To update info on a thing that already exists just tap on that thing and then tap "edit place" at the bottom of the page.

I've always loved the iterative approach to mapping and adding on top of other contributions.

One person can draw a simple square over a building, even if the shape doesn't really match (just make sure it's aligned), and only add the tag building=yes. Then someone else can spend the time to make the shape more accurate.

The next person, maybe somebody walking by with an app on their phone, doesn't need to spend the time drawing the building. They can simply add the address to the building.

The next person can then add the name of the store.

The next person can add the opening hours.

All of that would be a lot of time consuming work for just one person, which may discourage them from even adding the information they know because they don't want to do all the other steps. But because someone took even just a single minute to make a basic contribution, it makes it that much easier for the next person and lowers the bar for someone to feel they can contribute.

And the contributions don't even need to be in any particular order. If you know there's a McDonald's there but there isn't a building on the map, just put a dot down and tag it name=McDonald's. Someone else can come along and draw the building afterward, or add the address.

You certainly don't need to be an expert on everything to contribute to OSM. I don't know half of the complicated stuff, but I regularly contribute when I can, mapping buildings, sidewalks, and updating place information in my area.

There is no expectation or commitment, so you can map as much or as little as you want. If you don't know how to do something, you can always open an issue with details (i.e. "this shop changed its phone number to X") and someone else can help you fix it

So civilians the general public can help dig out an access path.

fire/rescue and even police are civilian institutions. A more appropriate distinguish them would be, "general public."

A seemingly minor thing, but legally very important to keep (more) tanks off our streets

Benches as an example do show up on renderers like Carta (the one on the OSM website) and can be genuinely useful to individuals.

HOE LI FUKK!

As partner to someone with degenerative and chronic disorders (and the most able-bodied person multiple people trust to push their wheelchairs) this will come in SO handy, and I'm definitely going to be micromapping the shit out of every park and downtown area I visit.

Thanks, that helps. I’m a perfectionist, so I’m discouraged for not knowing how to use the more advanced tools and instead do nothing because I haven’t taken the time to learn. I can definitely add missing places easily.

A slight warning: You will never be finished, which means your brain will never get the "right, I'm done"-feeling, which means... It can get really addictive. 😅

Thanks for this info dump, I'll have to look further into all this. Mapping things is fun!

Point of order - the electrical grid can be really handy as a navigation aid when walking; it rarely changes (though, perhaps sadly, some long established routes are being buried here in the UK) and is fairly/very visible. Whilst the power line running down your street might not help, the line of towers across the local hillside might be the difference between wandering lost for hours and a fast route out. Map the heck out of it.

Fences

I live in the countryside, so for decades, my area just showed up as a few main roads and a lot of empty map space. I've had delivery and mail vehicles fly by my house because they didn't know where exactly to turn in. Inviting friends over was always a challenge because I need to describe distances and landmarks. Everyone misses the mailbox.

With OpenStreetMap, I've not only been able to put in driveways and outlines of houses on the map, but I put in the fences between my property, the 40 acres of conservation wilderness next to me, then the neighborhood on the other side. Now you can actually see the local neighborhoods out here! And every house has an address associated with it, instead of just a number next to the empty road that doesn't quite match up with driveways.

And since updating it myself, I've noticed those details populating on Google and Bing maps too, so deliveries have been more accurate lately. I'm no longer getting mail for my neighbors, or having neighbors drop off my mail that was left at their house.

I volunteer for my town's parks committee. Lately, I've been marking and labeling our parks and trails on OpenStreetMap because locals are always asking where they are. And my town's homemade maps are ancient and awfully drawn. I spent my whole childhood living here and I'm only now learning about some of these parks and trails in my 40s!

I've spent a lifetime irritated with how little information is available on maps for my region, and now I get to update it myself! It's been wonderful. I've even edited details in my local town as construction changed the street layout and no one updated public maps. It's so convenient!

Do you know what's up with the OpenSeaMap project? I have been contributing rocks along the coast and the like. Their last posts are from years ago.

I am thinking about implementing a sync system for depth data from open government sources to their map which would make it useful for navigation.

That's amazing! You gotta print out some new maps at some point :D

Give the ID Editor a shot sometime! It's quite simple to pick up and can take you very far

On a pc go to openstreetmap.org, create an account, and click the 'edit' button on the top.

Overwhelming? I'd rather say graphomaniac. I know it's for a good cause, but OP should put himself in our shoes for a moment, because that won't attract much people imho.

Keep in mind, too, that you can add as much or as little data as you want. If you want to map the species name of every tree, feel free; if you want to trace over a building and just call it a “building” with no other details, that’s helpful too. So don’t get intimidated; it’s about what you can do, not what you can’t.

Thanks for this! I wanted to add a public ping pong table a couple weeks ago but got overwhelmed by all the data fields in Vespucci. I didn't want to submit an incomplete dataset, but couldn't figure out which additional fields are needed. Next time I'll just submit it.

One person can draw a simple square over a building, even if the shape doesn't really match, and only add the tag building=yes. Then someone else can spend the time to make the shape more accurate.

To counterpoint: one misdrawn and misaligned building is a breeze to improve, but a hundred can be a real nightmare. You can end up with surrounding infrastructure "corrected" to the misaligned buildings.

Is there a good android app for the basic stuff that does all of the conventions by default?

StreetComplete is awesome and guides you really well.

Fair

Ok, so thats really simple updates, but doesn't allow new stuff or edits? It asks for the surface of a footpath, but doesn't let me split it to configure different surfaces on different bits? (I remember this being hard on the website too!)

Give Every Door a try, StreetComplete is mostly about filling in missing data, every door lets you create/update stuff arbitrarily.

The thing that has always bothered me about OSM is that it's just so weirdly done.

Like, a lot of information could simply be pulled from government databases. Yet OSM doesn't seem to do that, often leaving out information that should be publicly available.

Then there's the very weird thing that they don't have any satellite view? I mean, one of the advantages of OSM should be that any kind of data can be added by motivated individuals. I don't get why things like topographic map, weather map, and all other kinds of map aren't already integrated ... i wanted to do it myself but i found the whole structure of the project confusing, so i left it be.

Then what i don't get is what exactly is the aim of the project? Like, what is the status of integration with navigation apps? I still can't simply search for a public transport connection in my city with OSM. Is there any plan to allow that at all? Is it even encouraged? Why is there nobody talking about this at all?

That's a fair point, sometimes bad data is worse than no data. I'm just trying to express that it doesn't need to be perfect.

It's always good to consider the next person who may be working to add more details, or even who may simply be using the data to navigate.

Yeah, "perfect" is the enemy of "good", for sure! I just think the mindset should be that any addition is as good as it can be for the level of detail that it's being created to.

Inaccuracy is a problem. Not adding the buttresses on a church is fine, for example, but failing to align the map or allow for parallax creates real issues and it would have been better to just create a node.

Shout out to whoever has been adding the bike racks in my area, you're the best. It's incredibly helpful information.

will give it a go, thanks!

Like, a lot of information could simply be pulled from government databases. Yet OSM doesn't seem to do that, often leaving out information that should be publicly available.

It is already the case, data is imported from public database with compatible licenses.

It does requires a lot of manual verifications and from my experience the data available is not always better than the data already available in OSM.

Then there's the very weird thing that they don't have any satellite view

There is satellite view for editing, depending on the area you usually have at least 3 different satellite imagery supplier that you can use for editing

what exactly is the aim of the project?

The main of the project isn't to provide a final product usable by everyone, it's to provide the data that can be use by any other app.

Maps have power, they've been used through the centuries by those in power as tools of propaganda and control. Today it is important not to let the big tech company have the monopoly on these tools.

Things might have changed since the last time you get to contribute to osm, you should try again. Open openstreetmap.org , click on "edit" and you will have immediately a tool that you can use for editing with satellite imagery. Or go to Tasks.hotosm.org to contribute to humanitarian projects using OSM

You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood what OSM is, OSM is not a platform like google maps.

The core OSM project is just an open database of geographical data, of what exists in real life. Things like navigation and satellite imagery are not part of this, that's something separate that you add ontop of OSM.
And as part of the "open" part, any data added must be compatible with the odbl license, which means sources must first be verified as compatible, so any imports of government databases are oftentimes simply not legally possible and even if they are it's something you have to do quasi-manually since it's probably in a completely different format.

No one is talking about this because to anyone familiar with OSM this stuff is so obvious that they forget it isn't obvious to anyone else.

Do note that organic maps is not recommended any more, due to kerfuffle with the trademark holders wanting to be mean.
The Comaps fork is instead the recommended app these days, basically the same thing but with a slightly different coat of paint and with a better organizational structure behind it.

i need to pick this back up. what’s a good ios client? also i am a sw eng and can look into any other areas that may need help; is code online at somewhere safe like codeberg?

when i open openstreetmap.org, click on edit, i see this:

Electrical – OpenStreetMap straight-up maps the global electrical grid. It’s incomplete, but the tools are there, and there’s a lot already done. By helping this, you’re creating an open dataset in an area that’s otherwise often extremely opaque. Your data may be the literal best open data that exists.

I wonder whether this is even legal. Like, in some places, there is intentionally no public information about infrastructure available to make military targeted operations by other countries more difficult. Like, if a neighboring country knows exactly where your vulnerable infrastructure is, they have an easier time aiming for it. I think that it's not so clear to me whether mapping critical infrastructure on a publicly available database is even legal.

Yes, you need to create an account to edit the map.

makes sense. i was just saying that there's no easily visible satellite view on the webpage.

I think, for many countries sliding into totalitarianism, the most important thing you can map now is cameras.

Your neighborhood blackblock will do you all favors by disabling them.

It doesn't matter if it's legal, it's the right thing to do.

We got the 30 hour work week by disabling critical infrastructure until the thugs in power folded. This public knowledge is critical to the masses keeping their governments in line.

Capacity: 4
Type: trash. Don't use it.

What's the license on those government databases?

You can also just leave a "note" and some other volunteer with more experience can add the node for you

Also great to find out where the power plants are, and what type of energy they're supplied with

How does parallax cities work anyway?

The imagery is still orthogonal, so you align things at street height with the map and ignore the roofs of buildings, etc. If you're lucky, you'll be working in an area that has cadastral maps with canonical alignment, so it's easy to precisely adjust your aerial imagery.

As a Pokemon GO player, I can appreciate the depth of information in OSM. Recently a Pokemon debuted that only lives in deserts or other areas without vegitation, so OSM biome information was used for its distribution. Mine sites, desert, scrubland, and other environmental designations were used.