[lakechfoma]

I'm excited about this direction! I do minor contributions and poking around my area I'm surprised by how much of it is done by very few people. How useful it is yet how lacking it is. There's a neighboring town that is absurdly well documented, it seems a group of people got together over a month and mapped the place out meticulously, including drawing all buildings etc. This town would work very well for these vector maps, my town probably not so much.

I wonder how to get more people involved, and excited, about OSM? How do we make it the Wikipedia of digital maps?

And does Strava/Mapbox give back? When Strava identifies common bike routes, or perhaps trails, and when Mapbox determines that roads have changed is that given back to OSM in some capacity?

[mmt]

> I wonder how to get more people involved, and excited, about OSM? How do we make it the Wikipedia of digital maps?

This seems to be the general sentiment of the OSM community, without evidence that merely adding more people will yield better results.

I personally was turned off from contributing due to the emphasis on "community", even at the expense of map quality. I blogged about this 7 years ago.

As with Wikipedia, and perhaps much more so, the community can be very fragmented (both online and, obviously, geographically), and the portion holding the real power is usually very insular.

This essay https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm recently popped up on HN in reference to Valve and "flat" or non-hierarchical companies like Valve, often with a caveat to ignore its focus on the feminist movement. However, in the case of another all-volunteer project, it may apply better without that caveat.

[maxerickson]

Before their privacy apocalypse, Strava made their traces available for use in OSM. Mapbox actually had a project where they added information that Strava reported as missing:

https://github.com/mapbox/mapping/issues/113

Mapbox also uses other data to find things to improve.

[avar]

    >  I'm surprised by how much of it is
    > done by very few people [...] How do
    > we make it the Wikipedia of digital maps?

The exact same contribution curve applies to Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. Something like 5% of the users to 90% of the work.

[mistrial9]

hmm care to be more specific ?

[scoot]

Did I misunderstand, or was that not the entire thrust of the article?

That vector tiles enable the representation of a subset of the data that a particular group care about (e.g. playgrounds) in order to encourage and enable contribution from a wider and more diverse community?

[lakechfoma]

Seems to me like that's more of a new defining feature of OSM, which may incidentally attract more contributors, but that in and of itself is not lowering the barrier to entry for prospective contributors.