I think first and foremost we need a stronger community and communication. While mapping events are great, they target a very small subset of people. We need a better online presence, with an integrated open chat system in iD to talk to others in your region and country in real-time, instead of using the relatively unfriendly mailing lists or the dead US OSM forum site.

Additionally, we need remote mapping events, where we encourage US mappers to help each other map a city or town. It would bring the online mapping community together more. While there are a few of us both out surveying and doing armchair mapping as well, there are a lot of people who are more comfortable just working from Bing imagery.

We also need a better social media presence. The number of people in the US that even know about OSM is tiny; consequently the number of mappers is tiny as well. The US is massive and needs a better online community to help people mapping in all remote corners, rather than just the major, very progressive cities that have OSM mapping parties.

For such a large community, there is barely any dialog (outside of mailing lists and local groups). It’s actually quite strange that the forums and diaries are nearly deserted, as are OSM subreddits and Facebook pages. For a project with 25k active contributors, there is very little dialog. I’ve seen more communication with a group of 25 people. This is especially true in the US, where we have a tiny number of contributors per square mile. Without stronger community connections, the US is going to remain far, far inferior to Google, Bing, etc. We need a group chat option or something similar.

A6y, you are incorrect. The INGEI data was recently released under an open license (see the wiki). Therefore, he is allowed to use it.

Take a look at LA. Again, similar story, pretty much empty. This is the second largest metro area in the US, and also almost completely empty. This is especially sad since buildings and addresses could easily be imported based on LA’s current data license.

Given that there are 113 million residential buildings alone in the US, we’ve got a huge uphill battle to get addressing worked out, especially since 99% of the current US address are from about 10-15 large imports.

This is how I got started in OSM. I used an offline maps app to route me through West Virginia and it decided to send me down a dirt track. After that, I did a ton of work improving West Virginia, an area with almost no mappers and terrible import quality. I’ve also done the same in rural counties in North Carolina and South Carolina. The quality of data in a lot of counties is horrendous, so I applaud any people working to improve it.

Hey, welcome to OpenStreetMap, and thanks for editing. Let me know if you need any help.

Yeah, I’ve thought about this too. Amazon Mechanical Turk might be another approach.

Regarding the import issue: I completely agree, something needs to be done. The proposal requirement for a large scale import is great (avoiding legal issues, etc), but the biggest issue is that other contributors, especially in the US where imports are desperately needed, are incredibly slow to respond. The mailing lists are beyond useless for the general OSM population and cater to the old, established mappers, and are quite off-putting to new contributors (it was for me).

The local, surveyed input is the best, definitely. But there needs to be a middle ground between no addresses and locally surveyed addresses. Imports make sense to get some data in place, and the error corrections to that data should be left up to the local surveyors.

This highlights one of the issues I have and Steve Coast seems to have recently acknowledged. OSM is a fantastic map in many places visually, but the lack of addresses (there are something like 49 million addresses total worldwide, a tiny fraction of the real number, probably upwards of 2 billion or more) make it a poor substitute for any commercial map. This is especially of note in the US, where, as opposed to Western Europe, there are very few addresses outside of a few major imports (Washington, DC, Seattle, Chicago, NYC, San Francisco). Our contributer base here is also much lower per square mile than in Europe, making surveying hundreds of millions of address by hand unfeasible.

There needs to be more focus on getting accurate and open address data from governments and getting it imported in a timely manner. However, this imported data needs to be tagged in a way to indicate that it is imported and may need a local survey. This tag can be used to make QA tools (i.e. the addresses that have not been reviewed are highlighted by the program). That way, hopefully OSM can have addressing that will be on-par with commercial maps in many places due to imports, but will be superior in that many of the addresses will also be reviewed. Maybe that can strike a balance between the two sides of the addressing argument, importing and surveying.

Looks great and fantastic level of detail.