I think we have begun to take maps for granted - they seem woven into the fabric of our world. We expect to be able to look up directions, and scour places of interest all around the world. We think we know what Greenland looks like, and we barely register that you can keep scrolling horizontally on the map, and Antartica looks like a single contiguous, unbroken landscape. We benefit from how easy it is to use modern mapping tools, but we also cede a lot of power to technology companies.

Just like how many publishers are choosing the self-host and publish on less centralized systems, this revolution is also happening with maps, and OpenStreetMap is leading the front. OSM is the Wikipedia of geospatial information. Volunteer-led, meticulously tagged, it’s an internet artifact whose existence seems to defy common-sense. I’ve only encountered it previously as the ‘map provider’ for Mapbox, and now I understand their relationship a lot more.

Maps are expensive to serve and render - some back-of-the-envelop calculations have shown that it can take up to 50TB of data if it is rendered naively, which is why organizations like Mapbox have been able to build a business being a map tooling provider.

This is the magic - OpenStreetMap also hosts map tiles, free for non-commercial use. If you go to openstreetmaps.com you’ll find a map like experience that is delightful. You get to see the parks in New York City or the tiny alleys in Istanbul. There are tiles that are translated into multiple languages. There is also a host of open-source software that allows people to work with OpenStreetMaps data, including tagging, querying, and serving map tiles. There is even software to allow you to render your own map tiles. Other than making a donation, it’s not clear to me how we can make these enterprises more self-sustaining.

When I think of fundamental technologies of our era, I think of encryption, networking, databases, technologies that we largely don’t have a tactile relationship with. However, maps are something we continue to interface day in and day out, yet we have forgotten that maps are, like with all of our technologies, developed with a set of cultural and political assumptions and encode the biases of their creators. OpenStreetMaps really is a labor of love that we all benefit from, and we should do our best to keep it alive.