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.
