We develop and maintain OpenStreetMap’s coverage of San José and surrounding Santa Clara County. Together as volunteers with Open Source San José, we’re working to ensure that all South Bay residents have adequate representation on the map and benefit from the community-based and commercial services in the OpenStreetMap ecosystem. This repository tracks our editing campaigns, including easy ways to get started, and contains code for carrying out our data imports, so that other local mapping communities can build on our work.
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is an open-source project collecting all the data needed for making a worldwide, street-level map of the world and putting it in a single database. You are welcome to contribute to the project as a mapper, field surveyor, or developer. You can also reuse the data in a myriad of ways based on an open source license. Because of its openness, OSM is often described as the “Wikipedia of maps”. OSM is a useful resource on its own, as infrastructure for other civic tech projects, and as a low-barrier way for anyone to get involved with civic tech.
To get started with OpenStreetMap, go to openstreetmap.org and create a free user account. Once you’ve logged in, zoom into your neighborhood and click the “Edit” button at the top of the page. Spend a few minutes completing the interactive tutorial to get a feel for editing, then dive in and add missing details to your neighborhood. If you’d rather edit from your phone, download Vespucci for Android or Go Map!! for iOS. To contribute while you’re out and about, download StreetComplete (Android only) or Every Door and fill in details about your surroundings, or download Mapillary for Android or iOS and capture street-level imagery that makes it easier to edit at home.
If you’re interested in local history or genealogy, also check out OSM’s sister project, OpenHistoricalMap. It’s just getting off the ground but will eventually depict the evolution of places like San José over time.
To get in touch with other Bay Area mappers and the broader U.S. mapper community, invite yourself to the OSMUS Slack workspace and join the #local-california channel. There is also a low-volume mailing list and additional documentation on the OSM Wiki.
Open Source San José (formerly Code for San José) is a nonprofit community organization that focuses on open-source civic technology. In partnership with OSSJ, OSM’s South Bay mapping community holds a biweekly South Bay Map Night online. Upcoming Map Nights are listed on OSMCal and cross-posted to Mastodon and Meetup. You can also find out OSSJ’s general in-person meetings on Eventbrite.
To get in touch with other South Bay mappers and civic tech volunteers, invite yourself to the Open Source San José Slack workspace and join the #proj-osm channel, or join the Open Source San José Discord server and join the #🗺️openstreetmap channel. If you have a cool idea for something local mappers could add to OpenStreetMap, please open a new issue.
- Map businesses based on Santa Clara County social distancing protocol filings (good starting point)
- Review legacy sidewalk tags on streets (good starting point)
- Validate imported San José buildings and addresses
- Validate imported replacement San José buildings and addresses
- Validate imported San José crosswalks and fill in missing crosswalks (good starting point)
- Verify roads named after human rights activists and racist historical figures (good starting point)
- Map bridge details