Geodata such as street maps or postcode databases are generally held in state-controlled monopolies, restricting ordinary hackers ability to make things and tell stories with maps. OpenStreetMap.org is developing the software and community needed to collaboratively create open maps in a wiki-like way.

Maps are made using freely available Landsat satellite photography and user-submitted GPS traces with an open RESTful API and four community written editors. Maps have been bootstrapped from other sources including a delivery company which has GPS units attached to it’s couriers and public domain maps. ‘Eyeballs and footsteps’ are used to refine this data in to a usable map.

The first year of OpenStreetMap has seen over a thousand registered users contribute, a quarter of a million street segments added and 14 million GPS points uploaded from a wide variety of international contributors. The political and technical stresses and lessons learnt from the first year are discussed with an eye to a future where open geodata is the norm.