Even though focused attention on corporate editing by the OSM community is reaching new, visible heights, the OSM contributor network has been historically comprised of public and private entities that have participated for various reasons in a shared vision of an open map of the world. This report therefore focuses on the apparent growth of corporate involvement in the past few years, and why their growing participation through map editing may be fraught, and what this might mean for the future of OSM.

Several governments are both using and contributing to OSM. The World Bank has supported development of OSM data for both humanitarian crisis purposes and also as an ongoing effort for places that lack capabilities to develop geospatial data [ 46 ]. Government entities including the City of New York and Portland’s Traffic Authority have dedicated teams responsible for improving OSM data in their jurisdictions [ 47 ]. Previous research has described government contributions and usage of OSM data in greater detail [ 46 48 ]. Corporate entities such as Mapbox, Stamen, and Geofabrik also use OSM data and make active contribution to the database and community through various services they provide [ 47 ]. Corporate contributions to OSM data in small cities that lack good geospatial data has also been noted [ 26 ].

Second, large data contributions have significantly increased the map data available and overall map usability. A landmark contribution of government data to OSM was the uploading of the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) dataset produced by the U.S. Census Bureau starting in September 2007. The Automotive Navigation Data (AND) was also uploaded at a similar time, adding the road network for the Netherlands along with parts of India and China [ 38 ]. Several organizations, groups, and individuals have since contributed to OSM through large data imports. Such imports of bulk data are valuable for increasing the data volume, though integrating them with existing OSM data is challenging. For example, after the TIGER import, several compatibility errors were noted because the TIGER dataset and OSM do not follow the same road classification [ 42 ]. For managing the challenges of data integration, the community has come up with guidelines for importing government data [ 43 ]. The OSM wiki maintains a list of ‘large-scale’ data imports and potential data sources for import and use [ 44 45 ].

Next, we highlight a few key involvements of external groups that have had significant impact on shaping the community and the map since its inception. First, the ability to trace features from Yahoo! aerial images as of December 2006 removed the barrier of requiring GPS devices for contributing to OSM [ 38 ]. This enabled “armchair mappers” to create and edit data for remote locations. However, armchair mapping comes with its own set of challenges caused by georeferencing errors and temporality issues. These issues prompted OSM to come up with guidelines for tracing features [ 39 ]. Over the years, various custodians of aerial and satellite imagery—including Bing, Esri, Digital Globe, and Mapbox—have made their data available for tracing in OSM. A comprehensive list of imagery providers is maintained on the OSM Wiki [ 40 ]. Making satellite images available post-disaster has been critical in the usability of OSM for disaster response [ 41 ]. This has particularly aided the OSM community in quickly creating data for areas that lack good geospatial data during times of need [ 16 ]. Projects such as HOT and Missing Maps leverage the image tracing function to mobilize armchair mappers to contribute data for vulnerable places that lack geospatial data

While the rise of corporate editing teams is a new phenomenon in OSM, corporate presence is not new to OSM. For over a decade, corporations, governments, and other organizations have been heavily involved in shaping OSM as it exists today. These involvements are documented through the OSM wiki, mailing lists, and blogs, and cannot be traced through the scientific literature alone. As one example of this, the OSM founder, Steve Coast, also founded Cloudmade, a company that provided geo-services based on OSM data [ 37 ]. In this we see that special-interest groups are not new to the OSM community; corporate editorship is not simply a case of capitalist appropriation of an open data project, but rather the latest stage in an evolving project comprised of a wide-array of stakeholders, each coming from a different value system.

Like other online platforms, OSM also reproduces offline inequalities. Several groups of people are underrepresented, including women, people in the Global South, people of color, and non-urbanites [ 21 26 ]. The skewed participation in OSM produces several artifacts in the data [ 27 29 ]. For example, the predominance of male participation in OSM has created an apparent over-representation of features that are correlated to male interests [ 21 ]. Availability and access to the internet, technical knowledge, barriers created by the gatekeepers of the platforms, and lack of free time and opportunity to contribute have been recognized as some of the hindrances to equal participation [ 21 31 ]. In addition to systemic barriers, researchers have also highlighted that the global political landscape has significant impact on contributors and consequently, on the data produced [ 31 36 ].

Not all users contribute equally to the map. OSM is no exception to the 90-9-1 rule found in online communities where only a small number of active contributors account for most of the contributions [ 19 ]. By our calculations for OSM, the top 1.4% of editors are responsible for 90% of all the map changes ( Figure 2 ). On a monthly basis, approximately 1 to 13 percent of users actively contribute data [ 20 ]. Figure 1 shows that though over 1 million contributors have edited the map, less than 700,000 have made more than ten changes to the map.

The response of the OSM community has been notable in the wake humanitarian crises [ 15 16 ]. In particular, HOT mobilizes and coordinates global mapping events in response to disasters, including Typhoon Yolanda (2013), The Ebola Crisis (2014), and the Nepal Earthquake (2015), to name just a few. Additionally, local OSM communities organizeto recruit and support new participants as well as to map previously unmapped areas [ 17 18 ]. Regional and globalconferences are also organized by active OSM groups, typically with support from the OSMF and regional OSM organizations. In addition to the map itself, there are active mailing lists and a wiki which also serve as venues for user contributions and discussion.

OSM relies on volunteer contributions to build and curate the map: specifically, this means that OSM does not offer financial incentives to mappers. Currently, there are more than 5 million registered users, over 1 million of whom have edited the map. The growth of the entire OSM community is shown in Figure 1 . Researchers have noted the motivations for contribution to OSM as ranging from altruistic to vandalistic as a result of intrinsic self-motivations and external societal, economic, or political drivers [ 10 13 ]. The legal entity behind the OpenStreetMap project is the OSM Foundation (OSMF). OSMF is a U.K.-registered non-profit that supports OSM by fund-raising, managing servers, organizing and sponsoring conferences, and supporting working groups that attend to various business functions such as licensing, operations, or communications. OSMF is run by a board which is elected by due-paying members [ 14 ]. Membership with the OSMF is separate from having a user account on openstreetmap.org, which is required for mapping. There is no requirement to join the OSMF to be part of the OSM community (that is, as a mapper, data consumer, etc.). Though there may be overlap in personnel, projects, and donors, but there are no formal governing links between OSM subcommunities—such as HOT, local OSM groups, or companies—and the OSMF.

The last two years have seen major growth of a particular type of community: corporate editors. These are paid editors that curate the map professionally. While numerous for-profit corporations have always been involved in OSM—typically through using OSM data in their services and products—the rapidly increasing number of paid-editors on the platform is new and has become a contentious issue for some in the community. Presumably, the corporations employing these editors are investing in OSM in relation to their product. For example, some core Mapbox products rely on maps built on OSM data. As such they were one of the first companies to engage in this activity, beginning as early as 2014. Other companies, such as Amazon Logistics, claim to use some OSM data in their internal routing algorithms. In turn, they contribute back information from their drivers to improve the vehicle routing abilities of OSM data [ 10 ]. In this article, we identify ten corporations that transparently employ teams of professional editors. We explore the editing activity of each team to better understand the impact on the map and community. Though some editing mishaps have made the OSM community suspicious of corporate editing, guidelines around transparency and community engagement are now in place that these corporations attend to—and in so doing, make the usernames of their editors available. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first article exploring the role and contributions of corporate entities editing OSM at scale. We consider the discourse about corporate involvement in OSM to inform and contextualize quantitative analyses of the OSM database to measure the global footprint of the ten companies.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a freely available and openly editable map of the world founded in 2004 by Steve Coast in response to the prohibitively expensive geographic data owned by the Ordnance Survey [ 1 ]. Since this time, OSM has grown into the world’s largest Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) platform. OSM is comprised of the consumable product—the mapped, geographic data produced by millions of people around the world—and the massive community that maintains it. At its technical core, OSM is a geospatial database with billions of entries that denote hundreds of millions of physical objects in the real world. Several researchers have commented on the growth in the volume and the evolution of this geographic content in terms of accuracy and completeness [ 2 6 ]. The constantly-evolving map is supported by a growing community of mappers with a variety of motivations [ 7 ]. In addition to individual mappers, various groups formed around OSM also provide clues about the diversity of interests in the OSM community. These include for-profit organizations that use the map-data, organizations such as the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), which creates geospatial data both in preparation of and response to humanitarian crises around the world, or the many formal and informal local OSM communities that organizeand other events to encourage participation and data contribution. As such, OSM can be described as a “community of communities” that curate and edit map data on a single platform, compelled by a range of individual and shared motivations, but with the over-arching objective of creating a freely accessible, open, and editable map of the world [ 8 ]. The continued growth of OSM is a testament to the idea that maps are never fully formed, and are thus an ever-evolving product of embodied, social, and technical processes [ 9 ]. Maps represent snapshots of the moment, reflecting the values and priorities of their creators. The various communities within OSM edit the map with different goals and motivations with the hope that the common platform results in a uniform product useful for all. The ongoing efforts of this “community of communities” make OSM a constantly evolving map-of-the-moment adapted to the requirements of the day.

2. Materials and Methods

The companies examined in this report were identified through either their longtime involvement in the OSM community, noted by their continued sponsorship of the Foundation and/or conferences, or their current transparency in publicly revealing their involvement in editing the map. This comprehensive sample was made by those with the most editing activity (Apple, Mapbox, and Kaart) along with seven other corporations that the authors were able to identify through their conference participation and their publicly visible list of paid editors. In total, we identified 954 usernames associated with corporate editing. At the time of writing, we are unaware of other corporations with as much editing activity as those identified here. It is possible that there are other companies employing teams of editors, but have yet to disclose this information.

We used two types of data sources to then further examine the role of corporate editorship: public articles and data about corporate involvement in OSM, and the geospatial data created by corporate editors.

For the first source, we identify information across websites and media outlets to help trace the interest expressed by corporate editors for using and editing OSM. This information links also to publicly-available data that lists usernames of editors associated with each corporate team. It also lends insight into the motivations, the nature of edits, and the mode of edits because these companies both list and discuss specific mapping projects and their progress. The OSM sponsors list was used as the starting point for assembling a list of companies interested in OSM. Media articles were obtained when developments regarding this new phenomenon of corporate editing occurred. The authors’ long-time experience in the OSM community, including personal observations at State of the Map conferences, informed the formation of the questions and interpretations.

tile-reduce ( For the second source, we use historical quarterly-snapshot OSM-QA-Tiles for quantifying where and what the corporate editors are editing on the map. OSM-QA-Tiles are vector tiles containing object level editing behavior for the vast majority of OSM data: roads, buildings, points-of-interest, etc. in an efficient, accessible form. For example, a recently modified building will exist in an OSM-QA-Tile as a polygon object with metadata including the name of the mapper that most recently edited it, the timestamp of this edit, and the current version number of the building: denoting whether this user created the building (version = 1) or edited an existing object (version > 1). We find this to be more accessible than the standard OSM data-model which requires first reconstructing the building by identifying the individual nodes associated with the object. However, an analytical weakness of the standard OSM-QA-Tiles is that map objects are unique (one version of each object), so other than knowing their current version number, objects are unaware of their own editing histories. Thus, these tilesets can only represent a snapshot in time: the most recent version of the map data. For this historical analysis, we used the historical quarterly-snapshot OSM-QA-Tiles. These tiles represent the map at the end of every quarter since 2005. Historical OSM data analysis is possible by iterating through these tiles to get quarterly development of the map. For example, if a road was created in January, and then subsequently edited three more times in April, August, and December of that year, then each of the quarterly snapshots will include this road along with the metadata corresponding to each of these edits (e.g., usernames and date of each of these four changes). An annual snapshot, in contrast, would only include metadata for the latest edit occurring in December. Objects are edited at all frequencies, but quarterly snapshots give a finer resolution of the evolution of the map while still making global-scale analysis computationally efficient. We use the open-source Javascript framework github.com/Mapbox/tile-reduce ) to efficiently process these historical vector tilesets, following the same methodology as previous work by Anderson et al. [ 15 ].

Thus, the initial analysis of media articles, blog posts, and wiki pages enables us to position corporate editors in the context of the larger OSM community, while the evaluation using OSM-QA-Tiles quantifies the impacts to the map. To label edits as corporate, we match the usernames associated with edits with the publicly disclosed lists of usernames associated with each company. In the event a mapper edited before and/or after being employed by a company, we filter by time to count only the edits that occurred during the mapper’s employment on a corporate data team.