Every day at lunch, geologist Nick Zahn grabs his MacBook Air and heads to the cafeteria at the Maryland Department of the Environment, where he connects to the building's Wi-Fi and logs in to the website for Waze, the hugely popular smartphone navigation app that relies on crowdsourced data. Once in, Zahn accesses the Waze Map Editor, which allows him and other editors to make updates and changes to the map that tens of millions of drivers across the globe use on a daily basis.

"I'll log on and kind of check my area, see if anything has popped up or check in on a couple of problems I've been watching," says Zahn, who is an area manager for Baltimore City and its surrounding territory.

According to Zahn, the things that pop up can include Waze users reporting that a one-way street is now two-way or even a surprise road closure. It's his job to update the map accordingly. Zahn's responsibilities are numerous enough that the 27-year-old also puts in time over the weekends and for about two hours each night as he and his wife watch TV— Bones or The Big Bang Theory, usually.

Zahn has recently had to scale back because he is enrolled in graduate school, but he still puts in at least 16 hours a week working for Waze, which is "more than my wife would like," he says. That's because he doesn't get paid for any of his time. And he isn't alone. Zahn is just one of roughly 6,000 active editors throughout the U.S. who voluntarily keep Waze's map updated. Internationally, there are almost 300,000 editors working behind the scenes. For the most part, this volunteer workforce is entirely self-sufficient.

Building a community

Founded in 2008, Waze is an Israeli-based startup that is growing at a rapid pace. The premise is simple: By tracking users' phones when the app is open and also allowing drivers to leave live traffic updates on the map, Waze provides real-time route guidance that often embarrasses the most sophisticated predictive navigation software. The company's reach and potential as a social mapping tool is so huge—50 million downloads and counting—that in 2013 Google bought the company for almost $1 billion.

Despite suspicions that Google would merge the company with its own Google Maps, Waze operates independently and maintains its own mapping technology, with Google Maps pulling only traffic and emergency data. At last year's Mobile World Congress, Google announced that Waze would be available as an optional preloaded app on all Android phones.

Although plenty of apps and websites depend on the active involvement of users to create or improve the experience, the real genius of Waze is that it's almost entirely crowdsourced. As integral as drivers using the app for navigation are to Waze's real-time analytics, it's the extensive network of volunteer map editors toiling behind the scenes that the company ultimately depends on.

"Since the beginning we knew that to build a map that would be free and constantly updated, we'd need to work with a community of people engaged with the project and who relate to our vision," says Shirli Lior, community team leader at Waze.

Map editors are vital to Waze, so becoming one is easy. Just create a profile on the website, select an option to edit the map, and you're a Level 1 editor with limited editing privileges. There are six levels, and with each promotion—achieved after a certain number of edits—comes more authority and editing responsibility. Zahn is a Level 3 editor and has made more than 60,000 edits since he started five years ago.

"I never edited with the goal of increasing my number," Zahn says. "There are editors out there who just go, and they try to make as many edits as they can, fixing every little thing, and they move up the ranks really quickly. In my case, I'm more about taking the time to look at one little bubble that somebody reported and saying, well, why isn't this working?"

The company employs fewer than 200 people

Waze's popularity goes far beyond its convenience for commuters. In countries without extensive digital maps available, it's becoming essential. In Costa Rica, editors used the app to create the first complete digital maps of the country. And in Italy, Waze says editors have recently turned their attention to North Africa, using Google's Street View functionality (the main benefit of the Google acquisition for editors) within the Map Editor to map the country from afar.

Considering how prevalent Waze is becoming around the world, it's astonishing how small its staff is. The company employs fewer than 200 people, and fewer than 10 of them are dedicated to supporting the global editor community. Using feedback provided by the most active editors, Waze's main focus is to provide the best software and tools it can to support their efforts.

The majority of the community, however, is self-regulated. Upper editors create Waze's mapping guidelines, manage lower-ranked editors, and even dole out discipline. Through the Map Editor and online forums, they take responsibility for tutoring newcomers and monitoring forum threads with subject lines such as "Bodies of water are now places!"

Editing the map isn't the only way the Waze community contributes. In what might be the most remarkable stat about the company, when a new version of the app is released, it's the volunteers who translate it—and fast. "We can usually expect that within 24 hours we'll have 100 percent of about 30 languages, and within 48 hours all of the translations done," Lior says.

A labor of obsession

It's easy to draw correlations between Waze and Wikipedia, which also relies on crowd-sourced editing. One big difference between the two is that Waze is for-profit, selling targeted advertisements on its map. But both attract the same kind of people: Type A personalities with a penchant for detail. And in Waze's case, the built-in gamification, or ability to increase rank by accruing edits or points, is particularly addicting.

Kent Smith, a 50-year-old recovering Wikipedia editor, is a Level 6 global champ—one of the top titles you can earn—who can edit any part of the U.S. map. When he first started as a Waze map editor three years ago, Smith recalls coming home from work and losing his whole night to working on maps. "If you're an obsessive-compulsive-type personality, you get so sucked into it," he says.

"If you're an obsessive-compulsive-type personality, you get so sucked into it."

Smith, who works in marketing for a computer company and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, has managed to rein in the time he spends working on Waze to "no less than a couple of hours a day." Along with editing maps, he also uses his Wikipedia skills to maintain the U.S. Waze Wiki pages, which provide instructions and guidelines for map editing on a general and state-by-state basis.

Alan Akins, another Level 6 global champ, has been a Waze editor in the Portland, Oregon, area since 2010, before much of Waze's volunteer infrastructure had been formally established. Like Smith, Akins, who is 42 and married, also had a bit of an addiction problem when he first became a Waze editor. "I had a time that I could put in probably 30-plus hours [a week] working on map editing," he says.

Nowadays, Akins, who works as an IT vendor manager for Nike, spends only five to six hours a week editing maps, but he spends plenty more time creating Wiki tutorials or answering questions on Waze's forums, where his handle AlanOfTheBerg is ubiquitous. In addition, Akins runs the unofficial @WazeMapping Twitter feed, providing tips and answering questions. But even that's not enough. "I also monitor the @Waze Twitter account because I sometimes find that the support on there lacks in terms of being able to understand the problems users are writing in about," he says.

Although Zahn, Smith, and Akins readily admit that their dedication might seem crazy to an outsider, they enjoy the camaraderie that comes with being a map editor and see a sense of altruism in what they do—they are helping people. "It's really nice to be able to solve people's problems, like they're not getting to the right place, or they're not able to turn where they think they should be able to turn," Zahn says.

There are few perks that come with being a map editor. Waze does routinely organize and occasionally pay for local and regional meet-ups for top editors, but these are as much about fostering a sense of community and gleaning valuable feedback as they are about rewards. If you're going to have people working for free, they'd at least better feel valued and like part of the team.

To that end, when Waze was being acquired by Google, the company flew a small group of global champs to its headquarters in Tel-Aviv, Israel, to have them meet and involve them in the decision making. Both Akins and Smith cite that trip as the highlight of their time spent as editors. Another trip to Tel-Aviv for 50 global champs to discuss future projects is planned for June this year.

Maintaining the work force

With Waze's popularity only increasing, its current model inevitably raises questions. The biggest one: Is the system sustainable? What happens when the most active editors no longer want to spend their free time maintaining the map and community?

In fact, in the past year, Waze's editor pool has shown signs of stagnation while users have continued to boom. "Our focus is more on growing the driver base than growing the editor base," says Julie Mossler, Waze's head of global communications and creative launch strategy.

Despite the massive injection of Google cash, Waze doesn't look to be supplementing the editors with extra help anytime soon, either. "On the employee side we really haven't grown much since we were acquired," Mossler says. "We know how to operate a really strong, lean team, and that's not something we want to lose just because we have the ability to hire more."

"Our focus is more on growing the driver base than growing the editor base."

A big challenge for Waze moving forward will be its ability to continuously convert low-level editors to the ranks of its already spread-thin top editors, who do the heaviest lifting. "It does take over," Smith says. "And you know, for me, I'm actually trying to do a little less, because I have a lot of stuff going on in my personal life too."

Without any monetary incentives to move people up the chain, replacing top editors is difficult—especially with the amount there is to learn when it comes to Waze's own mapping guidelines, state and federal guidelines, and just using the Map Editor. "A lot of what I see on the [Map Editor] chat is trying to get people who start editing at a Level 1 to stick with it," Zahn says. "They've also developed this mentoring program where people can start at a Level 1 and rank up, but what I really think it comes down to is that we're going to need to get some more people editing the map."

Indeed, what makes Waze so very powerful and valuable is the accuracy of its map and the community it supports. That's what attracts users, which in turn attracts advertisers—and even cities. Last October, Waze announced its Connected Citizen program, which teams up with cities and municipal organizations to provide data about everything from traffic flow to potholes. So far, Waze is working with 30 different partners across the globe. Ten of them are in the U.S., including the NYPD, the City of Boston, the Oregon Department of Transportation, and the Kentucky Department of Transportation.

For Waze, the benefits of the Connected Citizen program are twofold. First, it's a way for the company—and Google—to weave itself into the civic fabric. Second, by establishing a direct connection between city databases and the Waze Map Editor, the shared information loop will provide some relief for map editors, who can spend hours tediously combing state and local websites for updates such as road construction.

"Some of the [municipal] feeds we get are automatically fed into the Map Editor and require editor-staff review and approval before they appear in the app," Mossler says. "We will always have a human touch, since that's what has made Waze so relevant and flexible in the first place."

That last part, about always having a human touch, is crucial. Data provided by Waze users and the Connected Citizen program can provide an immense amount of information, but algorithms can only do so much. For now, there are just too many variables and too much at stake for humans not to be the deciding factor in many editing decisions. And so for Nick Zahn, Kent Smith, Alan Akins, and the legion of other volunteer Waze map editors, the work continues.

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