What OpenStreetMap can be

https://forum.osm.org/viewtopic.php?id=61826

and Microsoft released 124 million buildings for contribution to OSM:

https://blogs.bing.com/maps/2018-06/microsoft-releases-125-m...

There's also been some work by individuals:

https://github.com/jremillard/images-to-osm

A key to the satellite imagery projects is that the imagery be suitably licensed.

    >  I'm surprised by how much of it is
    > done by very few people [...] How do
    > we make it the Wikipedia of digital maps?

https://github.com/mapbox/mapping/issues/113

Mapbox also uses other data to find things to improve.

This seems to be the general sentiment of the OSM community, without evidence that merely adding more people will yield better results.

I personally was turned off from contributing due to the emphasis on "community", even at the expense of map quality. I blogged about this 7 years ago.

As with Wikipedia, and perhaps much more so, the community can be very fragmented (both online and, obviously, geographically), and the portion holding the real power is usually very insular.

This essay https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm recently popped up on HN in reference to Valve and "flat" or non-hierarchical companies like Valve, often with a caveat to ignore its focus on the feminist movement. However, in the case of another all-volunteer project, it may apply better without that caveat.

That vector tiles enable the representation of a subset of the data that a particular group care about (e.g. playgrounds) in order to encourage and enable contribution from a wider and more diverse community?

OSM has all of that, it's great.

I haven't had time to really dig into OSM. One item that confuses me is the community-based editing which lends me to not wanting to touch it out of fear I'll cross someone (like Wikipedia). I do a lot of personal mapping on Google Earth of routes, points of interest, etc., just dumping GPS data out after walks. I would like to do the same on OSM, and store it as my own private overlay but I don't see how.

I found the app the most accurate source. Though the other maps were better about displaying where guarded and unguarded mountain huts were.

There is an old proverb of "A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step". Almost all contributions make a positive step for improving the map for everybody. In the time it took to write the comment you probably could have used your local knowledge and aerial imagery to add some details to the map.

I remember when I started adding data to the map in 2006 and it was almost all blank. I was happy to cycle around my local area with a GPS and spend time adding data locally to me. I did it partly because I was interested in the technology but I also had faith that when I needed to use the map someone else would have added the data that was local to them. As it turns out, this faith was justified and the OSM maps of the UK are great.

For OSM to continue to make progress there is an assumptions that there is a subset of the general population that are willing to contribute for the greater good. I know that isn't always the case, the argument of: "why bother when we all use Google maps" is common. As it turns out, what Google displays on the map and what they allow you to do with it is fairly limited.

As Doctor_Fegg argues, OSM is only just beginning on the journey to becoming an essential resource for worldwide geographic information. Right now things are still too focussed on providing a limited set of raster tiles which typically throw away half the data when choosing what can be displayed.

Vectors tiles are an obvious next step for expanding the visualization of the existing data and provide the client with greater access to the underlying data which might not be shown on a raster tile.

Another important point of open data is that it allows multiple sources to be combined together. OSM has never tried to collect everything. For example, SRTM is a better source of altitude information. There are other websites which provide open aerial imagery or street-view style videos. Openness of the raw data is the fundamental differentiator of OSM versus any alternative that I am aware of.

Just like open source software is increasingly relied upon by businesses and the internet as a whole. I believe that open data will also be seen as being a fundamental building block which will never decrease in value or adoption.

It really only requires a few people who want to stay busy doing something that doesn't require of thinking to finish their day. In the early days of OSM, I mapped hundreds of local hiking trails. I also aligned extremely inaccurate street vector lines to the underlying aerial images for tons of cities. It's a very satisfying activity once you're in the flow.

Similarly, some madman has walked all the streets in my city and annotated all houses with the correct house number.

One of the best parts of OSM is that it's gathering data that is largely static: street location, and names, and number don't really change over time. So you don't need a large number of volunteers to improve a local map in a meaningful way.

https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete

It's super easy and once you run out of tasks, you can dig in deeper with this one https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vespucci or just through the browser.

Germany is quite well documented.

Be careful what you wish for. Once there's enough pre-existing data, or many contributors actively adding it, you'll have to worry about offending the "community".

Right now, you can be that community and add what you feel is important in the way and order you feel is important, at least locally.

Alternatively, you could try to ETL [1] the data from other sources, though free ones aren't always available, especially if something like building data hasn't been put into digital form by the government. Even then, you might be in for a fight to get it for a reasonable cost, even if freedom-of-information or public-records laws are technically on your side.

[1] certain computer skills are obviously very helpful, but expect to QA your own automation.

Here are some other similar projects: http://sdrgps.blogspot.com/ https://github.com/hahnpv/gr-gps https://github.com/hahnpv/SoftGNSS

Personally I would rather buy a $10 modules off eBay or a Chinese website which provides the GPS data in a standard NMEA serial stream.