My trip to Madison started with chasing the sunset. The city looked magical, with an island splitting the lake in two, and the sky, the clouds, and the lake’s reflection each holding a different color. I was mesmerized, but mostly more excited about the event ahead and the chance to learn and connect with fellow mappers. I spend a lot of my time trying to show up in rooms where our data is being used or talked about, and just hear what people are actually dealing with. Madison gave me a lot of that.
State of the Map (SOTM) US is organized by Executive Director Maggie Cawley and the OpenStreetMap US team, who put together another successful event this year connecting mappers, businesses, academics, government agencies, and nonprofits to create an open and editable map of the world. The conference program was great, but so was everything around it: the unexpectedly delightful mint strawberry cucumber water, the evening gatherings, the way people actually stuck around and talked to each other. That stuff doesn’t happen by accident. It takes someone thinking carefully about how people connect, and it shows.
Attribute: “By OpenStreetMap US, Professional photos taken by Clint Thayer (focalflame.com)”
What is the community building?
Session after session, I was watching people do incredibly interesting things with open data. Someone combining OSM with federal government road datasets to fix emergency routing in remote national forests. On-device AI navigation running entirely on a phone, no cloud required. Bicycle network stress analysis that shows, visually, exactly why people don’t feel safe cycling in a given city. Legal map generation that produces jurisdiction-specific boundary views from OSM relations, so a map can be legally displayed in India, Pakistan, and China simultaneously while complying with local laws.
Some of the most interesting conversations were around Overture’s transportation layer that came from practitioners with deep roots in how cities think about street networks, mobility data, and what it would take for transportation planners and engineers to integrate open geospatial data. PlanScore Executive Director Michal Migurski walked through that history in a way that was genuinely clarifying: from OSMNX to SharedStreets to where Overture’s transportation layer sits now and what it could unlock for urban planning, bike infrastructure, and city-scale network analysis.
All of it runs on OSM at the core. A remarkable community of volunteers spent the past two decades mapping their communities for free, just because they cared, and that work has become the foundation for real-world location-based applications: emergency services, navigation systems, urban planning tools and more. That trust is earned and maintained by thousands of contributors doing unglamorous work. OSM’s value comes from being fast, agile, and unencumbered, and the community keeps showing that strength. It has been a foundational data source for Overture and we’re grateful for the hard work the OSM community is doing to map the world.
Attribute: “By OpenStreetMap US, Professional photos taken by Clint Thayer (focalflame.com)”
What am I bringing back to the team?
The community is not shy with feedback and I’m grateful for that.
On Global Entity Reference System (GERS): people are using it, building with it, and telling us what’s working and what isn’t. Some of what I heard was about specific friction in production environments, where our data meets someone’s actual shipping constraints and the gap becomes visible. I’ve brought those specifics back to the team. The broader picture is that the appetite is there. People want to use Overture data and GERS.
I’m really happy to see that people are engaging with me on what we’re actually doing rather than what they assumed we were going to do. I think that’s partly about showing up at events like this one and in ongoing conversations, and partly about following through when people give us feedback. For example, we’ve updated our website based on community input . People noticed. That’s a small thing that turned out to matter, and we continue striving to do better.
Attribute: “By OpenStreetMap US, Professional photos taken by Clint Thayer (focalflame.com)”
Where are we going next?
Overture has built a community of engaged, thoughtful members. We have people building on our data in ways we didn’t anticipate. But there’s always more work to do in how we create conditions for those people to find each other, and how we make it easier for someone new to walk in and figure out where they fit. This is always the biggest challenge for any open source community and I left the conversation with more questions than I arrived with, which is usually a good sign.
The Esri User Conference in San Diego is up next – a different room, different community, enterprise GIS professionals who care a lot about interoperability and data reliability. Overture will be at booth #233. If you’re there, come say hi.
Then SOTM Global in Paris, End of August. SOTM Latam in Mexico City, late October. We’re supporting both and we’ll be there. Showing up for these communities is something we want to keep doing – keep learning, keep connecting.
Ending the post with the same sunset. Last evening we went to the Children’s Museum, we were on the rooftop, and the sunset that day was stunning.
See you soon!
— Nora
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