Earlier this week Danny and Richman joined our growing data team. Alongside Ruben, Edith and Luis they will help us here at Mapbox contribute even more and better improvements to OpenStreetMap. With our data team up to five full-time members, we can redouble efforts on projects like tracing all of San Francisco’s buildings, fixing massive amounts of TIGER misalignments and importing 1 million New York City buildings. This is a huge step up in our ability to contribute data and give back directly to the community. To make this work, we’re creating public guidelines that ensure our involvement is positive for OpenStreetMap as a community and as a map.

Updates to TIGER roads in US by Mapbox data team

In addition to the rules that apply to everyone in the community, here are the guidelines we want to reiterate and add for ourselves:

1. We listen to community. We are looking for your feedback on how to make a better map. Get in touch with any of our data team members. For general feedback drop aaronlidman or me a line.
2. Quality is paramount. We hold ourselves to the highest mapping standards as documented on the Wiki or as established as common practice in the community.
3. Local knowledge first. Where in any doubt, the locally surveyed information prevails over remote updates.
4. We disclose all ongoing mapping efforts on the OpenStreetMap Wiki.
5. All full time data team members will be listed OpenStreetMap Wiki and identified on their user profiles.
6. Where possible we use public tools for coordinating work, allowing anyone in the community to participate.

You can find these guides on our Wiki page. Let me know what you think of them, and what we could do better.

Here’s to making the best map in the world!