Supporting OpenStreetMap community activities across India

OpenStreetMap India community, including contrapunctus, have been an active part of the FOSS United community, with regular appearances at IndiaFOSS and various CityFOSS events.

Most of us are aware of how incredible and critical a project OpenStreetMap has turned out to be. For those who don’t know, OpenStreetMap is a community-made and community-owned map of the world, released under a copyleft libre license. It is widely relied upon by FOSS projects like Organic Maps, OsmAnd, OsmApp, KDE Marble, and GNOME Maps; Companies like OLA (OLA Maps), Meta (Facebook), Apple, Strava, Swiggy, redBus, Niantic (Pokémon Go, Ingress), Zomato, and others; Organisations like the United Nations, Wikipedia, and Doctors Without Borders.

Contrapunctus has been involved with OSM for a long time now, and has been organising mapping parties for the last three years. While OSM is very comprehensive in EU and the US, it lags behind in India. Partly due to insufficient awareness in the population, and very few contributors for a country of our size. He has been hosting mapping parties in Delhi NCR with the intent to keep the existing contributors active, onboard new ones and get more and more people to improve OSM in a focused way.

During BiharFOSS earlier this year, he led another OSM session. On the sidelines of the event, while mapping the IIT Patna campus, Rahul, Vishal discussed the possibility of a grant to Contrapunctus. The grant would enable him to continue travelling to FOSS United events across the country and also continue to organise OSM mapping events. Supporting sessions on OSM at FOSS United events will hopefully improve the diversity of both the FOSS United and the OSM India community.

Post by @OSMIndia@en.osm.town

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While we continue to try our best to make space and promote FOSS communities through our events, we at FOSS United have also been tinkering around and rethinking what our role as ecosystem enablers for the Indian FOSS community can look like. A part of it can be figuring out ways to help communities and individuals that contribute to various digital commons. Say something along the lines of Community Grants? But as we figure out the nitty-gritty of it, we thought why not go ahead and start with a short, experimental grant.

Post by @OSMIndia@en.osm.town

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And we are happy to announce a three-month grant of INR 30K/month, amounting to INR 90K, to support OSM India community mapping parties and meet-ups across cities in India :)

Here’s a short message from contrapuntus on his experience working with the OSM community and what lies ahead:

As someone who cares about privacy and software freedoms, I use freedom-respecting software like Organic Maps and OsmAnd instead of proprietary software like Google Maps. These applications rely on OpenStreetMap for the map data, so improving OSM improves the map for myself and others.I also find improving OSM to be quite fun! Exploring and documenting places, filling in the blanks on the map, watching software get better thanks to the data you add...it's quite addictive. Each workshop I have conducted has been a learning experience for me, and I continue to refine the material to make it more engaging.Each workshop has also brought with it the opportunity to meet the free software community of each city, which is always a delight. I've been hosting mapping parties in Delhi every month for the past few years, which motivate existing contributors, onboard new ones, and get everyone to improve OSM in a focused way. These activities are important on a number of levels, and I will continue organising them. The other half of the equation is applications which use OSM. For end users, OSM data is only as useful as the applications which use it. We need to improve freedom-respecting software like Organic Maps and OsmAnd, and I hope to contribute to that effort in the future.”

This grant is made possible thanks to our Industry Partners, who help us run the FOSS United Grants program. If you are an organisation that wants to give back to the FOSS Community, please reach out to us at foundation[at]fossunited[dot]org. If you’re an Indian FOSS project looking for a grant, please drop us an email at grants[at]fossunited[dot]org. Find information about previous grantees at https://fossunited.org/grants.