An introduction to the OpenStreetMap project – C.Quest

Introducing OpenStreetMap with Christian Quest

Walid: Today, dear listeners, we’re going to talk about a topic that we very quickly addressed in episode 14 of season 2, with Manon Corneille, we were talking about Open Food Fact and we talked about OpenStreetMap. And that’s good because today, we’re going to do an introductory episode on OpenStreetMap to understand who’s behind it, how it works and why. And with me, I have the great pleasure of having as a guest Christian Quest, whom I will let introduce himself afterwards, with whom we will talk about OpenStreetMap to try to find out more. Christian, welcome to the Free Projects podcast! I hope you’re doing well and hello to you.

Christian: Hello.

Presentation of Christian Quest

Walid: Well, listen, let’s go. So, as I was saying in the episode on Open Food Facts, we talked about OSM and we said that… that there were quite strong links between Open Food Facts and OpenStreetMap, at least the French part. So I’m going to start by letting you introduce yourself, explaining to us a little bit who you are and what your background is in Libre and how you discovered Free Software.

Christian: So who am I? I’m an old geek actually. I’m closer to 60 than 50. First computer in 1981, so you see, it goes back a bit. And then free software happened at the end of the 90s, I discovered Linux with Suse, and then running the first web servers with that, then PHP, MySQL, well that kind of thing. That’s it, the entry into the free is at that moment. And OpenStreetMap, I started in 2009, so 15 years ago. The project started in 2004, but I discovered it in 2009.

Walid: When did you discover this? How did it go?

Christian: I was doing genealogical research and I was looking for place names that I had in civil status records that I couldn’t find as a commune name or that kind of thing. And in fact, there are some that I found on OpenStreetMap. And I said to myself “this thing looks good”. And then, I have a funny anecdote, which is that suddenly, I said to myself, hey, I’m going to open an account. And in fact, I realized that my nickname was already taken. I said to myself “hey, weird”. I had the password resent and I received it. So in fact, I had already signed up before, and I hadn’t really been hooked. It’s very funny.

Walid: That’s clear. Before we started, we said that you know the people at Open Food Facts well and that you said that you had a foot in several projects. What other projects do you collaborate on besides OpenStreetMap?

Christian: So, there’s Open Food Facts where for quite a few years now, I’ve been helping out with server administration, on the infra part. It so happens that Stéphane Gigandet started Open Food Facts, who lives a few hundred meters from my home. At the beginning, he often presented Open Food Facts as the Open Street Map of food, because I thought it was very funny. He was inspired a lot by Open Street Map. And then there’s another brand new, very recent project, which I’m really into at the moment, which is called Panoramax. Panoramax is to make a long story short, we make a Street View, but free and collaborative, community. It was a collaboration between OpenStreetMap France and the IGN that made it possible to start the project, but it is a project that does not stop at these two actors.

Walid: I had the chance to see your lectures on this several times. We’ll talk about it, I think, in other episodes of the podcast because I think it’s quite a crazy project. I think we’ll do a full show on it. To start with, I’d like you to start by explaining to us, can you define what OpenStreetMap is?

What is OpenStreetMap?

Christian: I was talking about Open Food Facts which said it was the OpenStreetMap of food. It is often said that OpenStreetMap is the Wikipedia of maps. What for? It’s collaborative, it’s really a Wiki mode, which means that you add objects to the database. First of all, it’s a geographical database, that’s really it. What people see most of the time is what is produced from that database, but it is a geographic database. All maps today are produced from geographic databases and are drawn on screen or on paper.

But the project is to build the most complete, exhaustive, and up-to-date database of free geographic data in the world.

Walid: So that’s what we call a digital commons?

Christian: That’s what we discovered, because we kind of discovered that what we were doing was a digital commons. That’s also quite funny, it was during an OpenStreetMap France conference, we had a researcher who explained to us what commons were. And the digital commons made us understand that this is what we were doing.

What is a digital commons?

Walid: Do you have a definition, precisely, of what a digital commons is?

Christian:

So, the most common definition is that a commons, so if it’s digital, it’s a particularity, but a commons, there are three essential points: a shared resource, a community and rules. There you have it, these are the three ingredients that make there a commonality.

When you do this thanks to the Internet and what you create is data, well it becomes a digital commons. But historically, the commons were common land on which animals could graze. And there you have it, you can’t exhaust the resource, that’s why there are rules. What we like about our digital commons, whether it’s Open Food Facts or Open Street Map, or Wikipedia, is that they’re also free, because we can also, in some cases, have a resource, yes, a community and rules, but all of that may not be free. It can exist too. Our particularity is that they are digital commons, but in addition, they are free.

The beginnings of OpenStreetMap

Walid: And if we start to do a little bit of the history of OpenStreetMap, how does it start, OpenStreetMap?

Christian: So, I wasn’t there at the beginning of the story, but the story as I know it and as it is told, is that there is an English student (Editor’s note: Steve Coast) who needed, for his study project, his thesis or something like that, who needed geographical data. And he quite naturally asked the Ordnance Survey, the Ordnance Survey is the equivalent of the IGN but in England, to have access to the data he needed for his studies. And then you had to fill out a lot of paperwork, it was complicated, etc. Then frankly it annoyed him, he said to himself it’s not normal, all this is paid for with my taxes, or with our taxes, maybe not his, and we can’t use it. So there you have it, in theory for research, etc., we can have access to it. And that wasn’t the case. And so, he said to himself, this is not normal, we are going to create a free base.

And what’s crazy is that these are projects that are utopian. That’s what’s funny too, it’s to start projects by saying, yes, it’s a utopia, we’re going to map the world with our little arms, our little feet. And at first, we are not taken seriously. And then, 20 years later, it’s a different story.

Walid: but his initial project? Was it already mapping the world or was it just mapping the UK?

Christian: So, I don’t know if it was to map the world, but very quickly, you say to yourself, there is no limit, why would I stop? And from the moment we start to set up a tool that allows us to map any point on the globe, in fact, the interest of extending it to the whole world is that we grow the community at the same time. If you do a very local project, etc., you can start like that. But if I take OpenStreetMap or Open Food Facts or Panoramax, the idea is yes, we have to start somewhere, but we are not going to limit ourselves to one territory. So, there’s really a universal side to what we’re trying to do.

Walid: So it starts in 2004, right?

Christian: yes, 2004.

Walid: So there, in 2004, there is… No mapping tools accessible online?

Christian: There have been other projects that have existed, which started around the same time. In France, there is a project called, I think, Un point c’est tout, something like that, which I have not known, which I do not know, and which, similarly, had the idea of sharing geographical data, data collected in the field. And then, well… Why did OpenStreetMap start and expand and not a single point? Maybe for a very simple reason. It starts in England, so everything is in English, so internationalization is quite natural. We can see on Open Food Facts that internationalization has not been so natural. It remained very Franco-French for a long time, because that’s the language barrier. I also learned there on Panoramax, we started in France, but we really have everything. Everything written, everything documented in English to be able to expand more quickly.

Walid: On the beginnings of SM, the founder, he is all alone, he manages quite quickly to find a community of people who find his project interesting. How does it go at the beginning?

Christian: He took a lot of a community on board that revolved around cycling, bikes.

There was really an over-representation of cyclists among those who started on OpenStreetMap. So today, the most detailed maps for cyclists, all over the world, are OpenStreetMap. There is also a very simple reason, which is that when you go out into the field, you want to map quickly enough, but slowly enough, in fact the bike is the ideal speed.

We still move faster than on foot, but not too fast. And so, we can see all the details. You can stop at any place, etc. So, it’s really a great tool for mapping.

The creation of the OpenStreetMap Foundation

Walid: At the beginning, it was a purely personal project where he created a structure from the start to support his project?

Christian: Frankly, I don’t know. I can’t tell you. There is a foundation. The OpenStreetMap Foundation was created quite quickly. I think I’ll go maybe two years after or something like that. I don’t have the details in mind.

Walid: Is it an English foundation?

Christian: yes, it was created in England. It’s a weird status because in fact, non-profit associations don’t exist in England. Associations do not exist in England. It is a company, but a non-profit organization.

Walid : Okay.

Christian : Of course, you can maybe do it on your own if you want to map even a city. But as soon as you want to go a little further, you can’t do it alone. So, you have to quickly tell yourself that this is not a personal project. That’s not possible. So I think that very early on, there was this notion of community, there have to be people to collect geographical information, to share it, and then he didn’t necessarily have all the technical skills to set up the tools, the databases, all that stuff. So there was, I think, a bit of trial and error at the beginning. 2004 is the official birth, it’s where the domain name was registered: we celebrate our birthday in August, because it was in August that the domain name was registered. The real take-off was in 2006-2007, when there really began to be a database with an API that allowed you to interact with the database. And that it really took off, that we started to have tools that are developed around all this. And that the community really started to expand.

The original license of the data

Walid: And at that time, the data, what license is there around that data?

Christian: So in the beginning, OpenStreetMap, all the data was licensed under CC-BY-SA, because there wasn’t much else. And in 2012, we changed the license, we switched to the ODBL license, Open Database License, because the CC-BY-SA…

Walid: So Creative Commons…

Christian: yes, so Creative Commons-BY-SA, that is, you have to cite where the data comes from, and… And that’s the share-alike.

And identical sharing, there, it is very, very strong in CC by SA. That is to say, everything derived from the database must also be in CC by SA. So if I make a map from this data, my map must be in CC by SA. So what was still a very strong constraint for the reuse of data, it still limited a lot of reuse at that time.

And then there was also the notion that it was each contribution that had an author, etc. And the transition to the ODBL license has changed this logic. First of all, it’s a database. The rights holders are the foundation. And the ODBL license only applies to databases. On the other hand, what we produce from the database that is not a database, we can put it in the license we want. So if I produce a map, I can put a copyright on it or it can be… in the public domain, it can be in CC-BY-SA, there’s that, if I want. We don’t have the same constraint. On the other hand, we have the constraint of sharing identically on all the improvements to the data in the database. And that’s important, because in the end, it’s the logic of the common. We have to be able to use data to do something. On the other hand, by using them, if I improve them, I have to reshare these improvements. It’s really an important point for things to converge, for us to keep coming back to the common, rather than diverging. That is, yes, I use the data, but it doesn’t go back inside.

The countries where OSM has established itself the fastest

Walid: Naturally, did the project, at the beginning, develop more in the United Kingdom, for reasons of convenience? Or are there other countries that have also come to enrich their data, and where it has become popular?

Christian: So, it started, obviously, more in the United Kingdom, at the beginning. And very quickly, there is another country that has risen very, very strongly, and that is Germany. France, we’re not bad either, but France, we’ve started… when you see… I made a small site called archeOSM, which allows you to review the state of OpenStreetMap on January 1, 2007, 2008, 2009, etc. And we see that in France, in 2007, there is almost nothing. It’s all empty. In Paris, there are three axes. I don’t think there’s even the Seine, things like that. And then, we see that it takes off. But Germany, they started earlier.

Walid: there is a particular reason or it’s just…

Christian: I don’t know at all. I also don’t know why Germany is still the most active country in terms of contributions today. That’s it, it’s really, they’re on the top of the podium systematically. France, we’re in second, third, fourth place, it depends on the day. Relating to the population, on the other hand, it’s very, very funny to see the differences between countries. We are still well placed in France, even in relation to the population. And you have big countries like the United States where… Yes, they are quite on the podium, but compared to the population, they are not that active.

The beginnings of the OpenStreetMap France association

Walid: On the French side, when did you start a French association?

Christian: We created the association in France at the end of 2011 because the need of the association was above all, since we celebrated the 10th anniversary not very long ago, I reread all the discussions. all the exchanges we were able to have at the time we created the association. It was really that we needed a structure to be able to have equipment, to be able to accommodate it, to be able to receive aid or that kind of thing. Because quite quickly, we still had a small technical community that developed tools, set up services, etc. And that’s it, we needed a support to make it last in the long term. And so that’s why we created the association so yes 2011

Walid : So you were there at the beginning of the association?

Christian : yes I did a lot of things in the associative sector before, rather in sport, I had also created a computer club in (19)81 you see so here is the associative which is an office what is a general assembly etc I knew well. And so I participated quite a bit in the definition of that. I had not considered getting involved in the board of directors of the association. Then finally, during the Constitutive General Assembly, I said to myself “come on, go”. And I found myself secretary of the association to do the administrative procedures.

The governance of the OpenStreetMap project

Walid: Another point I wanted to discuss with you was the governance of the OpenStreetMap project. How does it work? What are the different organs that there are? What are the relationships between them? That’s something that interests me quite a bit about podcasting, to understand a little bit who manages what, who owns the intellectual property of what, who contributes to what. Can you explain to us a little roughly already what are the different organs that we will find around OpenStreetMap, the project?

Christian: There aren’t 50 of them.

I will already summarize in one essential sentence, it is an extremely horizontal governance. There is only one entity that has been created, which is the OpenStreetMap Foundation. This foundation has a board with 7 people.

It’s very, very little, it’s not enough from my point of view, but hey, that’s another subject, it’s very little. And there are working groups, there are working groups that take care of the infrastructure, there are working groups for communication, for the legal aspect, etc.

But in fact, one of the foundation’s slogans is that it is there to support the project, but not to control it, which is quite interesting. The rules come from below, they don’t come from the top.

In terms of support, what does the foundation bring? There is one, infrastructure, and two, legal support. That is to say, to defend the respect of the license, to defend the OpenStreetMap brand, that not just anyone can proclaim themselves OpenStreetMap. There you go.

Walid: Do they also own OSM? Because we can see with the issues around WordPress and WP, that it’s not that simple.

Christian: ah, has OSM also been registered as a trademark? I don’t know.

Walid: because there’s a whole battle in the community, the WordPress, around the use of WP that refers to WordPress. And so, there is a whole legal battle around this which is actually quite interesting. And I wondered if OSM was the same or not.

Christian: frankly, I think that the WordPress community is looking at itself because for me, WP means Wikipedia.

Walid: yes, OK.

Christian: With two letters, it gets a bit hot. With three letters, already, it starts to… There is no such thing as a delusional brand defense. It’s not a particular battlefield. The foundation reminds us that it owns the brand and that you can’t just do anything. But that’s all. The Legal Working Group is less concerned with this aspect, I think, than with the responsibility aspect in relation to the data in the database, that kind of thing.

Walid: You said earlier that you find that 7 people on the board of the foundation is not enough. What for?

Christian: For a global project, it’s not enough. When you start an association in England, I don’t say, but when you have a global project, if you want to have diversity on your board, with 7 places, it’s not possible. Already, even if we take one person per continent, it’s already hot. It doesn’t seem sustainable to me in the long term. Unfortunately, there is no work to be done to change this. I’ve been saying for more than ten years that it’s not enough.

Walid: Are these people appointed, elected? How does it work?

Christian: Oh no, they’re elected.

It is the members of the Foundation who elect. The last election was held a few weeks ago. And the members of the Foundation are either people who join the Foundation, or we have a principle of automatic membership when we are a regular contributor.

So a regular contributor, he doesn’t need to join, to pay a contribution. That allowed us to expand the community a little more, because it was very small, compared to the number of regular contributors. We have several thousand active contributors every day, but we had a few hundred, I don’t know, like 500 voters, that’s it for the foundation. So there, it’s expanded a little more, it allows us to have something a little more representative of the community too.

Walid: So you have a rule that defines what a regular contributor is? Yes

Christian: I don’t know her anymore, but she’s someone who has made changes in the database for more than so many days in the last six months or something. Well, it’s something like that.

Walid: OK, so a very horizontal governance, a single body that is responsible for managing the legal side and the brand. And then, everything else is self-organization?

Christian: And it works with a wiki that is a bit like the bible of the project, a forum that switched a little over two years ago to Discourse, which is the place for discussion, for exchanges on a lot of subjects, including voting, since we have voting systems in Discourse. So there you have it, it works like that, and there is a very, very long autonomy.

The project is very permissive. For example, we haven’t gone into detail about OpenStreetMap, but when we put an object in the database, to describe it, we use tags that are keys, values. And there’s no predefined list of these tags. The API allows you to use new tags without having to ask for permission, etc.

That’s also what makes this project so rich. I often say that the name is very badly chosen because Open, Street, Map… Open, yes, that, OK, we agree. Street, we really don’t just do the streets. And Map, we really don’t just make maps with it. The database allows you to do many other things. So, it should be called OpenGeodata or something like that. But hey, OpenStreetMap is good, it’s not bad. We’re not going to change now, it’s too late.

Walid : Are there people who are salaried employees?

Christian : From the foundation, you mean?

Walid : Yes,

Christian : but very, very little. The first person who was an employee was only in charge of the administrative aspects. She was part-time. And for the past few years, we’ve been… someone who is paid for the management of the infrastructure and a more regular follow-up on the infrastructure. So, that’s only two employees, that’s all.

Walid : So, all technical development, for example, is a volunteer organization… He is a full-time technical person plus volunteers.

Christian : yes, that’s right, yes. The bulk of the OpenStreetMap ecosystem, i.e. both the management of the database, but everything that revolves around it, has been done either on a voluntary basis, or there are also companies that participate in OpenStreetMap. We don’t just have individuals. So, there are companies that have developed software. Most of it is free software. Most of them are open source or free. And so, we have a whole ecosystem that exists around it.

Working groups

Walid : You were talking about these working groups. Are these working groups fairly high-level groups working on an issue?

Christian : Yes, on a theme, on a subject. For example, you have the Communication Working Group. So, there you go, it’s to respond to requests from the press, it’s to have a little bit of visibility, that kind of thing. You have a team that takes care of organizing international OSM conferences, which are called State of the Map, SOTMs. So we have a working group that deals with legal matters.

Walid : Who is part of these working groups? Anyone can ask to be… You, for example, could you ask to be part of a working group?

Christian : Anyone can come forward. It still works a little bit in a way by co-optation.

Walid : ok.

Christian : You have a working group that is important, it’s the Data Working Group, the DWG. He’s a bit like the referee. For example, if there are people who copied data and put it in OpenStreetMap when they didn’t have permission to use that data and it wasn’t free. So the Data Working Group will be able to make them disappear, including historical ones. We’ll be able to block accounts when there are people doing anything or when there are edit conflicts, because it happens to have edit conflicts that are very local, like one guy who considers that it’s a bike path and the other who considers that it’s a bike lane and then it can’t be heard. But we also have international edit conflicts. The border between Ukraine and Russia is debatable.

OSM communities

Walid : I wanted to talk about all these problems between countries and everything, which must be quite complicated to manage. But what I was also interested in understanding was the communities, in fact. We have communities in different countries. The communities are working on local development in their country of origin. We have an OSM France community, and for France, it’s not French-speaking.

Christian : yes, yes and no. Yes, OSM France obviously takes care of the French community first and foremost, but we have also helped French-speaking communities to be formed. We had given a hand, for example, to the constitution of OSM Morocco. And the Francophonie allows us to help them, to accompany them. So, we had made available a virtual machine to be able to make an OSM Morocco site, to have a base map in Moroccan with the borders that go well on it. And then, yes, we have contacts with Belgium and other French-speaking countries. But it’s still more the French territory dimension.

Walid : Generally speaking, the communities of the different countries, you speak, we were talking earlier about this State of the Map conference. How do you collaborate or get in touch?

Christian : There is the international forum, so community.openstreetmap.org, which is the space where, in fact, we can exchange in all languages, an integrated translation system that lowers the language barrier. It’s not perfect, but it’s not bad. It’s very, very variable because, in the end, in each country, people are a little bit self-organized in a way that is unique to them. We, in France, started quite early, we set up our own forum tools, etc., etc. We will be autonomous and not go and depend on GAFAM. On the other hand, you’re going to have communities in Asia that are all about Facebook or Slack.

Walid : It’s interesting to see that not everyone has the same point of view.

Christian : It’s really self-organization. For example, the French community is very inactive on the international forum because the OSM France forum is very active. It can be a little problematic when you start to have ideas for tags or things like that, and you don’t consult, you don’t look at what is being done abroad, it’s a bit of a shame. But hey, we have a good balance anyway, it works well.

Walid : And then, I was wondering, for example, when you arrive with a… “I have an idea, it’s going to be called Panoramax, we’re going to make a kind of free StreetView”, it revolves around the OpenStreetMap universe. Who are you talking to? And you’re completely free to do what you want in any case, but who do you talk to in the community when you have this idea?

Christian : So, first, the French community. I then took advantage of a conference in Europe, a State of the Map Europe, and we already had something that worked. I said, “Well, now, it’s time, it’s ripe, to go and show what we’ve done and go and make little ones outside France”. That’s it, and it’s taking off little by little. But yes, you do this in concentric circles and then you try to wait for the thing little by little. Because if you want to target the entire planet right away, it’s already good to turn the thing on a first territory before scaling up.

The relationship with French institutions

Walid: Earlier, you were talking about the fact that it was a collaboration with the IGN. That brings me to the next part I wanted to discuss with you. It is the relationship with the institutions. If I take for example at the French level, when do institutions start to take an interest in OSM, knowing that in our country, the IGN has its own maps. When do they see that it exists and they start to be interested in what’s going on around OSM? I don’t need a specific date, but basically, what interests me is more the path.

Christian: The journey started with the creation of the association. When we created the association, it was also so that someone who went to see an institution, whatever it is, or a community, or something like that, when you go there in a personal capacity to talk about a project that has no structure, apart from something in England, it was a little difficult to catch. So the fact that we created an association allowed us to be taken much more seriously. It’s an association, law 1901, so we explain our non-profit side, volunteer aspect, etc. It was from the creation of the association that we were able to do this, that we were able to be identified by the institutions as well as by the press, for example. And suddenly there was finally an interlocutor. Because otherwise, there was no interlocutor. There was Christian Quest, there was Gaël Musquet, there was XYZ, well there were plenty of people. They were individuals, you know.

Walid: I guess in the association itself there are people who work in institutions, right? Yes. And who themselves have been self-promoting within the institutions.

Christian: yes, I just mentioned Gaël Musquet. So Gaël was a civil servant, he campaigned on the interest of OpenStreetMap, etc., wherever he was. And then, in my case, it was the opposite. In fact, it was when OpenStreetMap started to show the ability we had to create data, and then to create data that was still of quality, that was usable, we could do things well with it. Here, the opposite happened. It was the Etalab mission that was in charge of opening up public data in France. In 2014, at the beginning of 2014, we organized our second State of the Map France in Paris. And we completely focused it on a subject which was the address, the addresses. Etalab was very, very interested in what we were doing and hired me (laughs). So, it’s the other way around. They said to themselves, we have to bring the knowledge and competence in this area internally. And we were able to start an agreement on addresses with the IGN, with La Poste, with Etalab and OpenStreetMap France. Well, it didn’t give all the results we were hoping for because it was quite complicated. But it shows how much there was an awareness that what we were doing was not just geeks with GPS in the street.

Walid: I guess for a first too, maybe it’s another way to… Another way for all these organizations to collaborate around a commonality, and that it is not necessarily very simple from the first try.

Christian: It’s mainly that they don’t have that culture at all. That’s very complicated to integrate, the culture of the commons. Especially common areas that operate in a very horizontal way. The entire French administration is extremely verticalized. So it’s hierarchical, etc. And there, the “but who decides?” side “Who am I talking to?” “Who is responsible?” We don’t have all that structure, which means we can move quickly too. We don’t have 50,000 authorizations to request. And it’s disruptive when you’re not used to it.

Walid: There was no obstacle around the fact that “no, but it’s my data, you know”.

Christian: Yes, of course. If I go back to 2012, between… The IGN and OSM, and OSM France, there were quite heated exchanges through the press between Gaël Musquet and the director of the IGN at the time. And so, we met. We said to each other, well, come on, let’s stop, we have to talk to each other so that you really know us. But the IGN also wanted to explain why, unfortunately, their data was not open and could not be opened immediately. Because the revenue from sales that it generated, they needed it to operate. But the director at the time, who is called Pascal Berteaud, told us, “I’m convinced that in a few years, all this will be open, but it’s going to take a little bit of time.” So, be patient, but yes, all of this, eventually, will be open. And that’s what happened. It just took ten years.

Walid: What fascinates me is that I’ve watched a lot of State of the Map conferences, especially last year, and some of them, because I’m a railway geek from the SNCF (here and there). And in fact, what I find absolutely incredible is how you realize that, in fact, through a project that is third-party, it allows several entities of the same group to be able to collaborate better on their data. I find it absolutely incredible. You realize that in fact, their common base becomes OSM.

Christian: For several reasons.

Already, we have tools that allow you to collaborate, whereas usually, you have silos that are not designed to collaborate at all. Even with several people in the same team, it’s not necessarily easy to work on the same documents, the same things. If your tools weren’t designed for that, you’re kind of dead. But when we noticed it too, I left OSM, when there was the French Open Data portal, data.gouv.fr, which was set up, the idea at the beginning was that public data could be reused by the private sphere, i.e. companies, citizens, etc. In fact, to their surprise, half of DataGouv’s users were government agencies.

Because in fact… could finally access data from other administrations to which, before, they had great difficulty in accessing. So, from the moment you open things up, without predicting who is going to use them, it allows for a fluidity, a circulation that we absolutely don’t have. I’m fighting a lot against a shift that happened a few years ago from the opening up of data, we moved to sharing or circulation. And in fact, it’s not the same thing. When we share, it’s a 1-to-1 relationship and not a 1-to-N relationship. Well, when we circulate. Sharing between administrations is not open. When we open, everyone will be able to use it.

Communities or administrations that use OSM

Walid: Before we look at the European level, if we look at the French level now, then OSM is heavily used. If we take a look, where are we going to find administrations and communities that use OSM?

Christian: Well, there are a lot of people who use, let’s say, the most visible product of OSM, which is the basemap. So, there are many, many administrative and business services, because we don’t make too much of a distinction, that use OpenStreetMap basemap, because it’s simple to implement, it’s free, which is not the best reason, but there you go, it works, it’s updated. For them, it’s the most used thing. We have set up a service… There is someone who has developed a tool called uMap. It was Yohan who developed this for us more than ten years ago now. And this tool allows you to take a background map and then add and make your personalized map on top of it. And we host more than a million maps like that on uMap. There are many. These are maps that are made either by companies or by administrations and that are visible on their website with an iframe. The use of OpenStreetMap, the first one, is there. The use of data is much more complicated. This can be the case when there are going to be analyses, statistics or stuff like that. On the other hand, as soon as it is really the data that is going to be used, it is not the case in administrations because of the license. Because the ODBL license, there are constraints that are not in line with the spirit of: “if it’s public data, everyone must be able to reuse it”. So there you have it, we have a subject in relation to that. There is a brake and it will remain so, because we are not going to change our license and they are not going to change their logic either. Well, it’s going to be very complicated, I think.

Walid: Are there people who are funded by the communities to work on OSM?

Christian: Finally, work, that is to say updating data or…

Walid: That or people or companies that are actually funded to make tools that contribute to the ecosystem, actually?

OSM and GAFAMs

Christian: So, one, there is a contribution financed by companies. I was talking about the GAFAMs. If we remove the G, all the others contribute to OSM. Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, but also Uber, etc.

Walid: They contribute because in the end, it costs them less to contribute to OSM than to redevelop their own solution?

Christian: They are already contributing in a first way, which is updating data. Because the greatest value of OpenStreetMap is the database. Without the data, everything else loses its interest. So if Amazon updates geographic data, it’s because they use OSM data to calculate routes, routes, etc. And that when there’s no address or the road or the path, they add it because for them, it improves their thing. So, there are… I talk about that, but the situation is very, very different from country to country. In France, we are not going to have so many actors who will contribute, because the data is sufficiently exhaustive, up-to-date, we have a sufficient community. On the other hand, there are certain countries, I’m thinking of African countries or certain Asian countries, where we will have a much greater involvement of these actors. There is also code that is developed by some and that is published as open source, which is free. It’s quite variable. We have an important American player called Mapbox which has developed a lot of bricks that are extremely used in the OSM ecosystem today, especially on everything that is vector rendered, vector maps. But they gradually closed their thing, their stack. As a result, there was a fork. So Mapbox, the fork, became MapLibre. There, the community of contributors is much more active. Also because it’s a project that is not open source, but it’s free. Where it is much easier to access contributions from outside. So, different governance.

Community contributions and open data

Walid: If I am a city or an inter-municipality or a region, etc., do I contribute myself or do I have other actors who contribute for me? Or is there a little bit of everything?

Christian: There’s a little bit of everything. All cases exist. Local authorities that contribute directly to OSM exist. There are some who are very involved, but it’s not the rule. It would be nice if there were more, but it’s still rather rare. We have Digne-les-Bains, for example, which is a good example of contributing to OpenStreetMap, organizing maps to games, etc. That is to say, they went further than just contributing to OSM. I also make OpenStreetMap known to the population. We also have Montpellier, which had done a collaborative mapping of accessibility. There you go, we have cases like that. And then there are cities that, on the other hand, were more at the origin of the opening up of their data, very, very early on. I’m thinking of Rennes and Brest, which are a bit of a pioneer in this area, where they were already producing a lot of data and above all, they opened up data at a time when there wasn’t all that in OSM. For them, it was easier to open their data and then allow OpenStreetMap contributors to add it to the database. Obviously, we, the OSM community, prefer to bring these new actors into the community and have them contribute directly to the database. But hey, it’s not necessarily the most obvious for them either.

Walid: What does it mean to open up this data? That is, they give you datasets in some different formats? Or it means that…

Christian: Opening is I publish my data, I publish my data on an Open Data portal and then we come to use them. Otherwise, it’s “I’ll give you my data”. We want to! But still, French law, if I can give it to one person, I have to open it so that everyone can access it.

Walid: When a local authority opens its data like this, does it open its data from a standard format? Is it hyper variable?

Christian: For geographic data, there are different file formats that exist. File formats are not a problem. We have a lot of tools that allow you to switch from one format to another. No, no, it’s the structure of the data that is the problem. That is to say… If you take something very simple, you take tabular data in a spreadsheet, what are the names of your columns? What’s the order of your columns? Did you give the same meaning to this information, in this place? In fact, that’s a mess (laughs). There is a bit of harmonization that is being done at the national level with the definition of a common scheme. So that’s one of the jobs that DataGov does, precisely. Here, the interest is that when local authorities publish data locally on a theme, we will take, I don’t know, carpooling spaces. Well, there is a national scheme for carpooling spaces, which has been defined, which means that all local authorities are asked to publish according to this scheme, which then makes it possible to aggregate the data and make a file, a national database of carpooling spaces. Otherwise, it’s horror. We have this for electric charging stations, we have this for a lot of things on transport. There have been things like that that have been done. And then, there is another thing that has been defined called the common base of local data. This was a bit of an initiative of an association called Open Data France, an association of local authorities. They said to themselves: “to have a better chance of our data being reused, it would be good if we harmonised the structure and the formats in which we disseminate them”.

Walid: As soon as you have a community that publishes its data on a portal, they look at it and say to themselves “Ah, that’s cool, I’m going to import it into OSM”. Are they volunteers? Is it done at the level of the association?

Christian: No, the association has absolutely no role in this. The association has the same logic as the foundation. We support, but we don’t control. We don’t do it instead. So, it’s going to be related to the theme, because you’re going to have contributors who are fully committed to a data theme. And they will fetch, for example, all the data on the locations of defibrillators to integrate them everywhere, wherever they are. Afterwards, you’ll see another way, it’s a contributor who wants the territory he is in to be as well informed as possible. So there, as soon as there is data that comes out on your territory, it will see how to integrate it, etc. And I use the word integrate and not the word import because… Importing into OpenStreetMap is a bit of a touchy subject, because we already have a lot of data in the database. And when you have an official dataset that will be released, what is its quality? Just because it’s an official game doesn’t mean it’s of good quality.

Walid: Official, you mean who was published by an entity?

Christian: That’s it, which has been published by a community or an administration, etc. I will take a somewhat historical example. When the RATP published the locations of bus stops for the first time. I looked at the bus stops near my home and it was a disaster. There were some who had been on the move for more than 10 years and they were not in the right position in their base. And when I say not in the right position, it wasn’t 10 meters of error, it was 200 meters of error. See, it wasn’t on the same block at all. So yes, there is open data available. First, we start by checking its quality. In principle, there is no licensing problem, because Open Data data in France is under licenses that are fully compatible with OSM’s ODBL. And then, we already have data of the same nature in OpenStreetMap, so we have to make a reconciliation between the two, what we call conflations. Hey, it tells me that there is a defibrillator in such and such a place, but I have one that is 20 meters away, it may be the same. How do I know? So it’s a pretty complicated process to integrate data from official sources.

OSM at the European level

Walid: We talked about France. What I would like to know is a little, at the European level, are there any projects supported by the EU? Does the EU also use OSM at the European level? Do you know a little bit if there are things at this level?

Christian: Is there any support? Support could already be funding. I haven’t heard much about funding directly from OpenStreetMap or the foundation. The foundation’s budget is ridiculous. It’s a few hundred thousand euros, it has nothing to do with the Wikimedia Foundation’s calls for donations, because we only have two employees in the foundation, that’s also it. And there are a lot of resources that are made available for free. For OSM France, it’s the same. So the EU, quite indirectly, if I take the case of Panoramax, we applied for financial support for the development of the mobile app. So we have… €50,000 to help finance the mobile bonus.

Walid: Did you go through the NGI funds, Next Generation Internet Zero?

Christian : yes, that’s it

Walid : NLNet funds?

Christian : yes

Walid: I invite listeners to go and listen to the episode with Lwenn Bussière on NLNet financing.

Christian: There you go, these are files that are not very complicated to put together. On the financing aspect, this is an important point.

On OSM France, for example, we hardly tried to get grants or things like that, because the files are more and more complicated to put together. We ask for deliverables, whereas I may be an old schnock of the associative, but the principle of subsidies, for me, should rather be “what you do is good, we want you to continue, so we finance you”. And as soon as what you are doing no longer suits us, we stop financing.

But there is no deliverable to have. It’s not a performance. However, there has been a shift in recent years. We have transformed associations into a bit of a business. We make calls for projects, calls for tenders. They are limited to local authority contracts. And it’s not very healthy for associations.

Walid: Absolutely. We also talk about it in the second episode on Framasoft that you can listen to too. We talk a little about this subject at some point too. Very interesting all this.

Projects that rely on OSM

Before I finished, there were two things that interested me. The first one was, basically, are there any other projects that are, relying heavily on OSM? We also talked about Apple’s projects, Amazon, etc. But are there other very, let’s say… very well-known?

Christian: I may answer you a little bit, but in fact, OpenStreetMap being quite universal in its content, the content of the database touches on multiple themes. And as a result, there are spin-off projects. You’ll find WheelMap, for example, which is the use of accessibility data in OSM. So, if you want, it highlights and highlights a certain theme.

There is OpenSeaMap, which makes the map more maritime. But in fact, behind it, it’s OpenStreetMap. Behind or below, the database is OpenStreetMap. So, we are trying to bring together a lot of projects.

I don’t know how many projects we have seen set up on “proving a drinking water point to fill my water bottle”. I don’t know, we must have half a dozen now. And they are all creating their own database of drinking water points. They would take the OSM data and then they would add it. First, one, respect for the license, but two, if you make an application that allows you to find a drinking water point and add one when it is missing, you have to go and find it in OpenStreetMap and when you add it, you add it in OpenStreetMap.

Even if you are only going to use this information and not all the rest of the database, at least your database is coherent. Now, one of the last apps where I tried to get them to come to OpenStreetMap is, you may have heard of this app, it’s Very Important Parking. It’s for parking lots for people with disabilities. So, they had a bit of press visibility, etc. Because one of the initiators of the project is Philippe Croizon. And in fact, I told him, but where do your parking lots that you have in your app come from? We had to dig a little bit to know that it was indeed the parking spaces that we had in OpenStreetMap. I said “but when people add it, it has to be added directly to OpenStreetMap. That you don’t have to manage your own database on the side, etc.” But it’s difficult to get them to converge. It’s difficult. Whereas it’s so much easier to say to yourself “Ok, I’m going to highlight the topic I’m interested in, but I’m going to contribute directly in OSM.”

OSM and humanitarian crises

Walid: yes, there’s something that’s super important, I think, that you didn’t talk about, and that’s the use of OSM data, typically for humanitarian crises, earthquakes, that kind of stuff.

Christian: It’s the responsiveness of the OSM community that makes it…

So, there are two things. About ten years ago, we saw the first major crisis on which we mobilized strongly, when there was the earthquake in Haiti. There were no digital maps, and the paper maps that there were at the time were old road maps that dated from the 60s and 70s, so they didn’t have maps. And on top of that, the earthquake had destroyed so much infrastructure that everything had to be updated. So in… Within days, Haiti’s city was mapped from satellite imagery. And in about ten days, I think, all of Haiti was done.

You have to know that when there are big disasters like this, there is a space charter that means that the first satellites capable of taking images that pass over them share the images with everyone. So we have fairly regular access, in the event of a disaster, to very fresh satellite images.

The second major disaster we mobilized on was after the tsunami in Japan, and therefore the consequences with Fukushima. I remember very well, in Haiti, I wasn’t very active at that time, but in Japan, I was really active and I mapped whole nights. Then at one point, I arrive, by the sea, a big factory, what is this factory? I load the OSM data, I say, “oh damn, it’s a nuclear power plant”. I can tell you that two days later, the satellite photos we had, still showed us that there was a sacred, hell of a mess and that the water had gone very, very far. I remember posting a message on Facebook at the time for my friends and family. I said, “I think that within the week, we’re going to hear about a city called Fukushima.”

So, it created a specific structure to manage humanitarian aid called HOT, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, which is an American NGO and which also helped develop certain tools to distribute the area to be mapped. We have what is called the tasking manager. We’re going to take an area, then we’re going to cut it into small squares. And then, presto, each contributor takes a square, contributes to that square. And then, when he’s done, he says I’m done. And then there’s someone else behind who will be able to come by to check that it’s good. And then, presto, the square, it turns green, it’s done. We don’t need to go back on it.

Walid: So it means that you, in your bedroom or living room, can participate in the collective effort in the event of a humanitarian crisis on the other side of the world.

Christian: Yes.

Walid: which is still a big change compared to where you were before, apart from giving to an association, a little helpless.

Christian: There, we can act directly.

In addition, we can act in anticipation. There are areas where we have understood that it is better to map before crises occur. There were a lot of areas like that that were done in anticipation. It can be anticipation, even if we don’t know that a crisis is going to come soon. But we can also have anticipation in the 48-hour future, because we know that there is a typhoon that will arrive over the Philippines.

We will quickly complete the mapping of the pre-existing infrastructure. That way, at least we know that this is done. We don’t have to do that. When there was the earthquake in Nepal, we improved the map of Nepal by a dimension that was incredible. There was very little mapped. And then, all the roads, all the paths were mapped in a week.

Walid: Is there any relationship with the United Nations of this NGO that was created?

Christian: Yes, they have relations with the United Nations, the Red Cross, all these institutions, because you have the whole field of humanitarianism, which is a complete world. Which is also sometimes a bit of a crab basket, you have to be aware of that. So there you have it, there is still a charity business that exists. But they are the ones who are in contact.

But we were also solicited, something quite notable, it was Médecins Sans Frontières, a few years ago, who contacted us to say, well, we have to send a team to Guinea, because there is a suspicion of Ebola there, but we don’t have a map, so they bought the high-resolution satellite photo. And they asked us to map. In a few days, we mapped a city in the middle of Guinea, where there are still a million inhabitants. It’s not a small village. And when they got there, there were maps and everything, while the local authorities didn’t have maps. There were no maps that existed.

In France, we also had an association called CartoNG, which does cartography, precisely, humanitarian. Here, it’s really a competent team, with skills in geomatics, etc., who will use OpenStreetMap data to really produce the maps they will need in the field, or do spatial analyses, etc. For example, we’re going to map buildings in remote areas of Africa, because it’s going to make it possible to know roughly where the population is, and so when MSF has to carry out a vaccination campaign, they have the roads and they know more or less where the people are. And so, they know where they need to position themselves to make a vaccination center, to reach a maximum population. This is the kind of stuff that is done with OSM data.

Problems related to political tensions

Walid: Last subject, you touched on it very quickly and I would just like us to say a few words. It’s all these political problems with these border conflicts, the problems that we’ve seen too, data degradation, I think, conflict between Russia and Ukraine, etc. That’s a real subject. How is it managed, in fact?

Christian: For years, it was a quiet topic because it was questions like the default name of Jerusalem, what language do we put it in? We put it in English. Like that, it’s neither in Arabic nor Hebrew, but we kicked the can down the road a bit. But yes, the border, I was talking about Morocco. Why did OSM Morocco need to make their own basemap? It is that there is Western Sahara that is the problem, a dispute over this territory. And so, Morocco considers that it is part of Morocco and you cannot show an official in Morocco a map where the border would not be the right one according to them. So, they absolutely had to have that.

We have rules for managing these conflicts. They have been around for a long time. When there are areas in official dispute, we take the official position of the UN, I believe. On the other hand, you can map the different boundaries in OSM. And we can indicate which countries recognize each of the borders. But we have problems of this type, even us in France, with Italy on Mont-Blanc, you know.

Walid: Oh yes?

Christian: Yes (laughs).

Walid: I didn’t know that so close to us, we had this.

Christian: yes, but hey, we don’t beat each other up for that.

Walid: Are there countries where OSM is banned? Precisely for these questions of borders or languages, etc. ?

Christian: I think there are countries where contributing to OSM would be a problem on the ground. I am not sure what the status is in China, but I think it is a bit hot, because all the Chinese geographical data is garbled. GPS does not give exact coordinates, etc. They have pretty strict laws on that. On the other hand, obviously, all the data in OpenStreetMap, it’s well positioned. You can take a look at North Korea too, it’s very well mapped, but not by North Koreans. That’s it, because satellite images allow us to do a lot of things.

And then there are local and national particularities. Mapping a military zone in Russia, you go to prison. In France too

Walid: I thought you didn’t do it or that it was just blurred, that it didn’t show up on the map.

Christian: Yes, we have a special treatment for all the cards we produce, we at OSM France, in France. There is a list of areas that are forbidden to capture. I keep it simple, I simplify. In the copy of the databases that are used to make the maps, all the objects that appear in these areas are eliminated, so the maps are empty. You can take a look at Brest, for example, it’s very visible. The harbour of Brest, which is a military zone, there are no objects in it. On the other hand, if you load the OpenStreetMap data on the same area, you will see that there is a lot of data. They are not visible on the map. We didn’t remove them so as not to create a Streisand effect.

Final Words

Walid: Yes, of course. We’re coming to the end of the interview. Do you have a final word or do you have a message to pass on before we part?

Christian: yes, I have a message. You shouldn’t just use it when you’re a developer, etc., when you make sites, etc., you also have to maintain it. Everything on the maps that we see is added or updated by contributors. I push a lot for what I call gardening, which means that you have to garden the database all the time to remove weeds, remove dead wood, etc. It’s exactly the same thing. Geographical data is perishable data. The field is constantly changing, so if you don’t maintain it, the database loses all its interest, all its value. So you really don’t just have to consume what you find, but also participate in one way or another in its maintenance. It can be simply by making OpenStreetMap known and the fact that we have this ability to update the database.

The extension of the community of contributors is the essential point for us. What I often say is if one day we had to make a difficult choice between deleting the database or deleting the community, it’s the database that I delete. The value is not in the database, it is in the community. Because if there is no more community, the database will not be updated and will lose all its interest. Whereas if I delete the database, I know the community, it will recreate it.

Walid: It’s a nice transition towards the end of the episode. There you go. Look, it’s great because I really wanted to know more about OSM. I had a lot of questions that you answered. So, thank you very much, Christian.

Christian: I’ll add one thing: there are plenty of ways to contribute. There are lots of different apps. StreetComplete, MapComplete, the OpenStreetMap browser’s built-in editor, heavier tools, etc. There are really a lot of ways to contribute. And one of the ways to contribute is… I’m putting my product back together: one of the ways to contribute is by taking photos in the field and sharing them on Panoramax, because OpenStreetMap contributors will be able to use them as a source of information to update the OSM data. We really have plenty of ways to contribute.

Conclusion

Walid: I’ll put in the transcript of the episode a link to one of your conferences that talks about Panoramax. And if you feel like it, I’ll be happy to invite you back to talk about Panoramax. There are things to say. It’s very interesting. There is really a lot to say about this. There are challenges when you start saying yes.

Christian: There are challenges when you start saying “yes, I’m going to have to host how many millions or how many hundreds of millions or how many billions of photos”, precisely.

Walid: In that case, we’ll talk about it again. And for the listeners, know that there are other episodes that will talk about OSM, because I’m going to do episodes on transportation, which is one of my great passions. And before making these episodes, I needed OSM to be introduced. So there you have it, now it’s done. We will be able to do episodes on transport and certainly other things in addition. Stay tuned for future episodes. And as usual, share these episodes, let other people around you know about them. That’s how you get to know the podcast and also the projects, even if OSM doesn’t need to be known, it’s known worldwide, that’s it. Christian, thank you so much, see you soon, thank you for taking the time with us, and then see you on the podcast.

Christian: see you next time! Thank you.

This episode was recorded on November 1, 2024.

License

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