After a bit of a summer hiatus our OpenStreetMap interview series is back!
We last heard from Martijn van Exel when we interviewed him about OpenStreetMap in Utah back in 2022. Besides being an active mapper and local organizer, Martijn is also a prolific OpenStreetMap tool developer. Today we have a chance to chat with him about his Meet your Mappers service.
1. Martijn, welcome back! For those who don’t yet know you, who are you and what do you do? What got you into OpenStreetMap?
Thanks, happy to be back and thanks for having me! I am somewhat of a senior citizen in the OSM community: I got involved in 2007 after I attended a mapping party in Amsterdam. The idea of a community-based map-making project sounded pretty cool to me, and it still does! If I had to name one thing that I appreciate most about the project is the local communities all over the world. I started the OSM Utah community when I moved to the United Stated in 2011 and have been organizing monthly meetings almost every month since. Our local mapping community was recently featured on the OpenStreetMap US blog.
2. What inspired you to make Meet Your Mappers? Who is it made for?
I am always on the lookout for new people to invite to the OSM Utah Meetups. Having our own website for OSM Utah helps people find us organically, but I always felt some FOMO - there must be active mappers out there who haven’t found us yet and would be interested in joining us! There are some tools out there that help find active mappers, but none did what I wanted: see who’s actively mapping in my area, and have an easy way to contact them. Meet Your Mappers celebrates local community building by giving every local organizer a straightforward way to find out who is actively mapping in their area. So I figured I’d make something myself, and learn something in the process!
3. I guess one issue with a tool like this is findign the balance between helping create community and data protection / privacy. How do you manage this?
In the latest release, I removed the requirement to be logged in with an OSM account. Requiring users to log in with their OSM account adds a barrier to entry and it doesn’t do anything meaningful to protect mappers’ privacy. If your username or mapping activity reveals too much about you as a person, there is nothing I can do to mitigate that. As for the tool itself, I collect aggregated metrics using a privacy-first metrics platform called Simple Analytics. I highly recommend it! Anyone can see the metrics for Meet Your Mappers here.
4. Are you looking for contributors to the project? What is the best way for people to get involved?
Absolutely! The project itself is open source and I welcome contributions in the form of code, bug reports and ideas. I am also looking for a hosting partner or small financial contributions. Meet Your Mappers runs on a Hetzner VPS that costs me about USD15 a month to run. There is a donation link on Github.
5. Last year OpenStreetMap celebrated 20 years. As someone who has been very active in OSM in so many ways (mapper - in different local communities, software developer, etc) for a long time, where do you think the project will be in another 20 years?
Ha, I have a lot of thoughts about that but let me keep it brief! I have become quite pessimistic about the relation between technology and humans, but I believe OSM, as a project that is built around community and human connections, is very well positioned to remain a strong force for good in a world where we as a society serve technology rather than the other way around. Capturing the world around us in a map is a uniquely human endeavor—there is no amount of automation and machine learning that can replace OSM wholesale, even though folks seem to be trying really hard.
A few words for anyone looking to be a local community builder: just do it! Fire up Meet Your Mappers and contact the top 5 active mappers, and get together! I always look forward to our local OSM meetups. I always learn something new! I am happy to help you get started. Please get in touch!
Thank you, Martijn! For this tool, and all your other contributions to OpenStreetMap. The power of OSM is the community, and tools like this are critical to making it simpler to join the community.
Anyone who wants to stay up to date on the project can watch it on GitHub. You can reach Martijn on mastodon.
Happy mapping (with others!),
Please let us know if your community would like to be part of our interview series here on our blog. If you are or know of someone we should interview, please get in touch, we’re always looking to promote people doing interesting things with open geo data.