I started contributing to OSM recently after a bike trail was built near me. The arial imagery typically takes years to refresh around here so I walked it a few times to capture GPX tracks and then drew the new path. It was exciting to see my contribution percolate out to various apps that depend on OSM, and meanwhile Google and Apple have both ignored my edit suggestions and deny the path exists.

So I have a fairly fresh newcomer's perspective and here's what I suggest to get started: keep it simple and start local. As others have noted, skip the complex mapping app and go straight to the website for feature edits, or download a simple mobile app like Every Door and focus on businesses and landmarks near you. Go on a walk around your neighborhood and look for old/incorrect/missing businesses. There may be errors near you about places you actually care about, and it is really gratifying to fix those.

There were restaurants near me that were missing, shops that had changed hands, etc., that were easy fixes but years overdue. I captured some basics (names, posted hours, the phone number posted on the door, etc.) with Every Door, and then later logged into the main OSM website and fine-tuned the entries. I got into a pattern of fixing one or two entries every evening when I went out for a walk and pretty soon my walking route was all up-to-date. Then I started paying attention to things like stop signs and cross walks and found a whole new kind of little, incremental edits that nobody else was doing.

It's been fun, I've made useful contributions, and my laptop is still Java free.

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raybb 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Every Door is definitely one of the easier ones and I like it but dang I wish the dev could get more funding to make it a nicer UX. Between the glitchy raster tiles and need to click load data all the time I feel it gets tiring fast.

I've considered building a separate app that's similar but oriented around the idea of using voice of pictures to update things (with AI extracting and formatting the data for you to review). But alas making yet another tool isnt ideal.

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ManuelKiessling 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn’t that a door (haha) opened by our supreme new AI coding overlords: that now it’s possible to take the Every Door source code (it’s on Github), and throw it into a coding agent with the instruction to „improve <ux shortcoming of your choice> without breaking functionality“, and with some iterations and human validation that yes, the UX is now indeed better, play the changes back with a PR?

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Gigachad 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

UX is one of the things AI isn’t good at. You can ask it for specific changes but just “make it nicer” is unlikely to work.

	▲	katbyte an hour ago \| parent [-]
		No but if you have specific asks like “make this resizable” “I should be able to drag and drop to combine” or “add a button on the top right to close” it’s quite good at directed changes

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raybb 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I can improve the UI to my taste but if the maintainer doesn't have time/money to maintain a big ol vibe coded PR for some very opinionated change isn't going to do much.

That would appear to leave me with the choice of just using it for myself (lame) or I then have a public fork to maintain :(

If there's basically no shot of it getting up streamed I think I'd rather make something from scratch to suit my needs without the extras.

Anyway, I hope the AI overlords help us fund more maintainers soon!

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nradov 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In a lot of areas the sidewalks and crosswalks aren't mapped even though they show up clearly on overhead imagery. I try to fill them in when I can, although this should probably be an AI task now.

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rafabulsing 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It doesn't help that there are multiple ways to map sidewalks in OSM (as a property of the roads themselves, or as standalone paths parallel to the roads).

I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.

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maxerickson 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's usually a reasonably clear consensus within a region or country.

That's less true for niche stuff (vs stuff where two different ideas are in wide use), but there probably isn't all that much of it either.

One way to approach it is to not worry too much about it, consistency can come later.

	▲	rafabulsing 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's true, but the very feeling that I might be inputting things in a way that might have to be updated later kinda drained my motivation. I do understand that even if does get replaced eventually, it still was useful for a while, and probably served as the basis for whatever came after. But still. For whatever reason, in my brain, it just diminished whatever psychological reward I got from adding information to OSM, which is a shame.

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nradov 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

At least in urban areas I've seen it's almost always better to define the sidewalks separately. The routing for pedestrians is often significantly different than for vehicles. This matters when the data is fed into Strava or Garmin for running routes.

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ni5arga 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Every Door is pretty cool but for iOS I prefer GoMaps more.