MapQuest’s new open site enables consumers in the U.S. to play an active role in improving the depth and quality of the map.  Today, there are more than 320,000 registered OSM users worldwide, including a growing U.S. contingency in urban locations such as San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Denver.

open.mapquest.com

Open.Mapquest.com provides the same features as our 10 sites in Europe and Asia, and also debuts a new error-reporting tool (which has been added to all of MapQuest’s open sites).  For many, this tool may be their first step in becoming OSM contributors.  Now, on any open MapQuest site, errors can be reported directly and are displayed in near real-time.  These errors can range from an incorrect speed limit or directional changes on a street to a missing parking lot or a new cultural institution. Read more details here in our Developer Blog.

“While the launch of our U.S. open site is significant, we are just scratching the surface on the power of open source, and its broader potential for MapQuest and the mapping ecosystem worldwide,” said Christian Dwyer, senior vice president and general manager, MapQuest.  “We look forward to the continued enhancement of all MapQuest open sites across the globe, leveraging the richness of OSM maps to create compelling user experiences in 2011.”

There are many fun ways to get involved: Mapping parties are a fantastic social activity that engage your community and build maps with things relevant to your family or neighborhood.  Look for an OpenStreetMap group in your area (here’s our Denver group for example) or contact us and we’ll help you start one.  To learn more about the project, go here!  Happy Mapping!

Photo by Harry Wood (flickr)

The webinar is a perfect way to get your hands dirty in a hands-on style. The hour long session will cover everything from history about OSM and cool stories of how the project ‘saved lives’ to walking you through the sign-up process and showing you how to make your first edit. The discussion is hosted by Depiction, a company that offers mapping, simulation and collaboration software that helps people all over the world use information from OpenStreetMap (OSM), and other publicly available sources, to make decisions, build plans, manage their resources and much more.

To sign up for the webinar, go here and register, it’s free!

My very proper American public school upbringing (it was like Hogwarts, but lacking magic, interesting curriculum and for that matter, beautiful English countryside) prohibits me from mentioning anything as gauche as monetary amounts. However, I can say it will provide additional capacity on the technical side of things. Steve Coast, chairman of the OSM Foundation commented on the contribution, “This is only the beginning of serious involvement by large-scale mapping sites to embrace OSM. Infrastructure support like this is fundamental to the growth of OpenStreetMap. A generous donation like MapQuest’s helps the project perform on the latest technology and gives us the capacity to grow.”

AOL and MapQuest are fired up to get the US community mapping. As Randy Meech, Head of Engineering for Mapping and Local, said earlier this year, “We believe that open source is ultimately the future of AOL’s local and mapping applications.” Patch, AOL’s rapidly growing community-specific news and information website and MapQuest’s sister company, already uses OpenStreetMap data to power all their maps.  But what do we need first? Strong Infrastructure…

Antony Pegg, our savvy Director of Open and obsessed TIGER data fixer, had this to say about MapQuest’s monetary support: “It’s very easy, as a consumer of the data, and even as a contributor, to forget about the donated infrastructure, maintained by volunteers.  No server or no sys-admin = no OSM. My hope is these dedicated volunteers will use this donation to improve both the OSM environment they maintain, and the tools they rely on for maintenance.”

Here’s looking to a brighter, faster OSM future!