OpenStreetMap Birthday Special - 4 million users, 4 billion points

OpenStreetMap (https://www.openstreetmap.org/), the free and editable map of the world, has over 4 Million registered users that maintain over 4 Billion unique geographic points all over the globe. How does this work?

OSM is turning 13. This GeoBLR will feature Jennings Anderson (https://twitter.com/jenningsatcu) to talk about his research on the growth of OSM, where people map, and what they do on the map. Jennings is a PhD student at the University of Colorado in Human Computer Interaction. Hope to see you all!

https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/1/4/9/0/600_463385264.jpeg

To better understand the map and how the map came to be, we need to start where the contributors do individual edits. Many contributors are active only in particular regions, some users have made hundreds of thousands of edits all over the world. Most registered users have never even performed a single edit. I build analysis tools on top of open source OpenStreetMap data processing frameworks to better answer questions about who is editing OpenStreetMap when and where to help sustain and grow this incredible volunteered geographic information project.