Hi all, Here's a subject near to my heart: open source maps (and other big data projects). There are several projects that combined can provide a nice alternative to Google Maps, depending on your area. Advantages include: - Licensing: You are free to copy the data for any purpose. Google Maps lets you download maps, but they're limited in size and what you can do with them. In contrast, with free maps I have the entirety of New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and Colorado on my phone and they're completely routable without internet access. (This has saved me on a roadtrip or two after getting lost in areas without cell coverage!) - Crowdsourcing: Google doesn't put much effort into low-population areas, like my hometown of Datil, NM. And even in Albuquerque their road coverage isn't perfect (especially when it comes to one-way roads and such). Being able to fix bugs like that instantly is really great. - Privacy: We all know that Google makes its money from ads and user tracking. Some people are willing to put up with that for the resulting product, but others are open to privacy-respecting alternatives. Open source mapping is a great way for both non-technical and technical people to contribute to the community. Anybody can edit a map, and everybody can see the benefit of better ones. So, how can we help? - Edit OpenStreetMap! https://www.openstreetmap.org/ You can add roads or buildings, parking lots, fix one-way streets, or add bicycle infrastructure like trails and bike racks (that show up on http://opencyclemap.org/), or bathrooms in national parks, or... It's a lot like Wikipedia. Changes you make show up within a few minutes on the main site. - Work with local governments/entities to provide freely licensed data! Obviously I'm never going to add addresses for the hundreds of thousands of houses and businesses in the Albuquerque metro area all by myself. That's why there are projects that work with goverments to export data in a freely licensed, open source friendly format. Some examples: OpenAddresses (https://openaddresses.io/), for street addresses TransitLand (https://transit.land/), for public transportation National Map Corps (http://nationalmap.gov/TheNationalMapCorps/), a user-editable USGS landmarks database You can help by submitting address datasets, GTFS feeds, etc to the above projects, or convincing governments, universities, and other public entities to do the same. Albuquerque is a clear leader in this regard; they provide address data and public transit feeds along with a ton of other public domain data at their website: https://www.cabq.gov/abq-data Other good examples are UNM (https://opendata.unm.edu/) and Farmington. I'm not aware of any such initiative for Santa Fe... anybody up there willing/able to try making contacts in the government? The federal Department of Transportation has been asking localities to provide open transit feeds, which may help move things along. https://web.archive.org/web/20160404135841/http://gis.rita.dot.gov/Transit/d... - Use and improve free software! There's a lot of neat stuff you can do with all these projects. Some of the software I use frequently for maps: Maps.me: offline Android maps OSMAnd: offline Android maps (free on F-droid) KDE Marble: desktop map viewer Mapillary: crowdsource photos (Street View alternative) JOSM: desktop openstreetmap editor Mapbox: create hosted maps to embed in your website Mapzen: provides routing software, etc to host on your own server -- Anthony J. Bentley