What motivates you contribute to HN? There is an old proverb of "A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step". Almost all contributions make a pos

What motivates you contribute to HN? There is an old proverb of "A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step". Almost all contributions make a positive step for improving the map for everybody. In the time it took to write the comment you probably could have used your local knowledge and aerial imagery to add some details to the map. I remember when I started adding data to the map in 2006 and it was almost all blank. I was happy to cycle around my local area with a GPS and spend time adding data locally to me. I did it partly because I was interested in the technology but I also had faith that when I needed to use the map someone else would have added the data that was local to them. As it turns out, this faith was justified and the OSM maps of the UK are great. For OSM to continue to make progress there is an assumptions that there is a subset of the general population that are willing to contribute for the greater good. I know that isn't always the case, the argument of: "why bother when we all use Google maps" is common. As it turns out, what Google displays on the map and what they allow you to do with it is fairly limited. As Doctor_Fegg argues, OSM is only just beginning on the journey to becoming an essential resource for worldwide geographic information. Right now things are still too focussed on providing a limited set of raster tiles which typically throw away half the data when choosing what can be displayed. Vectors tiles are an obvious next step for expanding the visualization of the existing data and provide the client with greater access to the underlying data which might not be shown on a raster tile. Another important point of open data is that it allows multiple sources to be combined together. OSM has never tried to collect everything. For example, SRTM is a better source of altitude information. There are other websites which provide open aerial imagery or street-view style videos. Openness of the raw data is the fundamental differentiator of OSM versus any alternative that I am aware of. Just like open source software is increasingly relied upon by businesses and the internet as a whole. I believe that open data will also be seen as being a fundamental building block which will never decrease in value or adoption.