Hi,
My name is Branko from Microsoft. Microsoft’s involvement with OSM spans several impactful contributions:
- Providing Bing imagery since 2010 for free use in OSM for whole world (and all the drama that comes with it)
- Creating Map builder – intuitive editor for Bing users that want to edit OSM map (and all the drama that comes with it)
- Maintaining iD in the interim period before Martin took over (sorry, no drama here, just plain good old maintainership)
- Released world coverage of AI-mined building footprints and road data as open data
This list is not intended to be PR for Microsoft, and I know this sounds like a corporate cliché, but this list is hopefully showing that Microsoft is really committed to success of OSM. Stuff that we did previously, stuff in that list above, is stuff that we think will benefit the community and improve OSM contributions. And we hope it did! A lot of us recently visited SotM EU 2023 and I hope you saw us all around. That event allowed us to see stuff from a different perspective and to try to think out of the box. So, we thought, what if we pause trying to figure out what is the best way to improve OSM contributions on our own and instead - ask YOU how Microsoft can help!? Yes, YOU, the community, directly here in the diary😊. I know this may sound unconventional, but hey – OSM is also not the most conventional project out there, so we thought this might just be the proper way to gather interesting ideas.
Some projects are easy and a single individual can tackle them easily. But some projects might require larger teams of developers, designers and resources. We think we are well positioned to take on ideas that sit nicely in these sweet spots. Ideas to think of should be 6-12 months in scope (but don’t be shy to suggest other ideas, we can brainstorm on how to increase scope if project is small, or how to transition it in maintenance mode if it is too big/needs lot of service work). Ideally, ideas should help improve quality and/or quantity of data on OSM map in some direct way (and in a broad coverage). But, honestly, there are no hard constraints, this is brainstorming only, every idea is fair game. Of course, no need to say that we don’t promise that these ideas will come to life (maybe none of them will), but what we can promise is that we will look at each of them and discuss them. And even if there is nothing out of it, comments in this diary will stay, someone next might come after us, look at this diary and some new ideas might emerge from reading them.
Maybe you think we should create a new vandalism detection platform, maybe we should implement that Segment Anything model in JOSM (half-way there, but seems not that easy) and host it in Azure for the whole world, maybe we should tackle first item on v0.7 wishlist – messaging API, or maybe we should just implement something cool inside Map builder… please tell us what you think in comments below and let’s brainstorm together. Again, no promises, but we would like to hear from you.