Minh Nguyen

Hi, I’m Minh Nguyễn, an armchair mapper since 2008, shoe-leather mapper since 2015, and wiki-fiddler since time immemorial. I served on the board of OpenStreetMap U.S. from 2019 to 2023, most of that time as president.

Most of my mapping contributions are clustered around the Greater Cincinnati area (where I grew up in Loveland) and the Santa Clara Valley (where I now live in San José and co-organize the local mapping community with Open Source San José). I use the Web-based iD editor for virtually all my editing, because I like well-designed UIs and also want to stay in touch with how ordinary mappers experience the project. I’ve participated in large-scale imports of buildings and addresses in New Orleans, sidewalks and buildings in San José, and buildings and addresses in Cincinnati. Occasionally I also whip out my phone camera or commit some code to OSM-related projects.

I originally started mapping to cope with homesickness and procrastinate on homework, but what keeps me coming back is OpenStreetMap’s potential to democratize mapmaking and help narrow the digital divide. Since the beginning, I’ve contributed to OpenStreetMap entirely in a personal capacity, and I consider my contributions to be in the public domain. This includes the time during which I worked for Mapbox from February 2015 to January 2023. As the world continually evolves, I hope my decades of past contributions will eventually find their way to OpenHistoricalMap for safekeeping.

Find out more about me on the wiki or say hello on Slack or the Community forum. (I’m also on the old forum and the help site but don’t check those sites often.) You may occasionally see me post stuff from nguyễn.cincinnati.oh.us; that’s my personal domain, not affiliated in any way with the City of Cincinnati.