OSMCha is almost eight years old now. A project that I started in my spare time to try to solve some data quality issues of the Brazilian OpenStreetMap community, grew up, became my job for some years, and is now an essential component of the OSM software ecosystem.
Since the beginning, Mapbox has been a crucial partner for OSMCha. They believed in the idea right after I presented it at a State of the Map LatAm conference. In 2015, they had around 10 people doing quality assurance in OSM data and there wasn’t a clear workflow on how to keep track of the changes in OSM. The main idea behind OSMCha was to register all changesets in a database, run some automatic checks to flag possible quality issues, and make the changesets searchable. That solution seemed interesting to the Mapbox team, so they started using it right away, improved the tool, and kept it running during all those years.
However, since June 2021, OSMCha is running without constant maintenance, and only one new feature was added, with the sponsorship of Wikimedia Italia. The lack of a team responsible for monitoring and maintaining the infrastructure caused a few days of downtime.
Now it’s time for a new phase in the OSMCha history! OpenStreetMap US has just accepted it as a charter project. This partnership will provide the structure to raise funds for development and hosting, and will also open the possibility for the entire OSM community to influence the future of OSMCha.
In collaboration with the OSM community, I believe we will be able to keep OSMCha running and provide yet more value for the users.
Soon, we will announce how you can engage in the OSMCha community meetings. Right now you can join the #osmcha channel in the OSM US Slack and continue reporting issues in the GitHub repository.
We also welcome companies and non-profit organizations that are interested in supporting OSMCha. Write to wille AT developmentseed.org if you want to have a chat about how you can collaborate with us.