There is more to OpenStreetMap than the data. OpenStreetMap is an amazing community, a database, and - collaboration software. With over two million contributors, the software infrastructure has clearly proven scalable. Increasingly organizations like the USGS or Moabi DRC are using OpenStreetMap’s software to power communities other than OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap software brings compelling features to the table a spatial database that tracks changes per user, history, cross platform data editors, live map rendering, which is all open source.

Adoption of OpenStreetMap software infrastructure by other projects presents a huge opportunity for us as more users of its software fuel contributions and thus create better tools for everyone. There are several moving parts behind the scene. The number of independent open source projects, different code bases, platforms and their dependencies add high degree of complexity in this process. We will focus on the pain points and propose an architecture for making OpenStreetMap software truly reusable taking a technical deep dive into what the road map would look like.