I spent last year working on the iD editor for OpenStreetMap and on the design and functionality of OpenStreetMap.org. I'm going to talk a little bit and at a high level about the technical side of those efforts — enough to give you an idea of what their goals were — but most of this talk is about the human side, about community management and open source stewardship.
My hope for this talk is that sharing what worked for me and my collaborators will help three groups of people: first, open source contributors who, like me, want to help the project tackle big technical challenges. Second, other outside organizations — public or private — that want to engage effectively with the OSM community. And finally, members of the community who want to see OpenStreetMap become a more friendly and welcoming community for everyone who would like to contribute.
I work at Mapbox — Mapbox paid me to work on iD and on the website. So first I want to answer the question: why does Mapbox care about OpenStreetMap anyway? Why wo