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The OpenStreetMap US Camera Lending Program

310A
Friday, 5:00 pm – 20 min
Toby Murray and Martijn van Exel
OpenStreetMap US

OpenStreetCam is a free and open platform for crowdsourced street-level images, created by Telenav in 2016 to help improve OpenStreetMap. Two years in, there are over 150 million images covering well over 2 million miles of road worldwide. Images are contributed using regular smartphones. To increase the reach of the program and collect higher quality images, Telenav partnered with dashcam maker Waylens to create a custom dashcam that automatically records and uploads images to OSC. To give mappers access to these cameras, Telenav and OpenStreetMap US developed a lending program. OSM US members can borrow a camera for up to three months to collect images. If they collect more than 1 million points on the OSC platform using the camera, they get to keep it. At the time of writing, 2 months in, 17 users have driven almost 20 thousand kilometers with the cameras. 5 users have already reached the threshold and are now Waylens camera owners! In this talk, we will share our experiences with the cameras and the lending program, and hopefully let a Waylens user take the stage to share their personal story!