[OSM-talk] Measuring the OpenStreetMap Economy

[Michal Migurski]

On Sep 23, 2010, at 9:17 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 15:05, SteveC <steve at asklater.com> wrote:
> 
>> When I see announcements flying around like MapQuests $1M commitment
>> to OSM, or CloudMades $12M VC round it begs the question of how big
>> is the OSM economy?
> 
> This is somewhat orthogonal to your question, but I think a much
> interesting question to ask is what's the overall economic impact of
> OpenStreetMap?
> 
> The money that companies like MapQuests and CloudMade are making is
> always going to by a tiny fraction of what OpenStreetMap is saving
> people who would otherwise not have gotten their job done.

This.

Stamen is working with OSM data on projects that simply wouldn't exist without it. The cost of entry in money and hassle that a commercial data provider represents makes medium-sized ideas like rendering a city or country's worth of geographic information  not worth the bother. With a free data set available, all that energy can go into interesting work that isn't fending off upsells from salespeople. It's basic broken windows, Navteq's holding the rock. I do think it's worth trying to estimate this amount, though.

On a side note Ian Dees and I have been kicking back and forth some of the ideas raised in my tiled data service question from the other week. It's relevant here because expanding the ease of OSM data consumption without introducing undue burdens on the server admins will open up data consumption to people who aren't willing to navigate extracts or deal with whole-planet dumps. That in turn will increase the economic impact of OSM by making it an easier data product to use in place of commercial source. Think of Haiti as a lab for this, with a constant flow of prints and garmin exports. City-scale FTW!

-mike.

----------------------------------------------------------------
michal migurski- mike at stamen.com
                 415.558.1610