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A lot of my open-source time goes into maps — OSMTracker and the broader OpenStreetMap ecosystem. People sometimes ask why. Here’s the short answer.

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Maps are infrastructure

We treat maps like a solved problem because, where we live, they usually are. But huge parts of the world are missing from the map, or badly out of date — and that gap matters most exactly when something goes wrong. After a flood or an earthquake, “which roads still exist and where are people stranded?” is not a trivia question. It’s the whole job. OpenStreetMap closes that gap by letting anyone contribute, and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team turns those contributions into maps that responders actually use.

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Meeting people where they are

What I love about tools like OSMTracker is that they don’t ask people to change how they work — you record where you already are, and the map gets better for it. The best mapping tech, I think, adds as little friction as possible: capture a trace in the field, get it back to the community, done. The value is in the plumbing being invisible.

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Small contributions add up

I’m not out mapping disaster zones myself. My part is the plumbing — the trackers, the uploaders, the parsers, the little tools that get a location from someone’s phone into a system that can act on it. It’s unglamorous, and that’s fine. When the pipeline works, someone who needed help is a little easier to find. That’s more than enough reason to keep at it.