The web page “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?” (HDYC) provides individual detailed information about project members. Some time ago, the page has been revised, that member profiles can only be accessed, when users logged in with their OpenStreetMap (OSM) user account. This feature has been implemented, after a long and important discussion about “protecting user privacy in the OSM project”. The complete German discussion can be found here. However, I don’t want to continue the discussion here. I still support that any information, which are available about contributors, should not be hidden in project data dumps, APIs or on webpages. In my opinion, information such as contributor names or ids and modification timestamps are essential for doing quality analysis and assessments to protect the project against e.g. vandalism or unintended map edits.

The reputation of a contributor in OpenStreetMap (OSM) plays a significant role, especially when considering the quality assessment of the collected data. Sometimes it’s difficult to make a meaningful statement about a contributor by simply looking at the raw mapping work represented by the number of created objects or used tags. Therefore, it would be really helpful if we would have some additional information about the person who contributes to the project. For example: Does she/he help other contributors? Is her/his work somehow documented or based on one of the “discussed” proposals? Or does she/he work as a lone warrior in the OSM world?

In 2010 I created “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?” (HDYC) as a kind of fun side project. Nowadays many people use it to get some detailed information about OSM contributors. Some of you are probably familiar with the “verified” icon used on some celebrity Twitter accounts. I created a similar new feature for the aforementioned HDYC page. If you connect your related OSM accounts, your profile will be marked as “verified”.