In the past few years, Grab as the biggest ride-sharing provider in Southeast Asia, is one of the biggest users and contributors of OpenStreetMap (OSM) in this region. We have put a great amount of effort into building a healthy ecosystem around it. We now have a better understanding of OpenStreetMap, mapping within its infrastructure, and how communities form one of its strongest pillars.

We are excited to share how Grab started from scratch and gradually built a unified framework to manage OSM data as well as, more importantly, the velocity and data richness Grab has contributed back to OSM. We have worked closely with the different corporates, partners and the communities in the South East Asia region to support, build, guide, and empower ourselves and the community in contributing to improving OpenStreetMap.

It has been a great learning journey so far with its share of peaks and valleys. Through this talk, we’d want to share our challenges and learnings from these experiences with the global OpenStreetMap community:

• Grab’s ecosystem of managing OSM is a crowdsourcing system powered by data analysis, AI techniques, and other organic components
• These include manual moderation and on the ground feedback from our well-trained map operations officers who are in every country striving to make the map as accurate as possible with local knowledge
• Our experience in collaborating with the vibrant South East Asian Communities and different community partners like HOTOSM, through different programs and initiatives leading to a stronger community in this region
• Collaborating with imagery partners like OpenStreetCam and Mapillary by contributing and making imagery available for cities like Singapore and Chiang Mai
• Working along with the other corporates in this region as well as representing SEA on the OpenStreetMap Foundation advisory board
• We will also share interesting findings of OSM in Southeast Asia and also shed light on how Grab has driven OSM to evolve here.