OpenStreetMap is first and foremost a community platform. A lot of OSM mapping emerges from grassroots collaborations, from local neighborhood communities to large-scale mapping initiatives. These collectives need tools to communicate, collaborate and sustain their combined motivation around mapping, and to that end we present OSM Teams.

OSM Teams is a software framework for building team-based applications on top of OpenStreetMap. Development Seed built Teams internally to coordinate mapping projects, and to share tasks and statistics across mapping applications built on top of OSM. By building an authentication and authorization framework on top of the OSM login, we enable a second identity layer for teams that can be shared throughout apps. If adopted by the wider community, OSM Teams would bring structure to organizational editing. Teams would also support individual mappers by empowering them to discover new communities and causes, and to better understand who else is editing the map.

With this presentation, I would like to start a technical and community focused conversation about running organizations, teams, and communities using this framework. Specifically the questions I would like to bring to the community are: how does this fit with existing community patterns? How do we reduce complexity for new mappers? What new application possibilities does this open up?