The Outdoors Group in France has a selfish purpose: help create OSM-based maps that we and our fellow outdoors practitioners and professionals can safely use to plan and carry out our favorite activities. We are end users, originally mostly hikers and mountain bikers, who came to OSM to create better maps and who discovered on the way that this will require other classes of end users to adopt OSM or at least find their way around it: route operators, tourism offices, land managers, mountain rescue services, etc.

This talk reports on our collective successes and remaining challenges in turning OSM-based maps into reliable and safe maps for outdoors activities in France and onboarding other end-users. Successes include going from zero to 30.000 km of node networks in a few years, maintaining route continuity above 90% on ~200.000 km of hiking routes, and starting collaborations with a few route operators. The challenges that we report on include better engagement of various categories of end users such as local institutions and land managers. Analyzing these challenges directs us toward a few irritants that we need to manage to make OSM more inclusive towards them; this includes some mapping principles and semantic models in OSM, the need for better tooling for relation management, and perhaps additional governance bodies.

In addition to reporting on our successes and remaining challenges, the goal of this talk proposal is also to recruit participants for a BOF session with outdoors mappers and map developers from other countries, possibly with an actual outdoors mapping session in or near Paris