Join the community

Beginners' Guide

1) Join the community

2) OSM data explained

3) Pick your mapping technique

4) Uploading changes

5) See your work and start using data

6) Additional help and resources (optional)

Join the community

Before you can contribute to OpenStreetMap you will need to sign up and agree to share your contributions under OpenStreetMap's license. This ensures that the data stays free for everyone and that changes can be attributed to specific sources. You don't need to use your real name as your user name. Many people use pseudonyms or nicknames instead. The email address you provide is just for validation and messages between users. It is never revealed directly to other users.

Sign Up

Congratulations, you are now a member of a very large community of contributors to OpenStreetMap!

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Communication

Now that you're a user, you can communicate with the community in a variety of ways.

• The official discussion forum which also has a Q&A section
• Users can comment on changesets made by other users at OpenStreetMap.org/history.
• Users can comment on Map Notes.
• Mailing lists - the talk and tagging lists are quite active.
• Wiki users (requires a separate user name) can communicate via Wiki talk pages.
• See the Contact channels page for more details.

Stay up to date

Keep up with OSM news through these links:

• The OpenStreetMap Blog
• Weekly OSM - Weekly summaries of major OSM news.

See also

• Account at www.openstreetmap.org - if you have troubles during account creation
• Use existing login from popular websites - (optional) how Google, Facebook, WordPress accounts can let you edit OpenStreetMap data

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