Local Mapping Conference in San Francisco June 8-9th

For driving directions, Google Maps is clearly at the top of the heap right now.  But if you're at your destination, and looking for a bench, trash can, toilet, or pathway, there is often a better option: Open Street Map.

Open Street Map is a "wiki" map, created by individual contributors in the style of Wikipedia.  Hundreds of such enthusiasts are making their way to San Francisco for the map's annual conference, scheduled for June 8th and 9th 2013.  The maps created will be available to anyone for any purpose: including commercial uses that violate the terms of service of the for-profit company maps.  

Thousands of edits are made each day. In the case of the destroyed bridge on Interstate 5 in Washington, updates were made within hours.  The opening ceremony of the Devil's Slide Tunnel was matched within minutes by an update to Open Street Map.  The open maps excel in park and recreation areas where vantage points and detailed trail maps (including "unofficial" trails) are generally available. Anyone with knowledge of a particular area is invited to contribute what they know.

More locally, Open Street Map has the most complete list of public hillside stairways in El Cerrito and Kensington.  A local group, the El Cerrito Trail Trekkers, seeks to refurbish and map these routes.

Contributions to Open Street Map are "open" and available to all people and all companies (in contrast to contributions made to for-profit map companies, which become the property of the map company). AOL, the parent company of patch, donates significantly to the development of Open Street Map, and has slowly been offering products based on the ever-improving open data.  Open Street Map based maps appear at times next to patch articles.

The conference runs June 8-9th, more information is available at http://stateofthemap.us/
Maps are available for Android, iOS, and on the web at http://www.openstreetmap.org/