Missing Maps Website Upgrade!

29 April 2021

We’ve Updated our Website!

We are so excited to announce the launch of our refreshed website! Over the last year, the Missing Maps team has focused on this project to ensure that you, our wonderful mappers, have everything you need to best participate in the OSM Community. In this blog, we will highlight some of our favorite new additions including new and updated guides, resources, sections, and features. With over 200,000 users in 2020 (up from 100,000 in 2019!) we hope this website serves you well as our community continues to grow and you continue to map the world!

Advanced Mapping Section: We have greatly enjoyed mapping with you over these last six years. As we continue to expand and nurture our existing mapping community, a big focus for our site refresh was to ensure that our mappers can easily progress to more advanced mapping skills. We have taken a building block approach and encourage curious mappers to first check out our JOSM resources and then advance to our Validation page. If you’d like to apply your mapping skills to an area that you know firsthand, this section also includes a new focus on community mapping, including a new section pointing readers towards some of our favorite external tools.

Event Tracker and Calendar: Another feature we are excited to announce is the revamp of our event registration tracking form and event list. We all love to attend mapathons, but we are now also encouraging community members to register other learning and mapping events in our community. This is where you’ll be able to find links for webinars, career panels, and trainings. As many of our events are now virtual, we do hope this allows us to work better together as a global community.

Accessibility & Translations: Ensuring equal access and maximizing usability on our site was very important to our design team. Some of our new features include alternative text for all of our images, updating our color contrast ratios, and changing our header structures. Additionally, our site will launch with Spanish and French translations, with Czech to follow. We encourage our community to help us continue to expand these features. If you have any suggestions or would like to support our translation efforts please reach out! Our contact info can always be found at the bottom of this page.

Logo Use Resource: We love seeing the Missing Maps community use our logo to advertise for events and for fun swag! We’ve made that easier for you by updating this resource with everything you need for your designs. Don’t forget to show us your designs on social media!

Missing Maps Statistics: We have totally revamped our statistics page! Our new structure breaks down our data into long-term achievements and gives us a seasonal snapshot of our work. Country-level data will still be available, and now includes breakdowns of those data by buildings (edited and new), roads, projects, and mappers. We can now also track our work across Missing Maps Member Organizations. We’d like to share a big THANK YOU with the team at Heidelberg University for providing and maintaining these updates.

Project Objectives Update: One of our most important updates was also our smallest in terms of design. The Missing Maps group has reflected on and updated our shared objectives and ethics. We’ve come a long way as a collective and we want to ensure that these statements continue to reflect the local contexts, priorities and interests of our participating communities.

We hope you enjoy our new site! We are so excited to share what we’ve already accomplished, but we know there is still work to be done. We’d like to thank all of our helpers who made this possible. From accessibility reviewers to translators to content creators, we can’t thank them enough for their support!

Happy Mapping!


by Melanie Chabot & Rachel Levine