// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap
This quick tutorial will help you make a meaningful contribution to OpenStreetMap (OSM) in less than 15 minutes. By the end, you will have added an official website tag to a nearby shop or amenity. Soon after, your contribution will be ingested into dozens of free OSM-based services, helping people worldwide.
Why a website tag? Once a place in OSM has a website tag, it becomes way easier to determine other helpful info about that place. Nearly every place’s official website has info about its phone, opening_hours, email, and other tags. So adding a website tag is a great place to get started.
Sign up for a free OSM account and then confirm your email.
Download JOSM (~365 MB) for your specific operating system and then run it.
JOSM, the Java OSM editor app, is a powerful tool for querying and editing OSM data. While simpler in-browser editors exist, JOSM offers plugins that make your edit as quick and easy as possible.
Now we’ll filter the OSM data to only show shops and amenities that don’t have a website.
🎉🎊🥳 Congratulations- you just made OSM a little bit better for everyone! Plus you got a preview of some of the cool things you can do with JOSM and OSM data.
You could keep going and add a website tag to every place in your AOI. For example, I quickly added 66 new website tags in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood in this changeset.
Or you could modify the filter to show places in your AOI with a website tag but no phone tag. Then you could add the phone tag based on info from the website.
Or you could spread the word about OSM and Website Wizard! The United States alone has more than 1 million shops. So if we want to put them all on the map, we’ll need to get many more people to help.