Attention Open Street Map Contibutors!

As many of you know, most of the data in Ride the City is based on Open Street Map (OSM), the wikimap of the world that allows anyone to freely contribute information to. Well, OSM is going through some changes and is requesting that all members agree to their revised license, Open Database License 1.0 (ODbL).

Sorry for the late warning, but if you've contributed data to OSM and haven't agreed to the new license, your data may be deleted as of April 1, 2012. (This is not an April Fools joke.)

We launched Ride the City - Chicago about three years ago. A lot has happened since then and Ride the City has changed quite a bit, too. Well, we're coming back to Chicago now to focus on the map to make it better. We're looking for people to help.

If you live in Chicago or know it well, consider spending an hour to improve the map in any part of the city you know well. We're looking to add missing bike lanes, bike paths, bicycle/pedestrian bridges, and so forth.

Most of you have probably generated bike routes on Ride the City. But how many have contributed to the Ride the City basemap? The background image at Ride the City is provided by Cloudmade, a company that's all about services and applications that are based on Open Street Map (OSM), the volunteer effort to map the world. Open Street Map provides the data, Cloudmade makes services that help to get that data to the end user. With Cloudmade's Style Editor, developers can customize their own map style or copy other maps. Here are some of the map styles from the Style Editor: