Field Papers + OpenStreetMap
Print a paper atlas of your blocks, walk them with a pen, photograph the pages, and turn the annotations into open map data. Neighborhood mapping with no GPS, no GIS, no app.
Field Papers — descended from Walking Papers, built for the OpenStreetMap community, and stewarded since 2023 by OpenStreetMap US — closes the loop between paper and the world's open map: print a multi-page atlas of anywhere, walk it and annotate with a pen, photograph the pages, upload, and transcribe what you marked into OpenStreetMap, where it becomes commons data anyone can use.
Its lineage runs through the most famous community mapping story there is: Kibera in Nairobi was a blank spot on the world's maps until residents mapped it themselves in 2009 (Map Kibera), using exactly this paper-first pattern.
The tool's deeper insight is that paper is a feature: a printed atlas can be carried by kids, marked by elders, passed around a stoop — participation without devices. The transcription evening afterward is its own gathering.
Neighborhood remix: a Saturday 'map our block' walk — benches, shade trees, little libraries, step-free entrances, water taps — and by Sunday the block has contributed its own commons layer to the map everyone's apps read.
Details
- maker: OpenStreetMap US
- hosted: free at fieldpapers.org
- license: ISC (fp-web, fp-tiler; the umbrella fieldpapers/fieldpapers repo carries no license file)
- repo url: https://github.com/fieldpapers
- remix idea: The Saturday block-mapping walk, kids carrying the atlas.
- practice kind: tool
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Build prompt
Build: A Front-Porch Digest for One Block
A starter build: fork Front Porch Forum's constitution, not its code — real names, one geography, one email a day, a rotating…
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Build prompt
Build: A Living Asset Map
A starter build bridging both new shelves: an asset-based community development map where the assets are neighbors' own declared gifts,…
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Build prompt
Build: A Third-Places Map for Your Neighborhood
A starter build: a local Ushahidi — neighbors collectively map the porches, stoops, cafés, courts, and corners where the neighborhood…
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Build prompt
Build: Adopt-a-Thing for Your Block
A starter build: the Adopt-a-Hydrant pattern, remixed — a map of small civic objects (tree wells, storm drains, benches, little libraries)…
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Build prompt
Build: Participatory Budgeting for a Very Small Budget
A starter build: run real participatory budgeting on a block association's actual money — propose, develop, vote, do — sized so the whole…
Contributed by OpenStreetMap US (Field Papers); Stamen Design & predecessors · fieldpapers.org
Original source: https://fieldpapers.org/about
See something to fix or add? Suggest an edit on GitHub — the commons lives in git too, and its history is the changelog.
local-civic-techcivic-tech-toolmappingpaper-firstopen-source