Contributing¶
The Commons grows one small fact at a time. Nobody fills in a form — a rider adds a water tap, a gradient, a "closed" flag, and the map gets a little better. Richness accretes from many tiny contributions, the way OpenStreetMap was built.
Ways to contribute¶
| Method | What it is |
|---|---|
| [tap] | a one-tap report in the moment — "water here", "road closed", "great view" |
| [edit] | a structured attribute edit — climb metrics, a café's opening hours |
| [vote] | ranking a region's best climbs, stays, views, heritage, and routes (see Curation & voting) |
| [auto] | derived automatically and anonymously from aggregate signals — nothing personal |
Every field is optional and additive. Required fields kill contribution; optional fields let the Commons grow one tap at a time. See the full taxonomy in the Data catalog.
Keeping perishable data honest (the freshness model)¶
Hazards and closures rot if they never expire. Dynamic data therefore carries a lifecycle:
- Timestamp + reporter count on every report — when, and how many independent riders.
- Confidence from confirmations — one report is unconfirmed; several independent ones are confirmed. The state is shown, never hidden.
- Decay by type — a pothole persists for months, a "closed for an event" expires in days. After expiry an item is hidden (not deleted) pending re-confirmation.
- Auto-clear from aggregate use — if riders keep passing through a spot flagged "closed", that's evidence it reopened; [auto] data downgrades a stale [tap] report.
- One-tap confirm / dispute — passing a flagged spot, a rider gets a light "still there? yes / gone" prompt that feeds confidence.
Giving back to OpenStreetMap¶
Because the Commons is ODbL — the same licence as OSM — durable infrastructure facts can flow back upstream. When you add an OSM-appropriate fact OSM is missing (a water tap, a repair station, a wrong surface), the Commons can offer a one-tap "add to OpenStreetMap too?" — posted as your own OSM edit. Curated, attributed, human-reviewed; never a bulk firehose (that gets reverted and resented).
What flows back to OSM: durable facts (water, repair stations, bike shops, surface, cycleways, barriers). What stays in the Commons: the game, subjective ratings, ephemeral hazards, and anything personal. OSM wants lasting facts, not your weather or your leaderboard.
How edits are reviewed¶
The Commons is contribution-first but not unguarded. Curators (a community role, not an owner class) review flagged edits and seed initial regional lists; conflicts are resolved openly and cheaply. This is Ostrom's monitoring-and-conflict-resolution in practice — see Governance.
Contributing to this repo¶
Documentation and the site live in this repository. Propose changes by pull request — the docs are themselves a commons. Substantive design decisions belong in the wiki so there is a single source of truth; please don't fork a topic into a second document.