How a country joins the Commons¶
The Commons doesn't try to cover the world on day one. It grows one country at a time, and the process is meant to be visible rather than mysterious. This page explains what you're looking at on cyclingcommons.org/regions, and how a country you don't see there yet can get added.
The stages a region moves through¶
Every region on the map is described by two independent things, and
/regions shows them as two columns rather than one ladder: how much the
region holds, and who looks after it. They really are independent: a busy
region can have nobody looking after it, and a freshly curated one can hold
almost nothing yet.
How much it holds
| Stage | What it means |
|---|---|
| Not on the map yet | The country hasn't been onboarded. It doesn't appear on /regions, but you can still ask for it (see below). |
| Onboarded | The region is live on the map from the day it's added, full read/write, full contribution flow, but riders haven't confirmed anything there yet. |
| Growing | Riders have started adding and confirming places. The commons for that region is not empty any more. |
| Established | Enough verified places and rider-backed routes that the map opens there in Best of view by default: best climbs, best stays, best views, ranked rather than just listed. It is earned rather than declared: a curator can only set it once the region passes a readiness count. |
Who looks after it
| Cover | What it means |
|---|---|
| Curated | The region has its own curator. |
| Country-wide | A curator covers the whole country, and this region has no local curator yet. Real cover, and deliberately said differently: somebody who rides there sees what a country-wide view never will. |
| No curator yet | Nobody has taken this region on. Riders can still add and confirm places, and the region page says so with a way in. |
A region page names its curators where they have made their profile public, each with the reach they hold.
The important part: the map serves every onboarded region from day one. Onboarding is not a waiting room before the map "turns on"; it's the opposite. The moment a region is onboarded you can add a water point, flag a closed road, or drop a photo of a view, exactly as you could anywhere else on the map. Growing and Curated describe how much rider knowledge has accumulated on top of that live map, not whether it's usable.
What makes a country onboard¶
Onboarding a country is a deliberate, hands-on step: it means loading that country's official geography, the country outline and its riding-scale subdivisions (provinces, states, or the equivalent), as real regions in the Commons, so contributions, moderation, and curation all have somewhere to anchor. It isn't automatic, and it isn't triggered by traffic alone.
What tells us where to look next is you. Every country in the world has
an ask-for-your-country page: follow the "Don't see your country?" search
on /regions, or go straight to cyclingcommons.org/join/<your country
code>. The page needs an account, so it asks you to sign in or create one
first. Tell us you're interested, and optionally that you'd be willing to
help. That interest is recorded and read by the people deciding what to
onboard next. We don't publish counts or league tables of which countries
are "winning," because the decision weighs more than raw volume: how ready a
local community is, how good the underlying map data is, and plain
practicality.
Asking doesn't obligate anything on either side. It's a signal, not a queue ticket with a number.
What a volunteer curator signs up for¶
If your country is already onboarded, that same /join/<country code> page
becomes something different: an application to curate it. See
Curation & voting for what curation actually does;
this is how you get the role.
The application is short: who you are (a few sentences is enough), and optionally your OpenStreetMap username and a website or social profile where we can find you, since a lot of curation overlaps with judgment calls about map data. There's no quiz and no minimum edit count required to apply, though what you've already fixed or added on the map is exactly what a reviewer looks at, so contributing (before or after applying) is the strongest way to support your case.
Both halves of the /join page need an account. If you hit it signed out, the
site walks you through signing in or creating one, including the email
confirmation, and then brings you back to the page to finish. If you are
signed in from a saved session (remember-me), the application asks you to
confirm your password before it sends, so that an application really is from
you. Once submitted, you get an acknowledgement in your messages (and by
email), and the application and its status (pending, approved, declined) live
on your profile, alongside any note the reviewer leaves. While it is being
read, the application page shows you what you sent rather than an empty form.
Curating requires two-factor authentication. It is not optional and it is not a setting: the moderation desks are unreachable until it is set up, because a curator can approve, reject and permanently destroy other people's contributions, and an account that can do that is worth stealing. You are asked to set it up the first time you sign in after approval.
Approval scopes a curator to a place, a whole country or one region within it, whichever you asked for; the application form asks which. If your areas change later, you are told which regions you now cover. A curator reviews the queue of proposed changes for their scope; they don't get any special power over regions outside it, and curating one country's queue never quietly becomes authority over the whole Commons. See Governance for how regional and core-team responsibilities are meant to stay separate.
What the data promises¶
Region boundaries, country outlines and their subdivisions alike, come from open geographic data (conflating OpenStreetMap and other open sources), the same ODbL licence that covers the rest of the Commons dataset. Everything riders add on top (places, edits, photos) carries the same open licensing described in full on the licensing page: ODbL for data, CC BY-SA 4.0 for photos and video.
A region's identity, its slug, the thing in the URL, is meant to stay fixed once assigned. Re-running an onboarding import to refresh boundaries updates the region in place rather than replacing it, specifically so a link to a region keeps working over time instead of quietly rotting.