Contributors
The project has a geographically diverse user-base, due to emphasis of local knowledge and ground truth in the process of data collection. Many early contributors are cyclists who survey with and for bicycles, charting cycletracks and navigable trails. Others are GIS professionals who contribute data with Esri tools.
As of November 2012, OpenStreetMap has over 900,000 contributors, a minority of whom contribute the majority of the content. In March 2008, approximately 10% of the registered user base were contributing map data each month, and in 2011, this percentage was around 3%.
By August 2008, shortly after the second The State of the Map conference was held, there were over 50,000 registered contributors; by March 2009, there were 100,000 and by the end of 2009 the figure was nearly 200,000. In April 2012, OpenStreetMap cleared 600,000 registered contributors.
Read more about this topic: Open Street Map