Crowdsourced Mapping

The most revolutionary mapping development of the 21st century is crowdsourcing. Projects like OpenStreetMap allow millions of volunteers to map the world collaboratively. After natural disasters, volunteer mappers can create detailed maps of affected areas within hours — often before professional teams arrive.

Google Maps quietly learns from the anonymized location data of millions of phones, updating traffic conditions, road closures, and business hours in near-real-time. Your phone is using maps and creating them at the same time — every trip you take helps refine the system for the next driver.