Cooperation between public authorities and Open Street Map in Rhineland-Palatinate
On 17-18 September 2024, the Policy Learning Platform held an onsite peer review for the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Transport, Agriculture and Viticulture Rhineland-Palatinate, which requested advice regarding their policy challenge on potential collaboration with Open Street Map to improve their cycling network data.
Peers from across Europe
Alongside Katharina Krell and Magda Michalikova, our Thematic Experts on ‘Greener Europe’, five excellent peers participated in the peer review:
- Aleksander Buczyński, European Cyclists' Federation, Belgium / Europe
- Emil Tin, City of Copenhagen, Denmark
- Francesca Gambarelli, Municipality of Reggio Emilia, Italy
- Johan Wiklund, ENTUR, Norway
- Markku Huotari, Public Transport Authority, Helsinki Region, Finland
The Ministry sees cycling as crucial in transition to a sustainable mobility and has a clear goal to make cycling as accessible and easy for local citizens as possible. Rhineland-Palatinate has a basic cycling network, however navigating one’s way through this network often requires detailed knowledge, and a good system is missing. Cooperation with Open Street Map offers the possibility to create a combined data platform with better guidance for cyclists, but this cooperation requires a new approach.
OSM has been seen by all experts as flexible, simple, versatile, responsive and accessible tool. It is regard as most complete network data repository and the only international standard.
The peers recommended the Ministry to:
- Start off easy by opening their data with an OSM friendly license.
- Become an active part of the OSM community.
- Keep it simple: Don’t reinvent the wheel and consult the OSM community.
- OSM is not a typical partner with whom to enter into contracts; OSM is a community. Cooperation with this community happens by starting to become part of it.
- No specific new cooperation frameworks, contracts or written agreements with OSM are needed.
- Governance questions arise only for the public authorities' side and relate mostly to cooperation with relevant internal and external stakeholders:
- Multilevel cooperation across the administrations, with involvement of the municipalities
- Horizontal cooperation with other transport organisations
- Collaboration with local and regional stakeholders
- Cooperation with local OSM community
- Strive to have complete data of good quality and share these as they are.
- Make your data open source.
- Consider using CCBY4.0 License (easiest for cooperation with OSM, also recommended by EC and Open Knowledge Foundation) + license by a specific waiver.
- Choose from the wide range of available OSM-related tools whatever will be the most suitable.
- Follow the guidance on procedures available on the OSM Wiki.
- Build a small group of interested stakeholders.
- Learn by doing: start working with OSM on a small pilot project.
- Quick wins will motivate the colleagues and stakeholders.
- Get in touch with the local OSM community (physical meeting).
- In parallel: Develop an overall strategy about what should be achieved in the end.
The host’s policy challenges, and all the peer suggestions will be available shortly in the follow-up report.
“Thank you to the peers for your presentations. All our questions have been answered and discussed. It seems that the general idea we have is in line with what has been deployed by other regions. We have to find new ways to organise ourselves, to work with other regions in Germany and to provide some data to the OSM community and make our data more OSM friendly.”
Reiner Dölger
Peer review publication
Find more information on the methodology and experiences of previous beneficiaries in our publication.
Apply for a peer review
Start your peer review application process today and find solutions to your policy challenge with our expert and peers!