At the start of 2023, we announced that OSMCha has now become a charter project of OpenStreetMap US. After nearly a decade of being hosted by Mapbox, OSMCha is transitioning to a new home at OpenStreetMap US. Moving forward, OSMCha will be operated on infrastructure owned by OSM US. We are excited about this new chapter for OSMCha and look forward to working with community members and organizations to expand the project.
Over the past few months, the Development Seed team has been working on modernizing the infrastructure code behind the OSMCha services in close collaboration with Mapbox. This was a necessary step as the infrastructure originally built by Mapbox was designed almost ten years ago. The modernization effort will also result in increased efficiency in terms of cost and performance.
The migration is scheduled for next Tuesday, February 13th. Starting from 15:00 UTC, OSMCha’s API will be either read-only or unavailable for a few hours.
We are thankful for the support provided by Mapbox over the years. Mapbox was the first company to believe in the OSMCha proposal, funded the initial development, and continued to run the project while providing infrastructure and critical maintenance. Their support was crucial in making OSMCha a core tool used by the OpenStreetMap community every day. We are now seeking new partners to help us continue to develop and expand OSMCha. If you’d like to support OSMCha directly, you can contact the OpenStreetMap US staff at team at openstreetmap.us.