Not all infrastructure looks like a server room. Some of it looks like a map.
On 19 May, Internet Archive Europe hosted a workshop at our Amsterdam space with Bart Louwers, one of the core maintainers of MapLibre, and Tommi Marmo, OpenStreetMap contributor. The conversation moved between the technical and the political in a way that felt familiar: who builds the tools, who controls them, and what happens to the communities that depend on them when that control is concentrated in too few hands.
Two projects, one principle
OpenStreetMap is sometimes referred to as “Wikipedia for maps”. Anyone can contribute to it, anyone can use it, and no single company owns it. It does not just show you where things are. It is a database that anyone can build on, and it maps things that proprietary providers choose not to, from water fountains to informal settlements.
MapLibre began in 2020 as a fork of a proprietary mapping tool. By 2022, it had its own sponsors, board, and charter. Today it is the rendering engine behind navigation apps, drone software, Wikimedia’s Android app, and products from companies including AWS, Microsoft, and Meta. The code is open source. The community governs the roadmap.
What makes MapLibre technically distinctive is its vector-based approach. Rather than downloading pre-rendered image tiles and stitching them together, the client receives descriptions of polygons, lines, and points and draws the map itself, in real time. The result is continuous zoom, styles that can change on the fly, and a format that is far more efficient. The entire planet fits in 136GB. You can host your own archive of it.
Why this matters beyond mapping
The question Tommi and Bart kept returning to is one we ask every day in a different context: who decides what is visible, what is preserved, and what disappears? Platforms rise and are acquired. Services shut down without notice. The communities built on them, and the data they generated, often go with them.
Open infrastructure is not a technical preference; it is the condition under which genuine public access becomes possible at all.
OpenStreetMap runs on community input. For example, StreetComplete, a map editing Android app, turns local surveying into something close to a game, sending contributors out to fill in what commercial map providers overlook. Another illustration is the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team project, which mobilises contributors after disasters, updating maps in real time so that aid reaches the right places. Corporations depend on OpenStreetMap as a crowdsourced map dataset, with TomTom even acknowledging this fact with their slogan “It takes the world to map the world”.
I joined this session wearing a second hat, beside my usual Internet Archive Europe one. The European Public Domain Day Working Group has been building a map on pdday.org, which tracks where public domain celebrations are taking place across Europe. That proprietary map has recently been updated and replaced with an open source version, and the community is actively looking for contributors to help keep it current. If you know of celebrations happening in your region, we would welcome your input.
Start exploring
For anyone curious about these tools: maplibre.org is the starting point. Maputnik at maputnik.github.io is a visual style editor for MapLibre maps, whose styles are in JSON rather than CSS. There are many hosted basemaps available, including non-commercial ones such as OpenFreeMap which has a quick-start guide for publishing your own maps. PMTiles lets you create and serve a permanent, self-contained archive of map data.
MapLibre’s Technical Steering Committee meets every second Wednesday of the month. Details and a community invite link are at maplibre.org/community.
The tools that remember where things are matter. So does who builds them.
We are grateful for the time and expertise that Bart and Tommi both shared with us, and the intimate group of participants who came to learn, explore, and build together.
