There’s been a boom in the last couple years of big tech companies trying to reach to the periphery of the globe and bring Internet access to people without connectivity. Facebook is launching giant solar-powered drones with lasers, Google is floating balloons with antennae into the stratosphere, and smartphones are cheaper than ever.

The success rate of these projects is hard to quantify, it’s too early. But for the mapping industry,...

One of the coolest open source / open data projects happening right now is OpenAddresses, a growing group effort assembling around the problem of geocoding, the process of turning human-friendly addresses into spatial coordinates (and its reverse). I’ve been following the project for close to a year now, but it seems to have really gained momentum in the last 6 months.

The project was started last year and is happening over on GitHub. It now has over 60 contributors, with over 100 million aggregated address points from 20 countries, and growing by the day. There’s also...