Room: Talks I / Opening - Amphi Caquot (Coriolis)
Saturday, 12:25
Duration: 20 minutes (plus Q&A)
Language: en
OSRM was once the go-to routing engine for anyone working with OpenStreetMap data: fast, purpose-built, and deeply aligned with OSM’s data model. But in recent years, the project lost momentum. Issues piled up, pull requests stalled, and the community started asking: is anyone still home?
This talk shares early lessons from a renewed effort to change that, presented by OSRM’s founder and BDFL.
We’ll give an honest account of where OSRM stands today: what works, what doesn’t, and what the broader routing ecosystem has taught us. More importantly, we’ll share what the revitalization effort looks like in practice: a renewed commitment to OSM-first routing philosophy, a public roadmap, a lower contribution barrier, and a clearer community voice.
At the heart of this renewal is a shift in technical ambition. OSRM has always excelled as a high-performance server engine, but routing doesn’t only happen in data centers. Field workers, humanitarian responders, cyclists navigating without connectivity: they all need routing on the device in their pocket. We’ll outline early work toward a single codebase that serves both worlds, powering large-scale server deployments and running efficiently on handheld devices, without splitting the project or compromising OSM fidelity.
OSRM’s core strength has always been its refusal to treat OSM as just another data format. The routing profiles, the handling of access tags, the speed model: all of it is designed around how OSM actually works. That advantage is worth fighting for, and worth bringing to every platform it can reach.
Attendees will leave with a clear picture of OSRM’s current state, the technical roadmap ahead, and concrete ways to get involved.