Community

OpenTrafficMap is an open project run by volunteers. This page covers how to take part, who is behind it, and where to find the code.

The most valuable contribution by a distance. The map can only show live data where a receiver is nearby, so every new location extends what the project can see — and a location nobody covers yet is worth more than a better antenna somewhere already covered.

1. Get a receiver, or build one: Receivers
2. Put it somewhere useful: Placement & Outdoor
3. Name it and put it on the map: Your Node

If you pick up something interesting — a new city, an unusual sender, infrastructure that was not known to be live — add it to Coverage. The conventions for entries and the difference between a documented deployment and a sighting are explained there.

Register a wiki account and edit. Corrections, missing details and new pages are all welcome, and the gaps are marked: search for TODO to find the places where somebody's knowledge is missing rather than somebody's writing.

A few conventions:

• Long pages with sections, rather than many small pages. If something is a paragraph, make it a section.
• Plain, factual language. No marketing tone.
• Say where a number comes from. Measurements, prices and dates age; a source lets the next person check.
• Prefer linking to a repository or a datasheet over copying its content, except where a short summary genuinely saves the reader a trip.
• Images: give them a height of 420 pixels by writing {{:your_image.jpg?0x420|caption}}. The leading zero means “no fixed width”, so the image is scaled proportionally to that height — it is not cropped. Equal heights make images sitting next to each other line up, and uneven widths do not bother the eye. Readers can always click for the full-size original. Only depart from 420 with a reason: a very wide panorama would become wider than the text column, and a picture that is the subject of its page may deserve more room.

Firmware, hardware and the map are developed in the open at codeberg.org/opentrafficmap. The receiver hardware and firmware are described on Receivers; alongside them you will find the decoding side — cits-to-json, a C-ITS parser written in Rust, and cits-wireshark-bridge, which decodes via tshark and produces JSON.

This wiki is written in English. C-ITS is a European technology, the deployments span several countries, and the people building receivers are not all German speakers.

One deliberate exception: the imprint stays in German, because it is a legal text under Austrian law.

OpenTrafficMap is run by a registered non-profit organization, and everyone involved works on a voluntary basis.

Receivers are passed on at cost — we do not make a margin on the hardware. The organization holds a bank account, which is what makes it possible to accept payment for orders and to receive donations at all.

TODO: Donation details — bank account, or whatever channel is preferred — are not documented anywhere. If donations are welcome, this is the place to say how.