Organised Editing/Activities/ORBIRUTA
Rationale
ORBIRUTA is an Ecuadorian company that builds management software for school transport. We operate in Cuenca (Azuay) with a school transport operator and its fleet.
We use OpenStreetMap as our base map and as the road network for routing and for snapping GPS positions to the road, with a self-hosted OSRM. We edit because our vehicles drive every day along rural roads that are incomplete or missing from the map, and we are the ones who drive them. Improving those roads improves our product, and it improves the map for anyone who needs to reach those houses.
Contact
Email: mapas@orbiruta.com
We answer in Spanish or English. If you think one of our edits is wrong, tell us and we will fix it: we would rather hear from you than have you revert it.
Community consultation
PENDING — replace with the actual links before our first upload. We will introduce this activity to the OpenStreetMap community in Ecuador and wait for feedback before we start editing.
Hashtag
Every changeset comment carries #orbiruta, and source=survey where the source is our own survey.
Timeframe
Starting September 2026. Ongoing, with no planned end date. We review and upload once a month, or whenever we find that a road has changed.
Tools and data sources
Tools: JOSM and the iD editor.
- Our own survey: GPS tracks from our fleet, used as a local reference layer for drawing. These edits carry source=survey.
- Aerial imagery made available to OSM by its providers (Bing, Esri, Maxar), through the editors.
We use no proprietary sources. We do not trace from Google Maps or any other restrictively licensed map, and we import no third-party data.
Data we do not publish
We publish no passenger data. Our system transports children, and their pick-up points are personal data protected under Ecuadorian law. Specifically:
- We do not upload GPS traces. We use them as a local reference for drawing and they never leave our systems. A trace with the stops removed would give the stops away: the gaps would be exactly the points where the bus stopped.
- We do not add school bus stops, or any node tied to our operation.
- We do not map driveways serving a single dwelling. A road that leads to one house points at that house.
Participants
- ORBIRUTA (on OSM · edits · contribs · heatmap · comments) — organisational account. It is the only account we edit with as an organisation.
Editing is done by ORBIRUTA or operator staff during working hours. No automated process edits the map.
Measuring our success
We have a direct, checkable measure: the share of GPS points recorded while moving that our map-matching cannot attach to any OSM way. Today it is around 7% of the moving track. If the map improves along our corridors, that number falls.
We also count the ways added or corrected each month. Our edits can be followed through the #orbiruta hashtag in tools such as OSMCha.
Training/instructions
We have a written procedure that everyone who edits must follow. Its rules: draw from our own survey or from permitted imagery, never from a proprietary map; do not upload traces; do not add stops; do not map driveways serving a single dwelling.
Every upload is reviewed by a named person before it is sent. We do not upload in bulk or automatically.
Post-event clean-up
We review our own changesets after uploading. We respond to comments left on them and to messages sent to mapas@orbiruta.com, and we fix whatever needs fixing.
Results
We will report progress here: ways added or corrected per period, and how the share of unmatched points evolves. If the community prefers another channel for that report, we will use it.