OpenStreetMap Founder Steve Coast has announced that the OpenStreetMap (OSM) Project now has more than 200,000 registered users. The project, originally started in August of 2004, has become increasingly popular in recent months. The new milestone comes less than ten months after the project reached 100,000 registered users back in March of 2009.

We have written about the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project many times, but we have yet to explain how to get started with it as a contributor. Since it is the vacation high season in the Northern Hemisphere and many more people will be hitting the maps, this is the perfect time. You can contribute a lot to the project even if you don't own a Global Positioning System (GPS) device -- or even a compass.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project in the process of building a free, Web-accessible, user-editable map of the world. So far, most of its map data has come through user-contributed GPS traces, but OSM has recently undertaken the bulk import of government-collected data covering the entire United States.