The Digital Trails Handbook

Hi there, you've found the home of The Digital Trails Handbook.

As part of our Trails Stewardship Initiative, OpenStreetMap US is working to compile a comprehensive guide to the world of digital trail data.

Just like with OpenStreetMap, you can contribute your edits to the handbook. We'd love your help in making the best trail data guide in the business.

FAQ

Why not use the OSM Wiki?

The OSM Wiki is an excellent technical resource, but we've found it can be tricky for newcomers to parse. While much of the content is the same, The Digital Trails Handbook aims to be a curated, approachable starting point for those who just want quick answers to common questions. The handbook is still community-driven, but serves a different purpose than the Wiki.

Get involved

Code of Conduct

Participation is subject to the OpenStreetMap US Code of Conduct. Please take a moment to review the CoC prior to contributing, and remember to be nice :)

Contributing

If you have an idea for an edit or even a whole new chapter, we invite you to open an issue or pull request.

Need help? Ping @quincylvania or @jake-low on OpenStreetMap US Slack. Anyone is free to join.

Development setup

You don't need to run this repository locally to contribute to the content, but if you want to:

1. Clone the repository
2. Open your terminal and cd into the repo's directory
3. Run bundle (first-time setup only)
4. Run jekyll serve to build and serve the site
5. Visit http://localhost:4000 in your browser
6. That's it!

Any changes you make to files in _source will automatically be applied when you reload the page. (Changes made to _config.yml require restarting the server).

License and copyright

This repository is © 2025 OpenStreetMap US. The frontend content is licensed CC BY 4.0. The other contents of this repository is distributed under the MIT license.

Map data is © OpenStreetMap unless otherwise noted. Illustrations are in the public domain unless otherwise noted.