I started contributing to OSM in 2006. I owned a Garmin Forerunner 305 and used my tracks from my runs to extend map. Back then the major thing to contribute were GPS tracks which recorded the real world.

I believe I might have been the very first person to upload tracks for India in 2007. The phones didn’t have GPS back then and personal GPS devices were still expensive and “for geeks only”.

That has - obviously - completely changed. Today I’m chasing down new developments in my city to map roads which were just cleared a few days earlier. Those opportunities are hard to come by. OSM has matured so much over the last 17+ years that attribution to existing objects is much more needed than it was back then. I still enjoy it.

Openstreetmap is now probably the atlas available.