About
The story behind OpenRiverMap and CURRENT
Where this comes from
Mat and Julie paddle Idaho rivers — the long multi-day trips where you carry everything on the boat. They take RiverMaps guides on every run and they're constantly checking them, but on a hundred-mile stretch it's easy to lose track of exactly where you are. The canyon walls blend together. The flat sections pile up. You're doing mental math against a paper guide and half the time you're guessing.
Before any serious rapid, you pull over and scout. You look for hazards, try to read the water, figure out a line through the rocks. There are books with photos showing routes through Class IVs — but those routes change. A landslide reshapes a rapid overnight. What was a clean line at 2,000 CFS is a hole at 5,000. The paper guides can't keep up with the river.
The one thing they both kept coming back to: something that tracks exactly where you are, the way Gaia GPS does when you're backpacking. Not something you'd stare at in whitewater — more like a glance every mile or so on the slower stretches. Mile logging, like Strava for river trips. Scouting photos tagged to the actual water level. A way to know what's ahead before you get there.
Every tool that does parts of this today locks the data behind a company. OpenRiverMap is licensed so the community owns it permanently.
How the data works
Every feature in the OpenRiverMap schema carries a CFS range condition. Routes, obstacles, and hazard severities appear, disappear, or change character as live gauge data crosses thresholds. USGS provides the live CFS. CURRENT modules provide the ground truth. The community validates the result. The license keeps it free.
USGS Water Services
8,700+ stream gauges. Public REST API. 15-minute resolution. Live CFS for every major river in the U.S.
National Hydrography Dataset
River centerline geometry for the entire U.S. Free and open. The baseline that ORM builds on.
OpenRiverMap
The community-contributed layer: conditional routes, hazard zones, field notes. ODbL licensed.
What nobody else is doing
Every major tool — PaddleWays, American Whitewater, RiverApp, GoRafting, Gaia GPS — was evaluated feature by feature. Some do gauge alerts well. Some have community trip notes. None of them are building an open commons.
The last row is the one that compounds forever. Data moats erode. Open commons don't.
Two things. One mission.
This is not a startup. It's an open source project with a hardware business attached — structured so the community owns the data permanently and the product sustains the infrastructure without extracting from it.
OpenRiverMap
- Open river feature dataset
- CFS-conditional schema
- ODbL licensed — data stays free
- Anyone can build on it
CURRENT
- Navigation app (mobile + web)
- RTK field hardware module
- Reference implementation on ORM data
- Hardware revenue sustains the commons
OpenStreetMap is the dataset that outlasted every commercial mapping competitor. The apps built on it came and went; the data compounded for 20 years and is now irreplaceable. OpenRiverMap is that model applied to rivers — with CURRENT as the reference implementation that both feeds it and funds it.
What this project is and isn't.
These aren't aspirational values to be traded away at Series B. They're structural commitments — some of them enforced by the license itself.
Open by Default
The OpenRiverMap dataset is ODbL licensed. Derivatives must share alike. The data cannot be proprietized by anyone, including us. This isn't a policy — it's in the license.
Hardware Sustains, Not Extracts
CURRENT module sales fund infrastructure and development. No features held hostage behind subscriptions. No freemium bait-and-switch.
Safety Over Growth
The primary value of this platform is keeping people alive on rivers. Safety features ship before engagement features. Non-negotiable.
Contributors Are Owners
Paddlers who run rivers and log data are the reason OpenRiverMap has value. They are not the product. Their data, contributed under ODbL, belongs to the commons.
No Algorithmic Engagement
No recommendation engines optimizing for time-on-platform. No dark patterns. The app shows you the river. It doesn't try to keep you looking at a screen.
Advisory, Not Prescriptive
Route data is community-observed intelligence, not guaranteed safe passage. River reading and judgment stay with the paddler. Always.
Three users, one commons.
Recreational Rafters
The primary safety beneficiary. GPS position on a flow-aware map, advance warnings before hazards, simplified route overlays. They consume the map — they don't need to understand how it was built.
Whitewater Kayakers
The data contributors and community backbone. They carry modules, log lines, annotate features, file hazard alerts. They're the reason the map exists and the reason it stays current.
Commercial Outfitters
The clearest paid use case. Fleet positioning, guide-to-guide communication, pre-trip route briefings, conditions records — none of this exists today at any price.
Get involved
This is a software + hardware + community project. If you paddle, guide, or work with outfitters — your knowledge is what makes the data valuable. If you build things — the stack is Astro, React, and a sub-$300 hardware module built around the Quectel LC29H.