[HOT] The status of iD in HOT contexts/projects

[Kathleen Danielson]

Great example of constructive feedback, Will. I'm sure that Tom, John, and
team really appreciate it!
On Sep 23, 2013 11:00 PM, "Will Skora" <skorasaurus at gmail.com> wrote:

> Robert Soden mentioned the interest of using iD for OSM-related
> trainings during today's HOT tech chat. While in Northern Haiti for
> the CAP103 project in May-June 2013, a handful of the advanced mappers
> in Northern Haiti had learned about iD and wanted to learn how to use
> it, and I attempted to give 2-3 informal brief walkthroughs.
> afterwards, I wrote my experiences about it and then forgot to share
> them with the HOT community until now and thought it would be useful
> to share since we haven't discussed the use of iD in HOT contexts.
>
> First off, I truly admire the work done for iD. Its development has
> been rapid, the developers are very friendly, humble, and responsive,
> they set an example for the OSM developers' community. I understand
> that iD developers have other competiting priorities to help improve
> the editor but there's several issues that I've experienced and as a
> result, would really hesitate to use iD in HOT contexts where these
> issues would be appear.
>
> - Lack of a GPS layer
>  - you can currently upload a single GPS track to display in the
> background, but you are not yet able to load the entire background of
> GPS traces from OSM of a given area.
>  https://github.com/systemed/iD/issues/277
>  Although the quantity and quality of imagery sources available has
> increased in recent years, there's still a handful of areas in the
> world where there's no traceable imagery available, often in areas
> where HOT has operated . In these instances, mappers still have to
> rely solely on GPX points and GPS layers to map.
>
> - Lack of waypoint support in GPX traces
> https://github.com/systemed/iD/issues/1557
>  As we often take waypoints as we often take GPS traces and write down
> information that describes the area associated with the corresponding
> waypoint.
>
>  - In some areas, bing imagery is 'offset' - a road traced with bing,
> for example, may be 30 or 50 meters away from where it is on the
> ground. To fix this, 'offsetting the imagery' is necessary. At the
> moment, iD has the capability to adjust imagery, but the adjustment
> must be manually done each time a user opens iD to edit OSM.
> Secondly, without a GPS trace layer (mentioned above), a user does not
> know whether the data already mapped to OSM are currently offset or
> not. This is a bit problematic to newer OSM users who may move data,
> believing that it should match up with bing imagery.
>  https://github.com/systemed/iD/issues/1124
>
>  - conflict detection
>   - no way to detect conflicts. This is problematic when there are
> mapping parties and mappers are editing in areas very close to each
> and you may be editing the same ways as your fellow users.
>   https://github.com/systemed/iD/issues/1053
>
> At the moment, iD is a great editor but the above issues can be quite
> problematic in some HOT contexts (that don't have great imagery for
> example) and would be considered dealbreakers in these HOT
> environments.
>
> Given the rapid development of iD, we may even have to reasses it in
> just a few months. Until then, we should keep iD on the back burner.
>
> Regards,
> Will
>
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