[HOT] Name tag in non-latin script - hindrance for NGOs/aid agencies?

[Frederik Ramm]

Dear HOT list,

the DWG has been involved in a discussion being had by the community in
a country where the official language uses non-latin characters.

I would like to keep this abstract hence I will not say which country it
is even though some of you will know; I don't think it matters. It is
not Japan but you can imagine Japan if you need an example.

In the country, more than 98% of the population speak the official
language as their native language, though English is commonly taught at
school and used in higher education. Older people or people outside of
the university system will often not be able to write English fluently.

Signs (road signs, signposts) seem to be exclusively in the official
language if less important, and in official language plus English where
more important. It is claimed that some signs in big cities are
English-only but I haven't yet seen one.

There is a dominant group in the country that says: Let us use English
for our "name" tags, and put the official language in name:xx (where xx
is the language code). This is relatively unusual for OSM, but it seems
to be the current consensus in the community. Some of them also request
that changeset discussions should be had in English instead of the
official language. Just like in many other countries, OSM was first
adopted by people at or involved with universities and hence used to
English, so the decision came lightly.

Parts of the discussion hinge on not all IT systems properly supporting
the special characters needed for the official language; but the main
argument brought up again and again by the proponents is that there are
many people from aid agencies and NGOs contributing data to OSM or using
data from OSM in that country, and the data was of lesser use (or even
useless) to them if name tags were in the official language. (This
reasoning is also used for the request to hold changeset discussions in
English.)

We have been told by the pro-English-name group:

> as the major user & contributors to the local repository are the aid agencies like UN, MSF, Red Cross/Red Crescent eventually they are also facing problem while using the data ... We have been reported a recent case were WFP was unable to use the data due to this reason. ... Aid agencies like UN, MSF, Red Crescent have run many projects to map large portions of the country and given those data to OSM, which makes them big contributors and users of the OSM data. But this data becomes useless if all `name` tags are replaced with [local language] ... The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) made a map for disaster response that is available in OSM main site as an additional layer, which also can't render [local language]. And that makes it a challenge in times of disaster response.

Of course, the pro-local-name group feels stymied by the request to use
English; they feel this is an sign that the map is not "their" map but
someone else's and that requesting English changeset discussions
practically excludes large parts of the population.

This is an issue that ultimately the local community must solve for
itself. But it seems to be that there might be a danger of favouring
the comfort of international contributors and NGOs over that of the
local population - in a line of thought that goes "the map in our
country gains more if we can keep these NGOs interested by using
English, than if we attract the less-well-English speaking citizens of
our country".

I hope that there might be people from the organisations mentioned (UN,
MSF, Red Cross/Red Crescent, WFP, HOT) on this list who can tell me if
their organisations have policies or a general approach towards issues
like this. Is this a thing, projects hinging on whether the locals are
willing to deal in English? Or is "we have to use English to favour our
international partners" a red herring?

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"