[Imports] How good can an import be?

[Richard Weait]

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 7:55 AM, Mike N <niceman at att.net> wrote:
> On 4/5/2011 4:58 AM, Andy Allan wrote:

>> Sometimes I wonder if one of the problems OSM
>> is facing in the US is the relative paucity of examples where OSM
>> volunteers have mapped to higher standards
>
>   Are you claiming that nearly everything people have surveyed in the US is
> crap?

The combined result of our work in North America suffers by comparison
to our European overlo^W cousins.  Individual mappers are, of course,
brilliant, dedicated citizen cartographers and "smarter than the
average bear".  That's what draws us to OSM.

But the North American community has not grown like the European
community did.  Is this because North Americans find OSM less
appealing?  You suggest one possible reason this might be true.

> The biggest issue in the US is that people's reaction is that we already have "Free Google, Bing, Yahoo and Mapquest" maps.   Why is there even another map?

Possibly.  That is sometimes the reaction when I introduce people to OSM.

And also possibly this.  If somebody learns of OSM and is curious
enough to look at their home (we all check that first; you know it.)
and that part of Anytown, USA looks superficially complete based on
TIGER.  They might just decide, "Enh.  They don't need my help."  And
so TIGER may have discouraged an OSM contributor from starting.

By comparison, consider Toronto, pre-imports.  See the Geofabrik
animation, around August 2007.

http://www.geofabrik.de/gallery/history/index.html#toronto

It seems to me, from memory, that starting around August 2007 was a
boom-time of new OSM contributors in Toronto.  We had some of the city
grid on the map, and a few detailed neighbourhoods.  A new user faced
with that might say, "I'll come back when your done" but a new mapper
might just say, "Oh, look, I can add my neighbourhood and make it look
better, like $nearby-neighbourhood."  That obviously-incomplete map
may well have inspired dedicated mappers to start to participate.
Imports didn't arrive in Canada until later in the animation.

This is not a scientific study, obviously.

As another, single point of comparison of communities, consider local
OSM groups.
http://usergroups.openstreetmap.de/

There appears to be a local OSM user group for each
100 Million USA-ians.
And one for each 10 Million Canadians.
And one for each 2 Million Germans.

The USA got imports early.
Canada got imports a bit later.
Imports seem much less popular in Germany.

Correlation? Causation?  I don't know.

There was no objection to TIGER import when Dave did it.  As I recall,
mappers asked him to import their counties even if it meant removing
their work first.  We did not suspect then, what we suspect now.

Even if an import is perfectly executed, it is stale data.  The import
data was captured by the source yesterday.  Or perhaps even longer ago
than that.  Import it today, and tomorrow it starts going stale.
Updating it next week, or whenever the source renews the dataset is a
challenge that we haven't necessarily mastered yet and in the interim
the data gets staler and staler.

Now by comparison, imagine that your town has a mapper in every
neighbourhood. How long would a new store on your main street go
unmapped?  A new subdivision in the next neighbourhood?  I think that
model updates faster and better than waiting for somebody else to
collect and publish the data, then an import / merge / update to OSM.

I think that local mapper, keeping their area of interest up to date,
is the great strength of OSM.  We see it in Germany.  It's a much more
localized strength in North America.

And I think imports have limited that strength in North America.