[Imports] San Francisco building heights import

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 11/15/2016 10:28 PM, Brandon Liu wrote:
> The SF building height import team is working to add height data for
> buildings in the City of San Francisco (wiki [0]). 

May I ask how many of those currently importing building heights in San
Francsico live in the wider San Francisco area, or at least have lived
there?

If you're participating in the import but are not local, may I ask what
your motivation is? Are you all employed by Mapbox and helping your
colleagues who actually live there (and why are those colleagues
seemingly not interested)?

On the project page on Github, I count people who say they are in

* Philippines (1x)
* USA/NYC (1x)
* India (5)
* Canada (1x)

But surely a successful import should at least have some footing in the
local community, should it not? How are you in touch with the local
community, and what about that "local mapping event" you are talking about?

The reason I am asking is that I am very worried about "import
specialists" in OpenStreetMap who perform one import after the next,
around the world. I think imports can be successful but only if they are
performed largely by a local group who, afterwards, takes ownership of
the data, keeps it current, improves it, fixes it. If we have an import
task force "kick-starting" imports and then disowning the result
(because they're busy with the next import on the other side of the
globe), then this mechanism won't work and we are looking at TIGER 2.0 -
import a lot of stuff and let someone else deal with it later.

Bye
Frederik

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