[Imports] San Francisco building heights import

Brandon Liu bdon at bdon.org
Wed Nov 30 08:05:52 UTC 2016


Frederik,

* I'm the initiator of this project. I started researching this while
I was living in San Francisco but moved to the east coast this year.
I'm very familiar with the built environment and OSM there.

* I don't work for Mapbox, but do provide services around OSM as a
job, often involving 3D visualization within San Francisco, so I have
a commercial as well as personal motivation for the project.

* The Mapbox Data team approached me this summer, offering their help.
They're the remote team responsible for the original 2014 tracing of
building footprints that we're augmenting [0], so this effort seems
like a good example of taking stewardship of their contributions and
making improvements. (They are also updating footprints.)

* Mapbox has offered use of their space for the local event, but it
will possibly happen after the US holiday season. We are in contact
with the Maptime SF and Bay Area OSM organizers through our chat
channel.

Brandon

[0] https://www.mapbox.com/blog/san-francisco-buildings/

On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 5:22 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> 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"
>
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