[Osmf-talk] The curse of Good Enough

[Frank Steggink]

On 18-10-2014 11:02, Ilya Zverev wrote:
> Hi. Sorry to bother you with another post on OSM stagnation. This one 
> will be the last, I promise.
>
> <snip>
>
> Please enlist to OSMF Board. Be a candidate. Be elected and see what 
> you can do to pull us out of this loop, to improve OSMF as an 
> organization. If your job, skills and resources allow that, of course.
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/AGM14/Election_to_Board
>
> IZ

I was about to say that to you. Your name isn't on the list yet ;)

As for your long post: maintaining geodata is different than writing 
articles, so it isn't fair to compare OSM to Wikipedia in that respect. 
In my opinion it is also much more difficult, because of the vast amount 
of data, different interpretation of features, spatial relationships, etc.

If there are no new exciting tools in recent years, that probably means 
that there was no itch to be scratched. Existing tools like JOSM are 
still improving. Yes, it takes a learning curve to get up to speed with 
it, but if you dumb it down too much, then experienced users might not 
use it anymore. Innovation is not something which is going to happen if 
you just wish hard enough for it.

As for the culture, you probably know how hard it is to change. It has 
grown this way over the past ten years, so one cannot reasonably expect 
that it will change overnight. This is even the case when most people 
are willing to open OSM up to women, minorities or people with different 
backgrounds, which I firmly believe is true. It means change, and 
usually there is resistance against change, even though it is not 
intended, but nobody is opposing opening OSM to other groups actively.

Anyways, if I can add my two cents: I think (hope) the next big change 
will be the full support of 3D. Adding layer and height tags isn't 
sufficient This is already going to happen in the GIS world for a couple 
of years, although it has been stagnating pretty much, because there is 
no killer app yet. Many smart people are spending their time on OSM, so 
there certainly is the capacity to pull it off. Of course it's pretty 
complex to "add" this to the existing data model, let alone to come up 
with a new data model. But in the general GIS work a lot of work has 
already been done, for example the CityGML standard. This doesn't make 
things easier for new users, which is an extra challenge.

Regards,

Frank