[Osmf-talk] Death and evolution

[Andy Robinson]

When I first looked at that wish list I thought, yes, I can see the logic in those. But on reflection I think I'm wrong. Let's look at them one at a time.

JOSM. Too hard? Once you have edited a lot it's like any other interface, you get by ok. It has its limitations and doesn’t always do things the way I would like but that’s no different to any other piece of software.

Relations editing? Hm, I'm torn with this one. On the one hand all and sundry creating relations scares me, while at the same time more grouping of objects may open up new possibilities with the data. For me the jury is out on this one.

Printing the map? Of course we all welcome tools that help the contributor but I find printing a screen shot or exporting a pdf works fine for my needs. In an ideal world I would like to see more data gathering capability from a modern phone or tablet. I think I'd still prefer to do mainstream editing from my desk though.

Low quality GPS? We don't need survey grade precision to make a viable map. As long as features are located correctly relative to each other I don’t think we need to care too much if it's out by a few metres.  I'm constantly moving old GPS gathered way alignments to BING, sometimes needing to move objects many 10's of metres. The map might look better afterwards (and its arguably more accurate) but the old version looked ok if you knew no better.

Mapping from the car? I prefer to get out on the bike. It's so much more fun. After all OSM is hobby for me. Also, I'd soon get data overload if I had my own streetview car!

Classification of tags? I hope we never classify them. The organic way we have created and developed our tags makes it all so much more accessible. Enforcing an ontology may be right for some end uses, but that’s up to those users to work on, not OSM contributors.
	
Reversion? I revert a changeset once or twice a week, mostly fix new editor issues in my local area. I'd be seriously worried if those same new users had the reversion capability!

I won't list all those things I think are equally important to address,  we can all come up with a nice list like that. There is however something that has worried me for many years - maintaining contribution & enthusiasm. Specifically:

1. How do we engage groups who are not interested in maps or mapping per se but who are passionate about some type of geographical data. 
2. How do we move the slider that says 90% of our data comes from 10% of the mapping userbase.

Possibly the one area we have neglected that could help address these points is education.  Other than at a personal level or specific projects like HOT in my opinion we have been poor at educating others to engage with the project.

Cheers
Andy



-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Amos [mailto:matt at asklater.com] 
Sent: 26 September 2014 12:19
To: Ilya Zverev
Cc: osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [Osmf-talk] Death and evolution

On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Ilya Zverev <ilya at zverev.info> wrote:
> But — what do mappers have? Oh, JOSM editor, which is still considered 
> extra hard, and which hasn't really turned smarter or easier than it 
> was in 2006. If you want to edit relations — the ultimate challenge — 
> that's the only editor you have. Ten years have passed, but we still, 
> even in Europe, print screenshots and go outside to draw on them. We 
> collect low-quality GPS data and pretend it's the best source. We have 
> zero tools for mapping from behind a wheel. We have no classification 
> of tags. No reverter that can be used by more than 0.001% of users. 
> Nobody had time to make any of those.

these all** sound like good ideas that mappers would want to have, and possibly would contribute towards. perhaps it would be worth setting up a project to focus on these things, getting funding through kickstarter / indiegogo / whatever? or setting up a "local chapter"
type organisation to self-organise around a community?

cheers,

matt

**: apart from the classification of tags - i'm not quite sure what you mean there and i think any fixed ontology would be bad for OSM, but that's an entirely tangential discussion we can have somewhere else.

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