[Osmf-talk] Directed Editing Policy

[Christoph Hormann]

I would like to point out that if you consider the results of the survey 
the policy draft is actually pretty lenient - especially with all the 
points listed under A2 as "encouraged" even though the survey indicates 
a significant fraction of the non-organized mappers would be in favour 
of a stricter regulation.  For example the "Instructions must be 
available for inspection" topic received more than 2/3 clear support 
from the unpaid/unorganized mappers (either agree or strongly agree).

This means the policy tries to - in those fields the survey indicated to 
be somewhat controversial between paid mappers and independent 
individual mappers - trust the organizations performing paid mapping to 
act responsibly and in the spirit of good cooperation.

Something to keep in mind if you are evaluating the policy draft as a 
stakeholder in directed editing...


Another note: Since there are quite a few new members on this list some 
of which are likely not so familiar with the history of the topic and 
several comments made indicate not everyone is aware of the history it 
seems important to point out that this policy is not being created out 
of a whim of the DWG.  There has been a clearly increasing intensity of 
directed editing activities, mostly from corporations and mostly doing 
good work, over the past few years but there have also been a number of 
prominent rouge activities of this kind as well as cases where well 
meaning activities failed to productively contribute due to a lack of 
understanding of how OSM works.

Based on this there have been discussions in local communities about the 
possibility of creating rules regarding organized/paid mapping.  A few 
rather prominent cases of secret organized activities (in particular 
what i discussed in [1]) and probably also the mentioned discussions in 
local communities led to the OSMF board to decide to task the DWG with 
working on a policy [2] which led to the survey we had in September 
[3] - results in [4] and then the drafting of the policy we discuss 
here.  

[1] http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/imagico/diary/40759
[2] 
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Board/Minutes/2017-04-18#Corporate_map_editing_policy
[3] 
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2017-September/004215.html
[4] 
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Data_Working_Group/Results_of_Organised_Editing_Survey_2017


-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/