[Osmf-talk] [OSM-talk] "The Future of Free and Open-Source Maps" Slashdot.org , Saturday February 17, 2018

[Dan S]

Hi Sean,

I hope you don't mind me saying: this seems a bit of a diversion -
there are lots of discussions about how to get-and-keep *mappers*
onboard, and also separate (endless!) discussions about tagging
standards, but this thread is/was mostly about how we move from nice
ideas to actual changes in OSM infrastructure. Heather's list of
suggestions (which you replied to) was about how to get-and-keep
*software developers* onboard. For example, I've contributed small
amounts of html/js/css to the main website, but it took a long time
for me to find any way of being able to contribute anything useful (I
know nothing about ruby on rails). A nice behind-the-scenes example is
that Andy Allan has been doing lots of refactoring of the Rails code
in order to modernise it and make it easier for new contributors to
work with.

Best
Dan


2018-02-20 16:00 GMT+00:00 Seán Lynch <seanlynch at umail.ucc.ie>:
> Hi Michael,
>
> I appreciate the decentralised nature of OSM/F.
>
> Would it be worth considering-
> 1. A set of tutorials / guiding principles that OSMF could agree on that
> incoming mappers could use to identify gaps, improve the quality of their
> inputs, other inputs and meet a criteria or some goals/targets? Is there a
> part of OSM where we can go to see that "this needs to be done"? Can this be
> made into an infographic that would be popular to share on social media and
> easy to consume? Or would effort be better spent on advanced training to
> encourage the development of smaller numbers of higher quality mappers? In
> my experience I find that some critical parts of OSM are not formatted
> favourably. For example many addresses that share a language are often
> separated with the character "/" which when using the string as a URL is
> problematic eg- the nominatim address I got for Switzerland was
> "Schweiz/Suisse/Svizzera/Svizra" and instead of using "-", I have to search
> every string for "/" and replace it with "-". Not a big deal, but some
> standardization on formatting would be nice. I love the way OSM uses native
> languages and alphabets, but I think it would be useful for OSM to include a
> English language version and a native version of each country name. I say
> this as an Irish speaker. Some more examples of where things are out of date
> or there is different inputs used, eg "Galway" vs "County Galway" or "Galway
> City" "Caithair na Gaillimhe" in the field with a key of "City" or "County".
> In comparison with US datasets, the same type of regional districts are
> called "States". When working with nominatim on a global scale, this becomes
> really problematic. At OpenLitterMap, I am building a list of locations
> dynamically based in inputs from new territory (which is redeemable in 100,
> 50, 25 Littercoin). I also manually verify and inspect each piece of data
> diligently (to the best of my ability) before releasing it as verified data.
> Each data has multiple stages of verification.
>
> 2. A MOOC or a refresher course on how to identify gaps and make
> contributions to OSM. Are we in contact with Geography departments where
> gaps exist? Can we provide them with a set of guiding principles / an
> assignment / that is available to include as part of a course assignment or
> as extra curricular career-building activity? Maybe reward students with a
> badge or something to post in LinkedIn to show they have completed X task of
> contributing to OSM?
>
> Just thinking out loud-
>
> Cheers,
> Seán
> --
> https://openlittermap.com @OpenLitterMap (Fb, Tw, Ig)
> M.Sc. Coastal & Marine Environments (NUIG, 2015)
> M.Sc. GIS & Remote Sensing (UCC, 2014)
> B.A. Geography & Economics (UCC, 2011)
> ie.linkedin.com/in/seanlynchgis
>
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