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

[joost schouppe]

I kind of like how most of the discussion here was about "how can we
improve based on this critique". Still I feel like there is truth in this
rebuttal that was shared on the French talk mailing list. Shared here with
permission of the author.
While I agree with much of emacsen's criticism, and think we could do so
much better, I don't feel like we're slipping away. In Belgium at least, I
feel like every year has been better than the last.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr>
Date: 2018-02-17 20:44 GMT+01:00
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk-fr] "Why OpenStreetMap is in Serious Trouble"
To: Discussions sur OSM en français <talk-fr at openstreetmap.org>


This is a vision from a user in US. In Europe the situation is dramatically
different, and OSM is far better than proprietary solutions.
The fact is that US contributors did not embrace OSM as much as they could
have done, and then they left proprietary solutions take the lead
everywhere.

Outside US and Europe, and notably in developping countries, OSM is already
better than proprietary solutions that are full of errors, approximations,
or extremely incomplete. But yes OSM is still too slow to grow there and it
could easily be overwhelmed there by proprietary solutions (notably by
Google creating maps based an automated imagery processing). But develoing
countries prefer avoiding this dependency and want to develop accurate maps
based on local contributions and with the possibility for local
governements and for NGOs to focus specific areas forgotten by major
proprietary map producers (which cannot infer lot of details and notably
local names, translations, social and community development, small
commercial activities, or even accurate roads taking into account their
real usability or assesment of risks caused by floods or damaged surfaces,
and the more specific usage not just by 4-wheeled cars but also by
motorcycles, bikes, traction by animal, tracks created by them or by
pastoral/nomadic agriculture, or their seasonal state).

In developing countries or poor areas, proprietary maps only focus on major
urban centers, just to locate shops, they cannot locate correctly the
taxis, small buses, markets, or religious places and many community areas,
so these maps are almost unusable (all they can produce correctly is aerial
imagery and some automated processing of buildings, full or errors because
buildings are hard to determine in dense cities: see the example of Mexico
or Bangladesh !). Moist prorietary maps have imported "blindly" some poor
data created initially with lot of difficulties by local authorities (most
of these are completely outdated, even the names are now false).

So where OSM is loosing ground ? Basically only in US, but this can change
(even if proprietary maps are attempting to keep the lead, by creating
"cute" maps with lot of tools, what they create is a dangerous dependancy
on how US citizens perceive their territory and what they can or cannot do
on it). There's no real reason why US cannot progress on OSM like what
happened in Europe. What is only needed is more involvement by the public
(and unfortunately, US still does not have a really active OSM US chapter
organization that can also become a force of proposition to federal and
local governments and all their agencies).

So we should urge US users to creating local communities in each one of US
state, to become state chapters, and founding an association/federation of
these state chapter that would become the OSM US chapter in the OSM
Foundation. This can start already is some states where there are very
active members (e.g. in NY, FL, CA states, and in DC). In the Midwest,
there's still a severe absence of contributors. The OSM US federation
should work on creating and sustaining the local state chapters, with help
of universities, or Wikimedia chapters, or important NGOs (like the
American Red Cross), or other partners (HOT).

It seems that most US users don't care much about OSM, and OSM is in fact
hidden by other US companies working with OSM data (but not only), such as
Mapbox.
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