[Tagging] Emergency shelters

[Eric Christensen]

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On 09/07/2017 11:12 PM, Nick Hocking wrote:
> Eric wrote   "Why would you delete data that is still valid and
> useful?"
> 
> 
> My concern is that if these are permanent features, then people
> will say "ooh - they'll be the same as last time" and of course
> they probably won't be the same as last time and we may route
> people to a wrong place, with possible tragic results.

I would say that shelters probably would be the same as last year.
It's very difficult to find structures that meet the criteria for
being shelters in the first place so thinking that you're going to
play a shell game with them really isn't going to happen.  The
shelters that I used to deal with are still shelters today some
fifteen years later and they were shelters for at least a decade when
I came into the job.

> I agree that this information should be left in place, but marked
> , unusable, until specifically activated by authorities, which I
> agree should be well ahead of time, so long as people know that
> they will not be usable until a state of emergency is declared.

I believe that's a given being that it's an emergency shelter.  That
said, I think we can use the 'note' key to make some sort of
declaration to that extent as I suspect there are some public tornado
shelters in the Midwest (US) that are available 24/7 whereas out here
on the east coast many hurricane shelters are stood up on an as-needed
basis.

> I also think that this information should NOT be edited, in any way
> by anyone other than the authorities. This brings back the old
> arguments about read only data in OSM.

One could make the same argument about roads or any other data.  This
is an open database and we all "garden" the data to make sure that the
information is correct.  Google has a closed database and it's a pain
for an "authoritative source" to get their one-off information into
it.  To go down the route of creating authoritative sources would
require way too much work to establish relationships with a lot of
agencies that likely do not wish to participate in the first place.
Further, we'd have to establish a trust relationship with them to be
able to authenticate them as the authenticated source.  Who is to say
that they would even maintain the data?  To me, the crowd is a much
better source and so far we've been doing pretty well.

- --Eric
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