[Tagging] RFC: school:for (to map special education and other ambiguous cases)

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 23:38 2022-06-18, stevea đã viết:
> On Jun 18, 2022, at 3:34 AM, Minh Nguyen <minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us> wrote:
>> Anyways, I don't really foresee parents using OSM to choose a school for their children depending on the kind of special-needs services offered. The school:for=* proposal seems more useful for dedicated facilities that would be distinguished from "mainstream" schools. Imagine a renderer or geocoder adding a subtitle after a school name describing it as an "oral school" (for students with hearing impairment). Contrast that with the subtitle for a "mainstream" school, which probably wouldn't mention any individualized services.
> 
> I'm often in awe at posts by Minh and others here, but this one point of "I don't really foresee... (downstream OSM users) using the map for purposes X or Y" sticks in my craw (rankles or irritates) a bit.  Often, even usually, OSM Contributors enter data which are both useful and used.  Sometimes, we enter data which certainly skew towards the esoteric or highly specialized.  Yes, it CAN be informative to get wider community feedback that a certain trend (data entry, particular key usage, syntax scheme...) is headed down a "more wrong, less correct" direction, and I certainly welcome this when it steers us onto a better path.
> 
> But it does get tricky to either not self-censor oneself, or to do so, when one "cannot imagine" or "does not really foresee" how some particular data in our map will or will not be useful.  Most annoying are "this is rubbish, such data are useless, stop entry now" (which certainly is not how Minh comes across here).  In some cases (proposals, talk on this list...) this might be true, but really off-putting data can be refuted as such in a highly discouraging way, while remaining polite.
> 
> Least annoying might be "there IS a need for these data, but only among certain downstream data users, even as these data are worthy data to put into our map."  I can think of the recent forest_compartment proposal, which I enthusiastically supported while it took three refinements to be Approved, even though I cannot even imagine me ever using it (we don't have such things in my country, at least that I know of).
> 
> It's those straddle-the-middle cases with which I get annoyed when people, perhaps due to lack of imagination that a mapping need exists (but you've never personally encountered it), yet it is discouraged for, for, well, not much more than "lack of imagination."
> 
> One of OSM's tenets is for our map data to be used (and they must certainly be created) in "creative, productive, or unexpected ways."  I expect a lot of OSM, and I do so by allowing myself to be (nearly always pleasantly) surprised when exactly this (the unexpected) happens.  If / as I can't imagine that, well, I'll allow that I do not have all of the imagination of the totality of the millions of us.  But it IS the millions of us together who have that imagination.  If a "control tower" really does need to "ground that plane, as it isn't air-worthy" (bad ideas are bad ideas, especially when they can be shown to be bad ideas), OK, that happens sometimes, and we better fix things before getting into the pilot's seat.  Otherwise, let imagination fly.
> 
> There is a spectrum of tagging "for" "schools" which might accommodate (through tagging) the rich universe of special education on Earth.  We discuss it here and now.  Really, is there another dynamic thought-space (database in the Web / "matrix" / cyberspace...) which is crowdsourced and perhaps an excellent vessel to hold such data?  I say, let the (tagging) refinements continue and watch how OSM (potentially) blossoms into becoming one of the most comprehensive geospatial databases of such data that exists, period.  (The same could be said about many more subjects than special education schools).  Sure, that's a long flight to the final destination, but we've gotta do some initial pilot inspection of the aircraft first, right?

What can I say, my crystal ball is imperfect. :-)

The proposal at hand focuses on identifying special-purpose schools -- 
rightly so, because there is an existing, demonstrated use case to be 
able to describe a school as being dedicated to a certain purpose.

On the other hand, I was responding to a tangential idea of tagging the 
accommodation of students with special needs at a general-purpose 
school, which in the U.S. would entail an individual education program 
(IEP) at a public school or an individual service plan (ISP) at a 
private school. [1] Since ISPs are voluntary, how would a mapper 
determine that a private school would accept one? If you get ahold of 
the school principal, would they be willing to answer this hypothetical? 
Maybe this is more straightforward in countries besides the U.S., I 
don't know.

It's not that I want it to be impossible to use OSM in a certain manner. 
But if a realistic use case cannot be articulated for tagging something 
as difficult to ascertain as IEP/ISP acceptance, then how do we know 
we're designing the right tagging scheme upfront? Better to let such 
tagging evolve organically and revisit it later than to design a 
potentially flawed scheme now, get it approved, and be stuck trying to 
explain it.

[1] 
https://www.understood.org/en/articles/the-difference-between-ieps-and-service-plans

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us