[OSM-talk-be] Workshop Trage Wegen - short report

[Wouter Hamelinck]

A short report about yesterday's workshop in Haaltert.
The public consisted of people that had never heard about OSM and very
limited experience in GPS use. I started with an explanation with what
is OSM, comparing with other online maps, pointing advantages,
disadvantages, possibilities...
After a short lunch break we went out to do some tracking. Most of us
went on to discover the paths around Haaltert. Polyglot showed a great
interest in house numbers which caused the local people to alert the
police about this suspect activity.
I finished with a short demonstration of Potlatch and JOSM.
Unfortunately there was a lack of time to let the attendees experiment
a lot with their own data. For this reason I have limited my edits
this far to the region where the others did not go. I will keep an eye
on the evolution the coming days.

There was a very positive response from the people of the vzw Trage
Wegen. They have a lot of data and have problems to make it public.
They see a lot of possibilities in OSM at the very minimum to use it
as a background layer. They intend to recreate there website, with a
new site that should be more map-oriented and e.g. allows visitors to
draw the trage wegen/voies lentes by themselves.
A few problems:
* A lot of their data is based on NGI-data and hence not directly usable in OSM
* They are very hesitating to redo all the work they have done this
far. Some automation should be needed. (Will need follow-up)
* The editors are intimidating for not-very-computer-minded people.
According to me it would be good to have an a to z explanation with
the minimum knowledge for specific interests. This means a full
description from creating an OSM-account and recording tracks to the
tags needed (in the case of trage wegen/voies lentes just
track/path/footway/cycleway would in fact be enough, they don't care a
lot about the rest) in one file or one page on the wiki. I think I'll
give that a shot.

Major opportunity: they are very eager to distribute the data that
they have. In that point of view we are completely at the same
wavelength.

wouter

-- 
"Wie niet in zichzelf gelooft, komt nergens."
                                       - Thor Heyerdahl