[Talk-ca] Automated imports of Canvec?

[Richard Weait]

On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 5:24 PM, James Ewen <ve6srv at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 1:46 PM, Richard Weait <richard at weait.com> wrote:
>
>> I think that OSM will be "complete, and in maintenance mode" once we
>> have a mapper on every block.
>
> And in what dream world do you live?

Yes, I know.  Come on in; the water's fine.  :-)

Yes, Canada is big and people are sparse in essentially all of it.  By
population density Canada is number 230-something, iirc.  We have some
real challenges painting a room this big.

I thought the idea that imports were hurting OSM was ridiculous when
it was first proposed to me.

We have an interesting opportunity.  We have been granted permission
to include CanVec.  We have a lot of space and many remote communities
on various scales.  So we could choose to experiment and try to find
the best way to import so that local mappers start participating.  Few
other OSM country-communities have this opportunity.

The US has data but it's already in place, everywhere.  Australia has
similar population and density challenges, but less available data to
import.

If there is an ideal way to use external reference data to "seed"
local communities and get local contributors to OSM, I'd like to know
what the secret is.  It seemed like the Toronto community grew the
fastest when we had the arterial grid roads for most of the city.
Some of those grids were "filled in" by new local mappers.

I think OSM with more contributors is better.  Do we keep doing things
the same way, or do we try some other things?

Best regards,
Richard