[Talk-ca] Manitoba buildings, addresses and high school work

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

As has been well-documented in both this forum (talk-ca) and our wiki(s), please note that importing building footprints in Canada has been fraught with peril, especially regarding licensing issues.  It must (again) be underscored that asking OSM's LWG about each and every license case for each and every Canadian city is a wholly unworkable solution, as to do so simply overwhelms our project's limited legal resources.  There (should be?  is?  will be?) a concerted effort (by STATCAN?  by others within OSM at an OSM grass-roots level independent of Canadian government entities?  in coordination with Canadian academia?) to better approach OSM's LWG with a nationwide "one time solution" to get city-at-a-time building data into OSM with a Canadian-wide LWG-cleared license, but this is far from achieved, let alone coordinated, well-documented as to its progress or even its methodology.  So, this process continues to badly stumble, choked with a distinct lack of transparency, critical in a project whose first name is Open.  Please fix this.

I dislike repeating what has been a sore spot over and over again in a forum where we are free to ask and have answered forthright questions in an atmosphere of friendliness.  However, there appears to be a serious problem with what might be described as "Canadian-community OSM communication (or lack thereof) with regards to citywide building imports."  I strongly urge Canadian OSM volunteers to remedy this problem so that this "reinvention of the wheel" and repeated discussions of a distinctly broken process no longer continues.  It is a fixable problem, but it will take grassroots coordination within OSM (talk-ca included) and possibly federal government and/or academia, likely wiki documentation including ongoing status, a full understanding of the history of mistakes made and how they will be remedied, and finally, a careful, limited approach to our LWG with a "one time proposal" only after all of the above work is completed.  Please:  fix this.

With respect,
SteveA
OSM Volunteer since 2009