[talk-ph] Media Coverage

[Jim Morgan]

ian lopez wrote, On Monday, January 19, 2009 10:12 AM:
> The media coverage may be good for the Pinoy OSM community, but I'm
> probably concerned that this would bring in "vandals". Hopefully, it
> wouldn't happen.

You know the saying .... there's no such thing as bad publicity. 

Well yes, I guess there is always a risk, but we can't have it both ways. We need more contributors, so we need more coverage. I think most people will just use the data to export maps in any case, but if they do that, then we also get exposure when people ask them where they got the map from. I think the actual mapping bit will only appeal to a certain kind of person. 

But this is an interesting point. What protection do we have against the deletion of information, accidental or otherwise? I remember when I started on OSM, a large area I'd worked on was deleted, but I think it was eventually restored from a backup. Can we roll back changes? Specifically, can we roll back changes made by a particular user? Are backups held at OSM central, or are we responsible for holding them ourselves.

Its a tricky one to police. Should we have an identity check for people signing up? Verification by phone for example. Probably not, as its against the ethos of Open-ness.

Should we have a moderator who needs to approve changes? This is how wikipedia copes with the problem. Maybe if we could  have moderator approval for changes over a certain number of nodes? Just thinking aloud here. I'm guessing none of this control is available within the OSM backend. But perhaps they could build it in if it is requested. 

Just for the record, I'm a professional paranoiac: I'm in IT security, so these are the sorts of questions I have to ask my clients every day. 

Jim