[Talk-us] New List: osm-professional

[McGuire, Matthew]

As far as the purpose of the group as distinct from this one, my hope for the "professional" group would be to focus on sustainably maintaining data in OpenStreetMap that meet non-OSM business needs.

I contribute to OSM somewhat casually. I map things I am familiar with. But as an official three-piece-suit-wearing establishmentarian, I am looking to OSM as a place to store and manage corporate data. Maps being representations of reality, and different needs requiring different representations, I'm not sure that it is possible. But it's worth a look.

Take points of interest as an example. Internally, my organization has at least two datasets that contain over 10,000 points of interest in a metropolitan area. We want to contribute this to OSM, and we want to reap the benefits of the combined knowledge of the metropolitan residents to improve that dataset. However, those datasets needs to continue to meet internal business needs.

Although it doesn't match the scale, it would be equivalent to the US Census Bureau uploading TIGER to OSM, encouraging and participating in improvements from the OSM community, and then extracting the data to create census blocks.

Whether this is possible, and if so, how best to do it technically and organizationally are the questions I have.

Matt



-----Original Message-----
From: talk-us-bounces at openstreetmap.org [mailto:talk-us-bounces at openstreetmap.org] On Behalf Of Randy
Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2010 11:37 PM
To: talk-us at openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [Talk-us] New List: osm-professional

Randy wrote:

>Richard Weait wrote:
>
>>On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 8:19 PM, Serge Wroclawski
>><emacsen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 12:19 AM, Frederik Ramm
>>><frederik at remote.org> wrote:
>>
>>>>Stop. - Are you saying that osm-professional is intended as a copy of
>>>>osm-talk just moderated?
>>>
>>>I see osm-professional as mainly focusing on a new audience of people
>>>who currently aren't subscribed to any OSM list, with a focus on
>>>people using osm in a professional context.
>>>
>>>If it's similar to any other list, it'd probably be "newbies"- but
>>>newbies is really about getting involved in the project in the sense
>>>of contributing to the project, where I see osm-professional as about
>>>people who may not want to be individual contributors but still have a
>>>connection to OSM.
>>
>>Perhaps "Newbies" is the answer.
>>Traffic is lower.
>>We try to restrain ourselves from diving into perpetual tagging, etc.,
>>discussions.
>>"Newbies" already has the expectation that questions should be
>>answered without a dose of "that's a stupid question."
>>To succeed "Newbies" needs a number of folks willing to answer
>>questions for folks not already steeped in the culture of OSM.  And a
>>number of new folks to ask questions.
>>
>>I think the expectation of acceptable behaviour is in place at
>>Newbies.  I think the demographics are so similar that no revision of
>>mandates is required.  The only thing missing is a way to make "new
>>OSM pros" think that they aren't being treated like "newbies", because
>>obviously, the are professionals.
>>
>>ln -s newbies osm-professional   # enh?  See what I did there?
>
>I sure don't understand what all the fuss is about. If there was an NTTP
>group where I didn't agree with the management process, I just wouldn't
>join it. Is the fuss because it has "openstreetmap" in its name? Maybe it
>should just be gmane.comp.gis.professionals_interested_in_mapping. Surely
>no one is so dictatorial about anarchy that they couldn't stomach that!

Woops. NNTP

Sorry Richard, by replying to your message, it looks like I was slamming
your idea. I didn't intend to be negative about a constructive idea, even
though I don't agree with it. From what I understand (which is no more
than anyone else and less than some) I suspect the demographics are not at
all the same. I would suspect that osm-professional would be significantly
more directed toward use of the data than creating data.

But then, I'm not the anarchist that went off and did my own thing by
creating the group, so I shouldn't be making assumptions.

--
Randy


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