[Talk-us] What does the community want from a US local chapter?

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 2:36 PM, Mike N <niceman at att.net> wrote:
> On 9/30/2011 2:23 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>>
>> Really? Are there people who say "I'd rather not map because there is no
>> consensus on the roads tagging"? Are those people the 20,000 missing
>> mappers in the US?
>
>  It is more like "I don't see anyone using the map except for Skobbler, so
> why should I invest my time?"

My experience is that most long term mappers map to OSM, not to any
one downstream OSM consumer (Skobbler, Mapquest, CloudMade). We map
because we want to improve OSM. And if the others use our work, great.
If not, we're still making the map.

>>  And what are the obstacles to usage?
>  inconsistent tagging.

My experience is that lack of complete addresses is a larger issue.

>
>>> Ideally this should be done by, as you say, "facilitating a consensus",
>>
>> Personally I'd think a per-state consensus would already be quite good.
>> Greece and Norway use different tagging schemes - so why would anyone be
>> "held back" if Texas uses something other than Alaska?
>
>  A map data consumer would want to be aware of local state conventions, but
> it would be a huge saving of effort to read up on a single US tagging
> convention from the Wiki, then apply it to consume map data.   As already
> demonstrated by the 'shields' discussion, we can begin to approach a unified
> tagging convention that will cover all states.  In the US, there may be
> minor differences from state to state, but we expect products to work
> seamlessly everywhere.

By the same token, the "standard tagging rules" should then apply- the
international ones.

- Serge