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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 09/30/2011 08:36 PM, Mike N 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?" And what are the obstacles to usage?
> inconsistent tagging.

Yes,but are the only meaningful uses of the map really those that depend 
on cross-state consistent road tagging? I find that hard to believe.

And even if it were so - it may be that Greece and Norway are different 
countries, and they certainly have different authorities responsible for 
road naming and design, but you can simply grab your car and go from 
Greece to Norway without even having to show an ID to anybody - and yet 
nobody in Greece has claimed that inconsistent road tagging within 
Europe was an obstacle to usage.

> In the
> US, there may be minor differences from state to state, but we expect
> products to work seamlessly everywhere.

Maybe I am missing something but I feel that over here we have products 
that work pretty well, in Greece and in Norway and everywhere in 
between, and we certainly don't have a unified tagging scheme.

I think this is a strawman. There's tons of people who like to claim 
that OSM cannot be used for something, and then suddenly someone comes 
along and makes it work. There are those who sit back and wait until 
someone finally provides the proper preconditions for them to go to 
work, and there are those who pull up their sleeves and do the work anyway.

I think that it is always more important to make things easy for 
mappers; users - and especially commercial users - should be our second 
priority, not our first. Because they stand to make a profit from using 
OSM, they can be expected to invest some time and brain power in finding 
out how to make OSM usable for them (just as Skobbler did!) whereas we 
mappers should just do what works well for us.

Of course this would require some self-discipline on the part of 
mappers; nobody must run a bot to impose his personal tagging scheme on 
the rest of the country.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"