[Talk-us] Imports and Mass Edits in the US

[Serge Wroclawski]

Alex,

You're asking good questions. Instead of trying to answer them point
by point, let me try instead to give you a comprehensive answer.

The community (US and broader worldwide community) have issues with
imports. I won't rehash those issues now- we can do that another time
but what we have are a lot of people, especially older, more respected
members of the community, who are very anti-import.

And on the other side, we have some really nice data resources.

How do we bring these two together in a way that makes sense. And by
make sense, I mean doesn't cause the kinds of problems that imports
have caused in our past, which are well documented.

We've tried documentation, but documentation alone hasn't worked. It's
been partial and difficult to maintain and a bit hap-hazard. For the
maintainers, it's difficult and frustrating and for the importers,
it's vague and a bit confusing. The same goes for "formalizing" the
process, which is just another way of saying documentation, but
sounding more fancy.

I'm suggesting a different approach, one where you have a proposed
importer saying "I have this data", they then take it to a
committee/working group who has been blessed by the community to help
with this process.

They evaluate the data (license, quality, suitability, etc.) and then
if it makes sense, work with the person making the import to get it
done. That can mean documenting it, making sure the data is properly
formatted, figuring out if there are conflation steps necessary to be
taken, etc.

Because this committee will be doing this somewhat frequently, and
with a mandate of proper documentation to be presented to the US
Chapter Board, then documentation will come out of it, born out of the
actual experiences of the group, so it should be more concise, more
practical, and more concise.

The community gets a group of motivated people who want to make
imports happen (where it makes sense). Importers get a process, and
someone to work with. The board (and the US Community, as well as the
larger OSM community) gets accountability.

Does that answer your question?

- Serge