[Talk-us] Imports - an attempt to explain

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    some of you have probably wondered why I am so critical of imports.

Some of you might even have assumed lesser motives on my part - a French 
guy once accused me (I'm from Germany) as simply being envious of the 
amount of open data available to the French. He suspected that since 
German OSMers have collected all their data by investing thousands of 
person-hours of hard work, I was now jealous of those having it easier 
to achieve the same results!

I want to try and explain myself, at the risk of sounding a little too 
passionate and less sober than I usually try to be.

I have spent the last 6 years in, with, and around OSM. Hardly a day has 
gone by on which I didn't write code, map things, or talk about things 
related to OSM.

If you do something with that kind of intensity, you have to 
occasionally step back and ask yourself: Why am I doing this? Is it a 
good thing? Is it worth my time?

In my case, I'm not only doing it for fun but also for a living, as one 
of the people running Geofabrik. But if you took away the passion and 
simply looked at how many hours I work for how much money then I'd be 
much better off simply working as a software developer in any vanilla IT 
business.

So, why am I doing this? If my grandchildren ask me in 2050 why I did 
all this, what will I say?

My, very personal, answer to this is that OSM is part of a greater 
movement of collaborative productivity, where people all over the world 
can and do join forces to create something great, something of value. 
This is a recent development. Of course Wikipedia paved the way in many 
respects but what we do, with our surveying and collecting, is even more 
tied to locality and requires even more international, globe-spanning 
cooperation. This is exciting, this is new, and I believe that efforts 
like this have the power to profoundly impact mankind and that we're 
part of the vanguard.

I believe that in 40 years, probably even in 15, hardly anything of the 
data we have collected will retain much value - but we will have been 
part of a great development, and mankind will be the better for it.

In my eyes, this is wholly about people, about their heart and soul and 
their wish to work together and create something together. It is a 
social endeavour, and every additional person that we manage to "win 
over", every additional person who understands that they can be part of 
this effort and help shape our common project, is a big win.

If my grandchildren ask me in 2050 why I did all this, I certainly won't 
be saying "oh, it was great, it allowed a large and popular electronics 
manufacturer of the time to increase their margin by 3% because they had 
cheaper map data" or so.

In my eyes, this "making the world a better place" effect comes through 
demonstrating what people are capable of if they work together, even 
without some dictator (or PR agency) telling them what to do. You don't 
make the world a better place by downloading a ton of government data 
from one server and uploading it in slightly modified form to a 
different server - that is not the new and interesting and exciting bit, 
that is not something that will be worth talking about in the future.

That's why I often react strongly if I encounter people who don't seem 
to share this deeper "why do you do all this", people who, at least 
superficially, seem to be concerned only with getting a nice map quickly 
and who couldn't care less about how the map is made and whether or not 
this has a social component or is part of a greater movement that shapes 
mankind.

Now, of course my view is entirely personal and if someone is only 
concerned about getting a nice map quickly then I guess it is their 
right to have that view.

It is even possible that getting a nice map quickly will make OSM more 
popular and in the end convert more people to our cause. But will "our 
cause" by that time perhaps be tainted - will OSM, instead of being the 
social endavour of "a great map that people made themselves", then be 
the technical challenge of "the geo database where a few clever guys 
managed to combine lots of existing data"? Will it still be the same story?

If you will, you can reduce this post to this: I'm concerned about the 
story of OSM, and I hope it will always be more a story of people than a 
story of computers.

Bye
Frederik

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