[Talk-us] Imports - an attempt to explain

[Alex Barth]

Frederik -

> 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 couldn't agree more. OpenStreetMap is an extremely audacious effort of creating the kind of public space that the ongoing consolidation of the web is undermining, a blog post yesterday by Josh Stearns today made me just think that [1]. And this audacity is not only in the tremendous data set that the community has been building for almost 10 years now but also in the kind of governance and interaction that is being built up around it. This is just plain awesome. 

> 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.

This is where I don't follow: the implication that an import is a sign of caring somehow less about OSM. I'm thinking there are clearly great examples of imports (how would we survey those country borders, coast lines, county borders, etc.?) and I'm thinking that even with the quality problems of current TIGER data it's better to have it than not as it allows us to have a usable map creating the incentives to  improve it now.

We clearly have to work on the quality of imports, but I'm thinking they will continue to be a way we (OSM community) do work, together with ground surveys, satellite tracing, bug reporting and so forth. Clearly, improving the quality of imports will also mean disallowing some. Given that imports won't go away, I'm first and foremostly interested in being very specific about what type of imports (or large edits) we're going to deem worthwhile and which ones not. I guess likely, we'll also have a category where we won't all be able to agree on, but at least differentiating the conversation would be a great start. I hope that this is what tonight's import working group meeting in the states will move forward on.

[1] http://stearns.wordpress.com/2012/12/19/from-instagram-to-open-journalism-towards-public-space-online/

On Dec 20, 2012, at 4:21 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> 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"
> 
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Alex Barth
http://twitter.com/lxbarth
tel (+1) 202 250 3633