[Talk-us] Imports - an attempt to explain

Martijn van Exel m at rtijn.org
Fri Dec 21 00:26:01 GMT 2012


Frederik, thanks for sharing your view. I agree that we need to remain
aware of the story this project will tell in the long run. To my mind,
that story cannot *not* revolve around people, because it's people who
thought it up, built it, maintain it and improve it, and if the people
go away, there is no OSM left, just a silo of dead data. To me, the
story of OSM is very much connected to data that is alive. The data
tells the story. That story started out as one, but it has panned out
and now, eight years and change from its conception, OSM data tells us
many stories. The German story is very different from the French one,
and the US one, and the Dutch one - some countries where the current
data was shaped to a great extent by large scale imports. I have been
part of two communities that have been affected by these large scale
import - the Dutch and the U.S - and much to my own initial surprise,
these imports seem to have done very little to keep new people from
joining, and to keep the community from caring deeply about the data.
One outcome of this is that we are now trying to set up a committee
here in the US to guide import efforts. Because we see that imports
can be a mixed blessing, and if you want to consider doing one, you
should know that you can't do so in a vacuum, and that help and
guidance is always at hand. That help and guidance can very well lead
to a decision not to perform the proposed import in the first place.
We need to make those decisions together, as the community who cares
very deeply about the data, to prevent OSM from becoming a dead data
silo. I firmly believe that as long as we keep developing our
community here the way we have been, that will not happen any time
soon.

Martijn

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 2:21 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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-- 
Martijn van Exel
http://oegeo.wordpress.com/
http://openstreetmap.us/



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