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

[Jason Remillard]

Hi,

Just wanted to put my 2 cents on on this.

OSM already has a rough consensus on its relationship to external data
sources. I don't think there we be any controversy saying "no thank
you" if somebody showed up wanting to import a shape file containing
the habitat of say black bears. We don't import contour data, parcels
(at least in the US), image data, historical roads, light pollution
map, etc. Other data is mostly imported, such as country/state/town
boundaries. I think that this committee should not talk about this
kind of stuff, it is best left to the wider OSM community to handle
the gray areas in this space. It seems to me that the current rough
consensus on what is in/out is pretty reasonable.

We do have a problem of a lot of hurt feeling when somebody new shows
up and wants to do an import. This committee can act as
mentors/facilitators for people with external data sources. We can
help them navigate the existing process as documented on the wiki *off
list*. So that all of the common/expected mistakes can happen in
private, without embarrassment or hard feelings. The benefit to the
community is that when/if an import is about to start, a well formed
RFC will land on the list. The people on the list can stop worrying
about the easy things, and focus on the whatever gray area may exist
for that specific data source. The mentors can also set the
expectations what parts are going to cause heated discussions/versus
items that will be non-issues. Implementing this is easy, get a couple
to volunteers and put their contact info at the bottom of the import
guideline page, saying "if you want help figuring this stuff out
please message one of these people, x,y,z". Lets keep all of the real
controversial items on the mailing list. When/if an import is ready,
the person sending the RFC will have a good understanding about what
is going on. Of coarse, if somebody wants to just do it the old
fashioned way and get the full hazing on the email lists, then that
should also be allowed.

With the rapid growth of the project, Soon (perhaps already) most
people in OSM will not be software engineers. Compared to software
people, they will have less awareness of IP law, will be less able to
deal with the wiki, and be much less tolerant of the rough behavior
that is customary between engineers. We will need to give them help
when dealing with external data sources, or they are going to just
leave with hurt feeling and we will lose a new enthusiastic mapper.

Thanks
Jason



On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 9:42 AM, Serge Wroclawski <emacsen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I know what it's like to be excited about OSM, and I know what it's
> like to be frustrated with OSM, struggling with low data quality, or
> lack of data altogether.
>
> And then you get access to a large dataset, and you know that having
> it in OSM would improve things. It would improve the quality, and
> maybe even get people mapping. At the same time, I think many of you
> have seen the damage that bad imports can do.
>
> The result is that folks like myself and others are frustrated by the
> import process, and folks who have good, useful datasets are frstrated
> by the import process.
>
> So I'm proposing a new committee, run by the US Chapter, to help guide
> imports and large edits.
>
> This will give step by step guidance to those who want to import data,
> and offer the larger community time to review and provide feedback.
>
> When I helped create the US Chapter several years ago, this was one of
> the main reasons I thought it should exist, but I think there's
> finally the amount of data and interest to justify it.
>
> What do folks think?
>
> - Serge
>
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