[Talk-us] parcel data in OSM

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 31.12.2012 06:49, Steve Coast wrote:
> Therefore I don't see why each
> country or state (i.e. Mass. and their own imports) can't have it's
> own solution which reflects the cultural realities there.

Your argument seems to be, essentially, that the cultural reality 
"there" is that they have no need for a crowdsourced map. If that is so, 
then maybe we should just accept that, and move on to places where there 
is such a need?

When you say that "Waze has not failed", I wouldn't know - Waze has zero 
publicity where I live, and their website offers a choice of "United 
States - Italy - Spain - Israel - Rest of world". It may be a big thing 
in the States but over here it usually doesn't even get a mention when 
people are talking about map data.

You're also talking of "ten or twenty" crowd-sourced maps of the world, 
and making it sound like a threat to OSM.

The real threat to OSM is to rely on imported data. If 99.9% of data in 
the US comes from imported sources, then those "ten or twenty" other 
crowd-sourced maps can simply import the same, and boast: "Our map has 
only 0.1% less than OpenStreetMap, and we're growing!"

You say that most users don't care where their data comes from, they 
just use whatever is in the package. Which also means that user adoption 
of OSM is worth little; if there's OSM on the iPhone today, there might 
be OtherSM (which offers 99.9% of the data that OSM has plus more 
favourable licensing terms) on the iPhone tomorrow and there goes your 
user base.

Any advantage we want to have over the competition that you paint on the 
wall can only come through a large community that cares for our data, a 
community committed to OSM, doing work that cannot be easily replaced by 
50 programmers from some outsourcing company.

In one sentence of your long post you mention the hope that imports 
could actually enlarge the community:

> If we could hand wave a "yes" it would change a lot of
> things and create positive feedback in more people resources to fix
> the map.

I've heard that quite often. "If only we import just a little more, then 
our map will suddenly cross some usability threshold and we'll have more 
users contributing quality data than we can wish for".

I guess it's a matter of faith. I can't prove you wrong but there's no 
evidence to support that hope either.

> Anyway. Maybe I'm completely wrong.

Your lament about us having "given up on the output side" is worth 
discussing calmly, at another time, in another thread. It rests on the 
same assumption that more users means more mappers, and I don't like the 
wording, but it might not be *entirely* wrong. The question is, however, 
if the means we have available would allow us to "not give up on the 
output side", or if trying to acquire the necessary means would make us 
give up on something else.

Bye
Frederik

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