[Talk-us] US Addressing

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 29.11.2012 23:26, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> If you chaps are all dead set on doing another massive TIGER import - hey,
> it's your funeral

It's not a funeral. It's a sacrifice of long-term project health for a 
short term gain.

Nobody in the overheated IT business world makes plans for something in 
five years; stuff that is in planning today will launch in 2013 and be 
dead in 2014. Naturally, if OSM can't promise addresses for 2013 then 
the business world isn't interested.

OSM has a choice. We don't have to submit to commercial life cycles; 
we've come as far as we have without doing it and we'll grow further 
even if we're not doing it. We can afford to tell those who ask: Thank 
you, we agree that addresses are important, but we'll do it our way and 
this will take time.

We might miss a few opportunities that way - we might see a little less 
announcements about some other big player having made the "switch2osm" 
in the short term. We might see a couple businesses throwing together 
OSM and third-party addressing and try to make a viable offer from that. 
But we'd be doing things our way, building a strong community and a good 
foundation for future growth.

Or we could opt for the quick success story, for a couple more minutes 
of fame, import data that we haven't created, haven't even seen - 
essentially become a distributor of third-party datasets. Garner some 
headlines, give a couple smart interviews to the press about why OSM is 
great (when in fact the data import is admitting the failure of 
precisely that which is great about OSM - individuals surveying the world).

We've been ignored by the big guys long enough - and even so flourished 
in the shadow. Does it really hurt if we're ignored for a while longer, 
and slowly and steadily grow?

I'd like to think that mankind has meanwhile learned to ask the 
sustainability question, and certainly imports aren't sustainable.

Bye
Frederik

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