[Talk-us] Admin borders in the US

[Simon Poole]

IMHO we shouldn't and I don't believe it is necessary to, give up the
principle of everybody can edit anything, even in the case of admin borders.

On the one hand we have cases where the borders are estimates generated
by mappers because there are no available and free sources, on the other
hand we can react faster to changes than your typical government GIS
agency (example: we have a largish number of municipality mergers each
year here, 2012 around 40, we had merged boarder polygons available
months before the official ones were available). As a consequence I
think it would be best to have borders (and other similar objects) in a
separate DB/layer/whatever (makes live simpler for nearly everybody and
stops the typical accident from happening), but the data should still be
edited by our standard tools (in other words the API should stay the
same) and by anybody with a OSM account.

Simon