[Talk-us] Facts about the world

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 04/04/2015 07:20 PM, Simon Poole wrote:
>> I just don't want to be called a couch potato in the course of it ;-)

> Seriously, I believe Frederik was more referring to how OSM is viewed by
> third parties 

Indeed. I don't have much exposure to US Americans outside of OSM but in
the few interactions like that I had, if people did have any conception
about OSM it usually fell into one of the two categories I mentioned -
either "OSM the hacker project to re-purpose government data" or "OSM
the humanitarian project".

I always put it down to people in the USA traditionally having much
freer access to data their government has collected (viz. TIGER) and
therefore more likely to respond to "hey, here's people finally making
their own map" with a shrug than with enthusiasm.

Creating that enthusiasm is a huge challenge (anyone remember
CloudMade's ambassadors?) and in my opinion, every time someone says "ah
we don't have to map this and that, we can take that data from <third
party source>", the enthusiasm dampens a bit. Because who wants to be
seen doing something that might turn out not to be necessary?

Bye
Frederik

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