[Talk-us] Facts about the world

[stevea]

>OSM started out with the do-it-yourself, clean room approach of 
>on-the-ground surveying. It offers the strongest guarantee of legal 
>compliance and appropriateness for OSM -- no legal analysis 
>required. All of us certainly hold such efforts in the highest 
>esteem, but I do see an argument for letting contributors be 
>resourceful in other ways, to *carefully and judiciously* 
>incorporate other sources, as long as they do their best to document 
>their work.

Thank you, Minh.  That really is all I did with rail subdivisions in 
California.  As others have said, I could have asked the rail 
companies (not by web, which yielded twin brick walls of "gotta log 
in" and "copyright") perhaps by telephone or letter, in which case I 
would have likely been given the answers, these being "facts about 
the world."  Or, I could have asked random people on the street, not 
a good idea, so I didn't.  What I did do was to *carefully and 
judiciously* confirm these data thanks to publications by my 
employees (the CPUC), and then I well documented that fact in my 
changeset tags.  Easy, peasy:  "being resourceful" where it makes 
sense to do so.  And it seems to me, that should be totally fuss-free.

By the way, along with my GPS, a little wire-page note pad with 
pencil and my decent memory/brain, I certainly do my fair share of 
on-the-ground surveying, too.

SteveA
California