[Talk-us] Caliparks re-tagging paths?

[Andy Townsend]

On 24/03/2016 15:50, James Umbanhowar wrote:
> Regardless of the community's eventual solution, I think the most
> important part of this event was the lack of engagement of Caliparks
> and Stamen with the community.

Well, let's cut the individual editor a bit of slack here.  They've done 
exactly 16 edits to OSM, and I'm sure that before my 16th edit I'd done 
a few silly things too :)

If you look at http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions?c=United 
States you'll see lots of "hello and welcome" messages (some from people 
in the US, some from people outside) explaining to new mappers how to 
get the hang of things.


> Is there a similar process for
> institutional (business, government, non-profit) editing of data as
> there is for imports?  There should be.  I think institutional
> engagement with OSM can bring many benefits, but has similar dangers as
> imports.
>

I'm not aware of anything currently - a mapper is a mapper is a mapper - 
although there's fairly regularly been discussions within the community 
about how to work with "institutional" editing.  I suspect the first 
thing that comes as a surprise to e.g. someone mapping on behalf of a 
business is that they just think of OSM as a dataset or a map; they 
don't expect it to talk to them when they add stuff to it.

When a business tries to talk to OSM I suspect it comes as a bit of a 
surprise that there's not much of a hierarchy - there are just people 
adding data, and people trusting other people to do various jobs 
(writing editors, creating map styles, ensuring that international 
boundaries don't get broken) because they've done that job well in the 
past.  Everyone complains about everyone else, but somehow it seems to 
work...

Another thing that a business might not be prepared for is the need to 
compromise - that their vision of what and how things should be mapped 
may need to be discussed and considered among others. Sometimes 
organisations think that they can just dump their data into OSM, and 
it's job done, when instead people in OSM will tell them they need to 
think about data quality, maintenance and other things.  For example, I 
found one of the paragraphs of the precursor post to the one that Marc 
Gemis posted interesting:

https://hi.stamen.com/on-the-right-trail-39e386ba977f#.gggx7v77j

"We are also spreading the word about how to use the “social_path” tag 
through social media, the OSM community, and in our work with other 
parks and public land agencies and grassroots groups such as Nerds for 
Nature and Maptime."

It's a real shame that one of those "grassroots groups" didn't actually 
include OpenStreetMap :)

Best Regards,

Andy