[Talk-us] Senseless Germans, again.

Thu Jul 26 10:26:05 UTC 2018

Hi guys,
I am willing to help re-map the sidewalks in question that got deleted or
fix them up, just point me in the right direction please, any links?

Now about this discussion:

I am one of those mappers who has stopped mapping so much a bit, but life
has gotten in my way.

I would like to add in one cent of insight here after have lived in Germany
for 20 years and being an American, America is huge and people are busy
surviving.

After having moved back to America, I find I have less time to map and
there are generally less people to do the work on open source and open
knowledge projects and a lot more space to map and things to do. Texas is
twice the size of Germany.

We have about same amount of mappers in USA, but with a much more larger
area to cover :
http://www.osmstats.neis-one.org/?item=countries

I have created my share of messes, Topeka Kansas, for example I got some
negative feedback, and that place needs some more work to get it up to the
level of other places, but at least it has a ton of address data that I
brought in and house locations. It is not Berlin, there are not so many
people working on it as Berlin. I do see that there are some edits going
on.

Here is an overview of where I live, and there are a handful of active
editors.
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/oooc?zoom=12&lat=40.27294&lon=-74.79694&layers=B0FTFFFFT

Tokpeka has like 4 active editors,
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/oooc?zoom=12&lat=39.02461&lon=-95.71525&layers=B0FTFFFFT

Berlin has so many it takes a long time to load
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/oooc?zoom=13&lat=52.51287&lon=13.39633&layers=B0FTFFFFT

On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 11:32 AM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:

> Kevin, It's kind of odd that you request that both Bryan and Frederik tone
> down the rhetoric and then generalize and repeat the rhetoric throughout
> your message.
>
> American mappers strive for the same goal as almost every other
> OpenStreetMapper: to improve the map to the best of their ability. I think
> what Bryan is reacting to is the consistent negative and deconstructive
> comments that seem to show up on OpenStreetMap community channels (mailing
> lists, forums, Reddit, IRC, weeklyOSM, etc.) about OSM data in the US.
>
> As you say, the reaction to finding lower-quality data in OSM shouldn't be
> to fire off a message threatening a wholesale revert, it should be to help
> the mappers improve their mapping skills and to contribute your
> improvements so they can learn. Instead of spending the time to build a
> meme about how terrible TIGER data is in some areas and posting it to
> Reddit then posting a tasking manager task to improve a portion of it, just
> skip to creating the tasking manager task and invite folks to improve it.
>
> Hearing that Americans "inhabit a culture of ad-hoc expedience and
> sloppiness" or getting an email from a member of the Data Working Group
> threatening to revert your contributions is not particularly inspiring.
> It's no wonder it's so hard to build a community in the US. Our own
> community is working against us!
>
> Let's not tone down the rhetoric: OSM is a great project and we should be
> excited about it. Let's just stop pushing away mappers who are trying to
> help.
>
> On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 9:53 AM Kevin Kenny <kevin.b.kenny at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Please, let's tone down the rhetoric here - both of you!
>>
>> Frederik has a long and distinguished history with OSM. He cares about
>> the map passionately. He wants very much to see things done right.
>> Alas, that tends to mean that he forgets at times what it means to be
>> a novice, and expects perfection in mapping from the beginning. He
>> works in a part of the world that has a vibrant map community, with
>> experienced locals almost everywhere to guide the way, which means
>> that he actually gets near-perfection from the novices - because there
>> is a generous supply of experienced mentors. For that reason, the
>> Europeans, and the Germans in particular, seem to have trouble
>> grasping the specific problems that we Americans face - land that is
>> incomprehensibly vast to many from Europe, and far too few mappers to
>> cover it.
>>
>> On the other hand, we Americans inhabit a culture of ad-hoc expedients
>> and sloppiness - and pay for it in the map, with broken routing,
>> broken rendering, and so on. We get in data that are 'just barely good
>> enough' - and tend to abandon them to degrade into 'not even good
>> enough' as the next urgent project beckons, of places where there are
>> no usable data at all. Or go off to our other communities - after all,
>> we all have lives beyond the map. (I understand that mapping is also
>> what Frederik does for a living. I don't.) This leaves our map in
>> disarray, and it's easy for someone to want to throw up his hands and
>> rip out big stretches of it.
>>
>> I'm sure that I'm guilty both ways. I've no doubt field-mapped stuff
>> very badly when I was learning, and I've no doubt missed going back to
>> fix things. (I at least hope that I've left matters better than I've
>> found them!) I've also been guilty, most likely, of damaging the
>> community - by importing. I still do it - but in my defense, all of my
>> imports are nearly poster children for "data not feasible for amateur
>> mappers to survey in the field." (Frederik has argued stongly to me
>> that this is a synonym for "data that mappers care too little about to
>> deserve inclusion in OSM." I remain unconvinced.)
>>
>> I do try to tidy up after myself when people leave notes or changelog
>> comments! I don't believe that I've ever had a change, no matter how
>> large, reverted wholesale.
>>
>> I do see that some of the Austin sidewalk data appear to be of pretty
>> questionable quality. I don't know to what extent the project has
>> mapped elsewhere, or how far the problem extends. Has anyone tried to
>> reach out to the mappers in question? Or - presuming that this was a
>> student group - tried to find their faculty advisor?  Does the web
>> site give contact information for a project leader? Are members of the
>> DWG other than Frederik aware of the issue?
>>
>> Reverting the changes should surely be the last resort, not the first,
>> and glibly tossing off, "at least they've labeled everything with the
>> project, so we can delete it when they fail," is no way to recruit
>> mappers! (Recruiting mappers should probably be American mappers'
>> highest priority - we have so few!) On the occasions where the mappers
>> and leadership are unreachable, it always should have the tone,
>> "unfortunately, the original mapper in not answering communications,
>> and there is a lack of resources to field-map the questionable
>> features, so reversion seems to be unavoidable." The glib dismissal is
>> particularly unseemly when it can be misinterpreted as an official
>> pronouncement of the DWG, of which Frederik is a member.
>>
>> Compounding the problem by nationalistic labelling of this as "yet
>> another German attempt to bully US mappers" serves nobody. Yes, I know
>> that Americans and Germans do engage in Kulturkampf over OSM
>> management. I'm frustrated by both the US "we'll fix it later"
>> attitude, by some statements from the other side of the Atlantic that
>> seem to say, "our model is fine; if you have cases that don't fit, fix
>> your country!" But always keep examining cultural assumptions. We come
>> from places that have different needs. Sometimes we Americans are
>> horribly slipshod simply because we can't manage better. Sometimes the
>> Europeans are horribly meticulous because they are trying to address
>> problems that are entirely beyond what we Americans can dream of
>> reaching. (Wheelchair routing? I'm still trying to get rural roads to
>> within a few hundred metres of their actual locations, and get
>> government and community facilities on the map in the first place. You
>> have to crawl before you can run.)
>>
>> Let's get the data - and more important, the process - fixed, rather
>> than falling to fighting among ourselves. Fix the immediate problem.
>> Educate the mappers. Keep exhorting Americans to improve their mapping
>> standard. Keep cautioning Europeans not to expect too much - we have a
>> big country and too few people to map it. And keep trying to map the
>> world!
>>
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-- 
James Michael DuPont
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