[Talk-us] admin_level and COGs, MPOs, SPDs, Home Rule

[stevea]

Our wiki is a vital source of reference and "how to."  It deserves the very best effort we can give it.  Sometimes, especially with a complex topic where local knowledge matters, yet so also does learned, scholarly perspective, a Discussion page gets wordy and detailed.  I do believe OSM wants to get this page as "right" as it can.  Minh and I agree there can be "multiple books in the library about (roughly) one subject;" the wiki he started on Boundaries is "more descriptive"while this one is "more prescriptive."  We walk a careful edge.  There are some crafted boundaries (heh) of syntax and semantics.  Let's build upon what we've built (with some effort).

Greg, the sort of COG Connecticut has built (an RCOG) is unique as "COG entity in a state with no counties."  There are also COGs in states with counties and I temporarily assume perhaps in states with townships, though I can't offer immediately a concrete example.  I don't know what numerical value of admin_level we would begin to assign to these (we shouldn't assign any, imho, and it seems your opinion, too), I have heard 5, 5.5. 6 and 7.  "Collisions with existing," hence 5.5.  We started to do this with CDPs at 8 and backed that out:  they're not these.

Please, put the boundary in the map if you must and tag it boundary=COG and let's be done, please.  No admin_level value at all, unless we can tolerate seemingly endless discussion and maybe some heated argument, too.  Clifford hasn't the patience as loudly and clearly, patience is wearing thin.  If we must continue, let's be careful to keep it civil and scholarly if we can.

And shorter.

Paul's mentioning of COGs in Oregon reminds me the decision didn't go over well (years ago) with many in Oregon, who rather strongly feel their COGs should have an admin_level value, though I'm not sure any numerical value revealed itself.  I made a call for an expert in Oregon's Blue Book to chime in; nothing.  (There are "collisions" in the number space with 5, 6 and 7 in other states).  If we let this genie out of this bottle, poof, we suddenly have a rainbow of values and state-specific up-and-down-the-hierarchy relationships between brand new things that need pigeon-holing we don't need to do:  these already have names and a tagging scheme (boundary=COG).  Maybe that's OK, maybe admin_level wasn't meant to be "beaten up" like that.  I don't look forward to participating in those discussions, that's for sure.

It's manageable, it takes some words and time to slog through.  Let's keep that trimmed well.

SteveA

> On May 7, 2020, at 6:07 PM, Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com> wrote:
> For what it's worth, I live in Massachusetts, which is next to
> Connecticut, and generally pay attention.  I have aboslutely zero idea
> what a COG/MPO is, but I think admin_level belongs on state/county/town
> and things that pretty much everybody recognizes as admininstrative
> subdivisions.  There are school districts, sewer districts, historical
> districts, and a ton of other things, that are something else.
> 
> I do fear for the future of OSM that wiki editing is such a big thing.