[Talk-us] New MapRoulette Challenge - Add Surface to Highways

[David Salmon]

Hi All,

Apologies for the late replies, I wasn't receiving the latest updates. With the help of Ian Dees and updating my spam filters, I think that's now sorted.

@Brian M. Sperlongano<mailto:zelonewolf at gmail.com> thank you for reaching out and letting me know about the additional talk-us threads after we connected on US OSM Slack last Friday February 3, 2023 in the #MapRoulette channel.

Just to give to some context, I am part of the Community and Partnerships team at TomTom and we work on a wide range of activities with communities and commercial partners on topics ranging from data sharing to editing TomTom's current, non-OSM based map. One of our goals is to be a part of the OSM community and help where we can to improve the completeness and quality of the OSM map. We're also working to open up output from internal TomTom processes for leads generations and sources to make them available externally to the OSM community. We also help sponsor local events, support editing parties, and helping with trainings in some communities. I appreciate that there will always be a degree of skepticism about corporate involvement in OSM but we want to strive to overcome that doubt and have a conversation about where and how it makes sense for TomTom to fit.

We're interested in improving the global map and with that comes the challenge of trying to figure out how to fit into a global open source project with diverse communities that have different interests, goals, and objectives. We're human, so we sometimes struggle getting our bearings and settling into good working relationships across the world. We're open to new ideas and trying new things. Some of the things we try may work out and some may not.

Related to the Add Surface to Highway challenges, based on conversations with other communities, we saw a gap in map completeness for Surface and thought it would make a good challenge. But clearly, the perceived value and appeal varied between countries was far greater than we anticipated. There won't be any new challenges announced in additional countries for Motorways.

Some of the previously announced challenges in MapRoulette have already been set to non-discoverable based on the feedback received so far. In some communities, there's on-going discussion including possible rescoping to lower classifications. This could mean deleting the previous challenge and replacing it with a new one or possibly rescoping the old one. I'm not directly involved in those discussions but relaying what my colleagues shared with me today.

I've also taken the feedback from Brian and Minh posted in the US OSM Slack in the #MapRoulette channel and shared that as a lesson learned with the entire team. Ahead of launching a new challenge concept we'll reach out to the community to get feedback before formally announcing it for multiple countries. This already happens organically in some communities but we've got some newcomers to this role in our team (myself included) and it was a missed opportunity.

@Frederik Ramm

For the TomTom GitHub pages, I agree they can be improved. If anyone is willing to share well documented pages for organized editing (Wiki or GitHub) so that we learn from their best practices, I'd appreciate it.

@Greg Troxel<mailto:gdt at lexort.com>

Regarding the license question, I had to ask some colleagues because that's not in my team's domain and it took longer than I expected to get a response.

TomTom is currently designing its licensing model for its maps that use OSM data, including how it will feed data back into the open-source project while respecting its guidelines and supporting the project. As soon as OSM data makes its way to TomTom's new map, attribution and licensing information will be shared during the course of 2023.

I can't share details about proprietary topics related to OSM usage at a product level but can point to this blog post: https://www.tomtom.com/newsroom/explainers-and-insights/qa-new-strategy-and-mapping-platform/

Thanks again for your insights and helping us improve.

All the best,
David
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