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

[Ilya Zverev]

I'm sure it's not that way for other people, but this task strikes me as a bit insensitive to the community.

Surveying road surfaces is not trivial, unlike simply tracing roads and buildings from satellite imagery. It requires certain experience and local knowledge. For example, which surfaces are common to the area: asphalt, tarmac, compacted, gravel etc etc.

Lighting and quality of imagery is different, so identifying a surface correctly is often a task only a seasoned mapper can do correctly. For example, I've been mapping for more than a decade, but I don't trust myself in discerning between asphalt and gravel based on imagery.

Then, it's not obvious (for me) why should I need to do this task. Like, I know why roads are important: I plan my travels using these. Speed limits — okay, pretty important, although hard to get and map. But with surfaces, while it's fun to mark some after a good cycling day, I don't see why it has become a race to add as much as possible. Like, we weren't in a hurry a month ago, and nobody complained.

What could have changed is that there appeared to be a new data source, or a comprehensive tutorial on detecting various surfaces, or, I don't know, some reward, good enough to dig into the theory. But as far as I see, this task doesn't give any context or help, it's just "we need this, go map".

And this attitude, this sudden, out of nowhere "we won't share a context what we're working on in TomTom, but from you, unpaid volunteers, we suddenly need a ton of work to promptly map things we cannot", feels a bit insensitive. Like, we're not working here. I see it as, TomTom decided to fire its mapping department and instead hire a couple community managers to order OSMers around.

Before it was either for a good cause (humanitarian mapping), or quid-pro-quo (here's a good data source, but there are few issues that, once fixed, would help us provide you with more). Now it's just "go map".

Ilya

On Wed, 25 Jan 2023, at 15:03, David Salmon wrote:
> Hello US OSM Community,
>  
> I hope that the beginning of 2023 is going well for everyone.
>  
> I’d like to introduce myself - my name is David, and I have picked-up the role of TomTom Community Manager for the United States and Canada from Courtney <https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/courtiney/>.
>  
> I’m reaching out to inform you that we have created a new MapRoulette challenge in order to add Surface to ways in California. To detect the issues in this challenge, we used Overpass Turbo to select Motorways where the Surface tag was not present.
>  
> You can find the challenge here: United States - Add Surface to Highway - January 2023 - California <https://maproulette.org/browse/challenges/37419>
>  
> In the description of the challenge you can find some additional information that will make it easier for you to solve the tasks.
>  
> Do not hesitate to contact me at david.salmon at tomtom.com to talk about possible collaborations, problems or challenges that you have detected. If you want to share them with us, we will be happy to explore how we can help.
>  
> In the meantime, happy editing!
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