[OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] In what direction should OSM go?

[Nic Roets]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 1:02 PM, Grant Slater
<openstreetmap at firefishy.com> wrote:
> On 29 September 2010 11:26, Nic Roets <nroets at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Obviously there are many exceptions to your rule, like the TIGER import.
>>

> Nic, local example... Durban South Africa, we imported a dataset, the
> few new mappers who were starting up these stopped mapping and haven't
> returned post import. The import data is now stagnating. The imported
> data also has many errors.

It's not really as if Johannesburg (where no imports have been made)
did any better. A few people started with Roodepoort, but left some
holes: Just North of Robert Broom and Florida Lake, both affluent
leafy suburbs. Then it stagnated. When the holes were more than a year
old, I made a trip to fill them in. My guess is that the original
contributors did not even notice.

If Johannesburg can't sustain a community, what chance does the less
technologically advanced and much smaller Durban have ?

>
> TIGER isn't a good example of a successful import.
>
> The TIGER import killed a fledgling community in the US, which is now
> only slowly recovering. TIGER has masses of data without anyone taking
> any ownership. Do we really need inaccurate, incorrectly tagged data
> for a dirt track crossing the Rockies?

Thanks for sending the links to the blogs, Frederik.

All of them focus on the social issues. A few mappers starting out,
then telling other "Look what I've done, why don't you join me". Then
you get the logistic growth that Matt refers to.

But the majority of the mappers in my area have selfish motivations.
For example the cyclist who adds all the foot paths so that he can use
our routing tools to reduce his own traveling time. Or the
entrepreneur who adds his own business for the free publicity. There
is however a very long lag: After doing the (TIGER) import it takes a
lot of time to build a user base of sufficient scale.