[OSM-talk] Organizational mapping policy

Serge Wroclawski emacsen at gmail.com
Fri Jun 20 12:25:26 UTC 2014


To elaborate on what Frederik said a bit...

The DWG has seen some what we're calling "organized mapping" which we
can generally define as a set of mappers being directed or working on
behalf of an organization.

The difference between what OSM experienced and what Wikipedia
experiences regarding paid contributors is a bit different, so I'll
elaborate on this a bit.

For Wikipedia the issue is really about independence. If I work for
GloboChem and write in Wikipedia that GloboChem has a wonderful
environmental reputation, there's an issue of bias and possibly truth.

That's not the kind of thing we're seeing or thinking about. Instead,
we're seeing issues like:

1. One mapper (on behalf of an organization) mapping in a very sloppy
way. This might be something like extranious nodes, disconnected roads
or broken relations. These aren't necessarily wrong in the sense of
vandalism, but they may not be correct either.

2. If you ask the mapper about what's going on, they don't answer.

3. You might see more than one account doing the same type of mapping

4. The DWG has to find the "responsible party" on their own because #2
and #3. This is not always easy, and it's often time consuming.

5. If the DWG sees that there's a lot of problems being caused by #1
or perhaps something more extreme, then even if we are able to get
through to a single mapper, other accounts (that turn out to be from
the same organization, though not necessarily the same person)
continue the same
problematic mapping activity in the same style

6. Organizations differ in how they want to be communicated with. Some
want us to treat them as a single entity and use some external
communication tool (ie not OSM messaging), while others want us to
treat mappers as individuals, and sometimes they want both, depending
on the context. This complexity puts a burden on the DWG to find the
right communication channel for each mapper in each context, using up
our volunteer time and resources.

7. Once a problem has been identified, it's often difficult to get the
individual or organization to take ownership of the problem and
especially to fix previous mistakes.

8. It's not infrequent for these organizations to be using remote
mappers, so sometimes you will see things mapped how they think they
should look based on where they live/how the imagery looks rather than
the on the ground truth. This gets more complicared when conflicts
arise between these remote mappers and existing mapped data from local
contributors. It's not a matter of vandalism, because it's not
malicious, but it can be hard to figure out the right way forward in
these situations.

The proposal, which was relatively modest IMHO, mainly focued around
the issue of transparency, making it easier to identify when a mapper
is working on behalf of a larger organization, and if they are, the
best way to communicate with the organization. In my opinion this
would benefit all of OSM, especially our concerned users who come to
the DWG with these complaints. It would probably end up reducing or
eliminating the need for DWG involvement in many cases.

As Frederik implied, for some reason the discussion on this turned
quite bitter. I think it's inevitable that we'll have to address this
topic, but I get the impression that parts of our community aren't
ready to address this topic yet.

- Serge



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