After the conference last weekend, I have received a lot of feedback about the role of this group, and my role in particular, in the import community.
I want to re-emphasize to folks that my own personal intent to raise the bar on imports by bringing them into the light and providing a way for the community to get involved in them, and by doing so, increase the number and the quality of the imported data in OSM. To that end, I think it's worth spending a few minutes of my time addressing the new "Community Import" model that I Clifford Snow and Jeff Meyer have pioneered. The differentiating factor between their efforts and previous ones is their use of the community not only in reviewing the data and preparing that data, but building a community around the data and using the skills of the community to manually curate the data, checking it as it's entered into OSM, as well as taking the steps to manually conflate the data where necessary. At the same time, I think that we're a long way from this type of import being possible to do everywhere. As Paul's talk, and Toby's experience shows, it can be impractical to rely on community horsepower in places where the OSM community is too small or non-existent. In the meantime, our toolset and our efforts in documentation have a role to play even in the community import, in helping provide the guidelines to local communities, and automate parts of the process. I think there's a strong role for this group in the US OSM community, and I'm glad to see our group getting wider attention. - Serge _______________________________________________ Imports-us mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports-us
