Hi, I should maybe say, since I might not be well known on this mailing list, that while I am a member of both the board of directors of the OSM Foundation and the OSMF's data working group, what I'm saying here is my personal opinion (and largely an opinion that was copiously published long before my appointment to any of these posts), and not the official take of either of these bodies.
This is especially true for my pet idea of imports requiring an "anchor" in the community, people who are likely to care, to curate, to work on the data. If it were for me, then anyone who wants to make an import would have to be able to show a couple of active mappers who want to work with the data about to be imported, and anyone who wants to import something just so that it looks nice on the map would be sent away. This isn't a DWG rule however; if an import proposal goes through the proper consultation process and isn't shown to be buggy then the data will be allowed in even if it is likely to bit-rot for lack of active community. The main reason for this is that nobody ever managed to prove the conjecture that mass-imported data actually hinders the forming of a lively community. I, personally, am convinced that this is true and that any import in an area where no local mapping community exists will actually make OSM's success in that area less likely. I am convinced that such imports sacrifice the long-term health of the project for a short-term "window dressing" on the map. But there's another, equally valid, theory that goes "If we import enough data into an area to make the map at least a little usable, the map will then be used more, and have more visibility, and therefore more people will come in contact with OSM, and if only a fraction of those contribute to OSM then a mapping community will form." - I think the problem with that theory is that the OSM that gets more visibility here is bound to be a patchwork of lifeless imported data rather than the living, breathing, soulful project that we are, and that this misrepresentation will not attract the people who are interested in being part of a mapping community. But hey, I can't prove that. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ Imports-us mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports-us
