On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 7:55 AM, Mike N <[email protected]> wrote: > On 4/5/2011 4:58 AM, Andy Allan wrote:
>> Sometimes I wonder if one of the problems OSM >> is facing in the US is the relative paucity of examples where OSM >> volunteers have mapped to higher standards > > Are you claiming that nearly everything people have surveyed in the US is > crap? The combined result of our work in North America suffers by comparison to our European overlo^W cousins. Individual mappers are, of course, brilliant, dedicated citizen cartographers and "smarter than the average bear". That's what draws us to OSM. But the North American community has not grown like the European community did. Is this because North Americans find OSM less appealing? You suggest one possible reason this might be true. > The biggest issue in the US is that people's reaction is that we already have > "Free Google, Bing, Yahoo and Mapquest" maps. Why is there even another map? Possibly. That is sometimes the reaction when I introduce people to OSM. And also possibly this. If somebody learns of OSM and is curious enough to look at their home (we all check that first; you know it.) and that part of Anytown, USA looks superficially complete based on TIGER. They might just decide, "Enh. They don't need my help." And so TIGER may have discouraged an OSM contributor from starting. By comparison, consider Toronto, pre-imports. See the Geofabrik animation, around August 2007. http://www.geofabrik.de/gallery/history/index.html#toronto It seems to me, from memory, that starting around August 2007 was a boom-time of new OSM contributors in Toronto. We had some of the city grid on the map, and a few detailed neighbourhoods. A new user faced with that might say, "I'll come back when your done" but a new mapper might just say, "Oh, look, I can add my neighbourhood and make it look better, like $nearby-neighbourhood." That obviously-incomplete map may well have inspired dedicated mappers to start to participate. Imports didn't arrive in Canada until later in the animation. This is not a scientific study, obviously. As another, single point of comparison of communities, consider local OSM groups. http://usergroups.openstreetmap.de/ There appears to be a local OSM user group for each 100 Million USA-ians. And one for each 10 Million Canadians. And one for each 2 Million Germans. The USA got imports early. Canada got imports a bit later. Imports seem much less popular in Germany. Correlation? Causation? I don't know. There was no objection to TIGER import when Dave did it. As I recall, mappers asked him to import their counties even if it meant removing their work first. We did not suspect then, what we suspect now. Even if an import is perfectly executed, it is stale data. The import data was captured by the source yesterday. Or perhaps even longer ago than that. Import it today, and tomorrow it starts going stale. Updating it next week, or whenever the source renews the dataset is a challenge that we haven't necessarily mastered yet and in the interim the data gets staler and staler. Now by comparison, imagine that your town has a mapper in every neighbourhood. How long would a new store on your main street go unmapped? A new subdivision in the next neighbourhood? I think that model updates faster and better than waiting for somebody else to collect and publish the data, then an import / merge / update to OSM. I think that local mapper, keeping their area of interest up to date, is the great strength of OSM. We see it in Germany. It's a much more localized strength in North America. And I think imports have limited that strength in North America. _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
