Daniel - Sorry for the late response - I've been taking a break for a bit.
I agree - the end goal is usable data for the community. My current
heartburn over all of this is the community. You guys have "guidelines"
that need to be followed. There is great merit behind the guidelines. I
would argue that those guidelines have turned into a law at this point.
Which is fine - just make it well known that there is a law of imports.
We had no clue until the emails started flying. There was no "Hey - I
see you're doing an import and I would like to talk to you about it"
yesterday. It was a line in the sand that was very poorly communicated.
I have said it in previosu emails and I will say it here. Work on the
communication aspect of this. You guys are ambassadors - I have clients
offering me data constantly "Please put this in OSM". I won't even
suggest they get the emails or the attitude that was exhibited towards
myself or Carol. Especially Carol - This is her second bad experience
from OSM. It took me a while to get her involved again after the first
one - then this happened.
I imported data 3 months ago. It was a very small area outside of the
continental US (I was sitting in that area when it was uploaded). It
went completely unnoticed (or at least there was none of the action we
had yesterday). I had proper clearance from the data owner to upload and
sourced them in that upload. It was important to the data owner it was
done - I did it. with that small upload they have cleared the rest of
the data to be opened once it is created. I had no clue that imports had
gotten this heated or we wouldn't have started it this way. The tools
for an import are everywhere. On the front page of the wiki there is one
mention of import. It's right after Donate some money under
Contributing. If I can suggest - make a line item about imports on the
front page for those of us in the geospatial industry. If it's this big
of a deal - it needs separate mention. Draw attention to it. Make it
clear for contributors - or ban imports altogether.
I welcome your help. We will be filling out a wiki page and following
the guidelines to the best of our ability. If we falter - I hope someone
helps as opposed to drawing a line in the sand and yelling. As anyone
has noticed I have no problem arguing - but it's not helpful to the
discussion when I or anyone drifts into that zone. Over the next few
days I'll make the page - share our methodology - and even provide maps
on how we were progressing in this upload and how we were handling
errors when they arose. I will put data somewhere it can be accessed and
I hope everyone will tell us what is wrong with it.
I appreciate the email - I appreciate your offer of help. This
discussion on our end has drifted into the Data working group and Serge.
The discussion continues and I hope everyone at some point can see the
emails. We don't discuss in a vacuum - we hope no one does.
Frederick - I appreciate your concern.
Randy
[email protected]
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: *Daniel O'Connor* <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
Date: Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 5:03 PM
Subject: Re: [Imports] Question on imports
To: Frederik Ramm <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
Cc: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
Can we all take a moment, pause, and relax a bit?
On one side, we have a contributor with pride on their side annoyed at
the insinuation they are doing something wrong.
On the other; we have a group that worries about imports going wrong.
The two end goals: get data imported to the net benefit of the mapping
community are the same.
@Randal, how best can this group help you moving forward?
As you can see the are a few pieces of advice from the group here around
taking it slowly, encouraging a written plan, sharing some of the
samples of work you plan on importing.
I think if you put aside some of the heat in the responses; you can
admit there is merit behind these recommendations.
Would you like help doing a writeup of the plan?
Happy to lend a hand there
Hi,
just to understand this better:
On 10/20/2013 02:49 AM, Randal Hale wrote:
> The data was donated yesterday. Data prep started yesterday.
So you have thought about how to import it for one full day, and you
haven't talked to anyone else about it, and ...
> Since the editathon is this weekend - I'm not spending the better part
> of a week arguiing the merits of building foot print data. I needed to
> show progress today - it's building foot print data - not addresses or
> anything else.
... you are not even *willing* to talk because you need to "show
progress" two days after the data has been donated?
Please, with regards to imports that's about as bad as it gets. If you
have no time to do it right, then don't do it, period.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
_______________________________________________
Imports mailing list
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
_______________________________________________
Imports mailing list
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
_______________________________________________
Imports mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
