Re: [Talk-us] Senseless racism

[Jordan Brod]

While I agree that national pride should be in how good the map is I think
that trying to eradicate nationalism in OSM is going to be a challenge.
It's too firmly entrenched.  Also I don't think calling someone a German is
racist, I mean it's a nationality more than a race.  Calling them senseless
might be mean or uncharitable but it's also not racist.

On Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 12:22 PM Jmapb  wrote:

> On 7/25/2018 12:57 PM, Christoph Hormann wrote:
>
> > I am somewhat amazed by the fact that hardly anyone from the US
> > community (where a lot of mappers routinely map abroad and should be
> > able to empathize with Frederik being concerned about an area where he
> > has no first hand knowledge of) seems to find it necessary to speak up
> > against this.
> Okay, count me in, American, Texan even: Cut out this racist/nationalist
> bull. Respond to people's comments without name-calling. Put the quality
> of the map first and don't take criticism personally. Grow up, apologize
> privately if you're able to, and move on.
>
> If you feel the need to show up some other nationality, do it by making
> a map so excellent that they weep.
>
> Jason
>
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Re: [Talk-us] Senseless Germans, again.

[Jordan Brod]

Is it in the unwritten rules that Talk-de is always reasonable and peace
filled and Talk-us is hostile and rage filled?  It seems there is a bit of
hypocrisy in the OSM adage to rely on local mappers when someone thousands
of miles away is waiting to delete the local's contribution.  I wouldn't go
to the map in Germany and do a mass revert because the data didn't live up
to my standards, that's what notes are for.  That's what the mailing lists
are for.  That's what the DWG is for.  We don't need to be data vigilantes,
we should use the processes in hand to deal with problems, and if the
process is unwritten then somebody needs to write it down or throw it out
if it isn't important enough to write down.

On Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 11:58 AM Christoph Hormann  wrote:

>
> I am somewhat amazed by the fact that hardly anyone from the US
> community (where a lot of mappers routinely map abroad and should be
> able to empathize with Frederik being concerned about an area where he
> has no first hand knowledge of) seems to find it necessary to speak up
> against this.  I cannot imagine someone coming to talk-de, getting
> a "Senseless Americans" in reply and this not being immediately
> rejected by many others - no matter how inappropriate or unfunded the
> original message might have been.
>
> This is talk-us of course so you are free to be as hostile and
> dismissive towards Germans here as you like.  Still i am watching the
> discussion with some bewilderment because in large parts (and in
> particular in statements from representatives of OSM US) it contrasts
> quite sharply with what i am used to in terms of American culture and
> communication styles.
>
> What saddens me is that those with constructive and reflective
> commentary (Rihards and Kevin) get caught in the rage against
> the "Senseless Germans".
>
> Side note:  I also have my doubts if Bryan's German colleagues at work
> appreciate this kind of remark.
>
> --
> Christoph Hormann
> http://www.imagico.de/
>
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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Jordan Brod]

"Firstly, many rules in OSM are not written down"

So while I get that OSM is an evolving and collaborative effort, don't you
think that having unwritten rules leads to less collaboration and less
civil interactions?  We have a code of conduct for behavior, guidelines for
using the data, import guidelines, etc. Would it not be a good thing to
adopt a set of conduct or guidelines for editing?  Put it in one place and
stick it in the walkthrough for using the browser editor.  Get the voting
members to agree to it so that it has authority.  Otherwise it comes off
as, "Hey a bunch of us don't like this and so we are going to delete it."
That can catch innocent contributors up and they might decide not to
contribute again.

Just for clarification, I don't support putting advertising in the
description or spam.  I just find it a little to vague when things aren't
obviously spelled out and we'll defined.  Looking at the key wiki entry it
simply says "advertising" and "spam" without offering a definition of
either terms.  Someone could put description= "A discount/low price
store".  It may be an accurate description of a thrift store, but it could
also be considered advertising.  Low Price is an often used advertising
phrase.  I know that common sense drives a lot of this and that we are all
using the best of intentions and discretion to work on this, I just want to
make sure it's all crystal clear.  For one thing I don't want to make edits
multiple times or have edits deleted for violating unwritten rules.  I know
my personality and I wouldn't try to fix the area and I wouldn't try to map
in that area again. I would let the rollback stand.

Thanks for the great discussion and for pointing out where that prohibition
was.  Hopefully I didn't upset anyone, I just want to help make the map
better.

On Mar 19, 2018 6:28 AM, "Frederik Ramm" <frede...@remote.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 19.03.2018 01:08, Jordan Brod wrote:
> > I went looking for any information printed in guidelines or code of
> > conduct about advertising in the attributes of a feature and I couldn't
> > find where it is approved/prohibited or even mentioned.  Does anybody
> > know where the rule against this is?
>
> Firstly, many rules in OSM are not written down. Just because there's no
> policy that says "don't do X" doesn't mean that X is welcome in OSM, or
> that someone who got their X deleted has a legitimate basis for a
> complaint.
>
> The current situation with written rules is that
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:description
> says "Never use description=* to add advertising messages.", and
> more generally our "How We Map" rules
> (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/How_We_Map) say that what you add
> must be truthful and verifiable, both of which is rarely the case for
> advertising.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frede...@remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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Re: [Talk-us] Help fight advertising

[Jordan Brod]

I went looking for any information printed in guidelines or code of conduct
about advertising in the attributes of a feature and I couldn't find where
it is approved/prohibited or even mentioned.  Does anybody know where the
rule against this is?

On Mar 18, 2018 6:42 PM, "Shawn K. Quinn"  wrote:

> On 03/01/2018 04:44 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> > there have also been situations where a local mapper had diligently
> > copied a business's sales slogan into the description tag and was
> > then upset to see this removed.
>
> If they are upset about it, tough turkey, it doesn't belong there.
>
> > As more and more SEO firms start dumping their stuff onto OSM (and
> > here I am not talking about those who actually talk to us and listen,
> > but those who don't care), this is becoming a fight that needs to be
> > fought by the community as a whole.
>
> My approach this morning was different. I did an Overpass query for a
> huge chunk of Texas (west of San Antonio, then going east including
> Austin, Houston, and most suburbs, going to somewhere east of Beaumont)
> for anything with a description tag. I then saved the layer from JOSM
> and edited each occurrence of the description tag by hand (which also
> made it easier to do things like just change "description" to "name"). I
> made a few other related edits and submitted as changeset 57284276.
> Generally speaking, I purged anything that looked like it was trying to
> sell me on the business, including ad-copy-like descriptions of local
> libraries. I also deleted any description=* that was duplicative of the
> content of name=* or which added no useful information, and added
> appropriate tags where description=* had been used by a sloppy/lazy
> mapper to say things like "bowling alley" or to include opening hours.
>
> By the time I had gotten around to doing this, I had completely
> forgotten about the CSV export, though I was able to go through the
> entire chunk I had exported with my text editor in the span of a
> half-hour or so (I did a search for "description" and just kept hitting
> "next match" when ready to move on).
>
> My Java programming skills are nearly non-existent, but it is tempting
> to (re-)learn enough to write a plugin to automate the process from
> within JOSM, perhaps naming it something like "AdTerminator".
>
> --
> Shawn K. Quinn 
> http://www.rantroulette.com
> http://www.skqrecordquest.com
>
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Re: [Talk-us] Tampa/Clearwater Building Import to aid in Irma Recovery Efforts

[Jordan Brod]

Seems to be a lot of concerns for an import that is meant to bolster data
available prior to a major hurricane strike, when HOT does a task in Africa
I often don't see the same level of concern about the armchair mapper's
local knowledge.  That's just my observation, and I have worked some tasks
for HOT, and I have also done editing for places in the Middle East in
relation to a project I was doing for a customer and I have never come
close to stepping foot in any of those countries.  I know there are many in
the global community that have aversions to imports but if the process can
be held to a great standard, and in the face of a natural disaster, I think
we can put aside our own biases on how the map is made better.

As to the Texas statements, I have lived in Texas my whole life and have
worked for several local/state governments/parties.  There is a strong
backlash within some communities about sharing anything that cannot have
cost recuperated.  It is a stance that is slowly changing due to the strong
push from communities such as OSM, but it hasn't reached the level of other
states or countries.  Part of the problem is that there isn't a central
authority in charge of data.  You have council of governments that produce
data, counties that produce data, the state that produces data, state
agencies that produce data, and local governments that produce data.  Much
of the data could be said to be duplicated efforts but there hasn't been a
strong push from the legislature or the governor to have anything close to
a centralized data portal.  You can add to that problem the inability for
many counties and towns to afford GIS (something I'm hoping to help with as
part of my business) or GIS professionals to make data, let alone to
purchase data when it is offered.  The other issue is licensing.  I live in
North Texas and when the different communities up here get together to fly
aerials and derive planimetrics the operation is carried out by the North
Central Texas Council of Governments, which hires a company to do the
work.  When the work is done the cities that signed up for the project pay
the COG for the data and the COG pays the contractor.  In this process the
data is licensed so that only those who pay for it can use it.  That means
that many of the building footprint data sets are prevented from being
listed as open data because of the license involved.  With TNRIS releasing
LiDAR data openly hopefully some of this will change but for now it is what
it is.

That's my two cents worth on this, I think getting the data in is
important, especially as many of the government entities and news
organizations are using OSM data backed maps for base maps in the disaster
management process.  For example NOAA used a MapBox basemap for their post
Harvey aerial map (https://storms.ngs.noaa.gov/storms/harvey/index.html) I
think it would be important with the high visibility the map is getting in
the US to make sure that it accurately reflects reality on the ground.

On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 3:17 PM, Clifford Snow 
wrote:

> Frederik - I'll attempt to answer your questions below. This is part of
> the effort to help in recovery efforts for hurricane Harvey and Irma.  My
> tasks are using the Microsoft provided building footprints to hard hit
> areas. There are two separate, but with common individuals involved. The US
> community is working on tasks in the US while HOT OSM is working on the
> Caribbean Island recovery efforts.
>
> On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 12:50 AM, Frederik Ramm 
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> could you share some thoughts about your general process with these
>> imports? I notice that you seem to be working on a lot of them. - Have
>> you forgotten to raise Tampa/Clearwater on imports@ or was the Corpus
>> Christi one assumed to be a kind of template for all Microsoft building
>> footprint imports?
>>
>
> I wanted to get the word out to the US community first. By now I expected
> to have it posted to the import list, but i'm having problems with my cloud
> storage.
>
>>
>> I'm unclear about the status. Your posting simply says "the wiki page
>> for the import is available". What does that mean? The wiki page for
>> Corpus Christi says "Pending acceptance", the "stats" tab on
>> http://tasks.openstreetmap.us/project/118 says "0% complete" yet the
>> "activity" tab says "Glassman marked #233 as done about 6 hours ago".
>> Was that a test edit, or is the import already started?
>>
>
> Task 233 was just a small test. ( and I forgot to use my import account)
>  This task has relatively low priority since the major flooding was in
> areas east of Corpus Christi. The 0% is just a rounding error. One of a few
> thousand tasks have been completed.  I've updated the wiki page to remove
> the pending acceptance.
>
>>
>> Do you have plans to prepare further regions for imports? Since you're
>> not local to the areas in question (would it be fair to say you're on
>> the other 

Re: [Talk-us] Hurricane Irma - Puerto Rico

[Jordan Brod]

Yeah and none of those are Puerto Rico, my point being that it will be
overlooked as HOT would view it as part of the U.S.  That's why my post
focused on Puerto Rico, HOT had already activated for Sint Maartens at that
point which is French and Dutch territory, the new activations appear to be
for British territory none of which is Puerto Rico.  I am not saying HOT
isn't doing anything in regards to It a, I'm trying to fill in a gap that
is missed.

On Sep 7, 2017 12:43 AM, "Marc Gemis" <marc.ge...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The hot task manager http://tasks.hotosm.org/ already lists 4 tasks :
> 3499, 3501, 3502 and 3504
>
> regards
>
> m.
>
> On Wed, Sep 6, 2017 at 5:33 AM, Jordan Brod <jordan.b...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hey all,
> >
> > I was curious if anybody was planning to do a response similar to what
> was
> > done in the Houston area for Puerto Rico (technically part of the US) in
> > regards to Irma.  From looking at the map San Juan looks to be well
> mapped
> > but the other areas seem to be lacking in building footprints.  The
> reason I
> > ask is that with Puerto Rico being a commonwealth / unincorporated
> territory
> > of the U.S. and not a state I don't know what kind of attention they will
> > receive from FEMA or any of the other federal disaster departments, and
> if
> > they are really hamstrung on data we might be able to offer assistance.
> I
> > don't think HOT will do an activation for Puerto Rico since they are
> part of
> > the U.S. even if not an official state, and from the looks of the current
> > response they are only activating for islands that have requested their
> > help.
> >
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[Talk-us] Hurricane Irma - Puerto Rico

[Jordan Brod]

Hey all,

I was curious if anybody was planning to do a response similar to what was
done in the Houston area for Puerto Rico (technically part of the US) in
regards to Irma.  From looking at the map San Juan looks to be well mapped
but the other areas seem to be lacking in building footprints.  The reason
I ask is that with Puerto Rico being a commonwealth / unincorporated
territory of the U.S. and not a state I don't know what kind of attention
they will receive from FEMA or any of the other federal disaster
departments, and if they are really hamstrung on data we might be able to
offer assistance.  I don't think HOT will do an activation for Puerto Rico
since they are part of the U.S. even if not an official state, and from the
looks of the current response they are only activating for islands that
have requested their help.
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