Re: [Talk-us] [OSM-talk] Reporting Attribution Issues on Mapbox maps

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2016 at 10:24 PM, Mikel Maron  wrote:

>
> > Webpages not hosted by Mapbox that are
> > using Mapbox tiles with
> > OSM-derived data would be responsible for
> > their own attribution, so
> > you'd need to contact them like with any other site.
>
> Actually, our support team will work to resolve attribution issues with
> maps using Mapbox tiles anywhere. Expect that this will resolve issues more
> expediently, since we likely have contact directly to responsible people
> for the site.
>
>
Glad to hear it.


> I believe Serge was wondering about attribution issues with sites using
> tiles or data not from Mapbox. That would include tiles from OSM.org.
>

I was specifically asked about a MapBox user who goes to MapBox, downloads
a map and then does not have proper attribution.

I'm glad to see that MapBox is pledging to handle these issues.

- Serge
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Re: [Talk-us] Reporting Attribution Issues on Mapbox maps

[Serge Wroclawski]

> Hey -- we've set up a support point for attribution issues on Mapbox
> hosted maps. Let us know if you spot something, and we'll work to fix.
>
> (Note, we won't be handling attribution issues on non-Mapbox hosted maps)
>
>
That's wonderful. All third party mapping providers should have a system
like this. And it would be even more awesome if we could see the resolution
and what an awesome job that Mapbox is doing in handling these issues as
they come up. It's good to see Mapbox stepping up and being a leader on
this.

But I'm a little concerned about non-MB hosted maps. If not this URL, where
can we report  attribution issues related to non-hosted Mapbox maps and
can you link to that other place we can report attribution issues related
to that other kind of customer from the same web page?

- Serge
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Re: [Talk-us] [OSM-talk] Slack

[Serge Wroclawski]

Michal,

The client code is proprietary, and the browser is just a platform from
which to execute the code.

It's similar to running Skype's proprietary binary on Debian. Running a
proprietary application on a Free operating system does not change the
freedom of the application.

-Serge
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Re: [Talk-us] [OSM-talk] Slack

[Serge Wroclawski]

Martijn,

I think your approach on this issue is spot on.

I personally think that when a project like OSM supports non-Free software,
especially ones run by external entities, it sends absolutely the wrong
message. Worse still is if we force users to use these gatekeepers to
interface with our community.

I'm happy to find tools that let us work with people together, but that
should be done with F/LOSS wherever possible.

- Serge
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Re: [Talk-us] Removing a CDP

[Serge Wroclawski]

I agree with Rich Welty- if you know the area and the CDP boundary
makes no sense, then remove it.

The issue in the past has been where some people wanted to remove all of them.

- Serge

On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 8:35 PM, Clifford Snow cliff...@snowandsnow.us wrote:
 I would like to remove Machias, Washington admin_level  8 since it does not
 exist as a city in Washington. It has been there for a number of years
 apparently added by a bot. I plan to leave it as a CDP locality node. There
 doesn't seem to be any chance that it will become a city and will most
 likely be annex by Lake Stevens.

 Before I do I'd like to hear people opinion about deleting these
 admin_level=8 for CDP boundaries.

 Clifford

 --
 @osm_seattle
 osm_seattle.snowandsnow.us
 OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch

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Re: [Talk-us] Removing a CDP

[Serge Wroclawski]

Brad,

Thank you for reminding us of what the Census office says that CDPs are.

I would just add that CDPs are used in some places as de-facto cities
or towns, which is why we've rejected proposals to remove them all.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] New York, Ellis Island Boundary

[Serge Wroclawski]

I agree, the historical boundary should be removed, but we need to be
sure to show what's in what state. It's quite a little mess.

- Serge

On Sun, May 10, 2015 at 11:31 AM, Frederik Ramm frede...@remote.org wrote:
 Hi,

puzzled about

 http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/37573502#map=18/40.69986/-74.03910

 is this really part of today's political boundary, then (historical)
 should perhaps be removed from the name. And is there any significance
 to the funny shape (an owl sitting on a branch?) or should it rather be
 aligned with the coastline?

 Bye
 Frederik

 --
 Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frede...@remote.org  ##  N49°00'09 E008°23'33

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Re: [Talk-us] Happy weekend - join the #Mapathon!

[Serge Wroclawski]

Just want to report that the OSM NYC Meetup yesterday went great!

It's a shame that I didn't know the weather today would be a so much
warmer, but there's no way to plan for things like that weeks in
advance...

- Serge

On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 3:56 PM, Alex Barth a...@openstreetmap.us wrote:
 Join this weekend at the US wide spring #mapathon. Find the official
 locations on the OpenStreetMap US blog or just join from home. All you need
 to join is tag your edits #mapathon in the changeset comment. As always,
 outdoors surveys and indoors activities are welcome!

 http://openstreetmap.us/2015/04/spring-mapathon/

 Happy weekend everyone -

 Alex

 --
 Alex Barth
 Vice President
 OpenStreetMap United States Inc.

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Re: [Talk-us] Facts about the world

[Serge Wroclawski]

Eleanor,

I want to clarify some things:

On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 1:06 AM, Eleanor Tutt eleanor.t...@gmail.com wrote:

 Paul - If perception of mapping in the US isn't aligning with reality, we
 probably *do* need to do a better job as a chapter board of telling the full
 story.

I believe that the story that the board tells reflect the overall
experience of the board. Paul did an analysis of the mapping activites
of the prospective board members before they were elected. Some of the
board members are not active OSM mappers, so it shouldn't come as a
surprise to anyone that people who don't do manual surveying don't
talk about manual surveying.

 I see what you mean about the blog posts, though I do think your
 interpretation is a bit harsh. For example, the mapathon post that you
 characterize as an indoor event, while it does admittedly have a photo of
 people at computers, also makes it clear that the theme for the upcoming
 mapathon is the great outdoors.

The events are characterized as Edit-a-thons and they were designed
to be run indoors. They were essentially a response from some members
of the community who felt that Mapping Parties were not for them. The
advantage of an Edit-A-Thon is that they can be run indoors (unlike
Mapping Parties), but if you look at most Edit-A-Thons going on next
week, and you look at the history of them (look at the talk-us
archives) they're still largely indoor events.

The only reason that OSM NYC runs them as outdoor events is that I
believe strongly that the experience of going out and surveying has
value- not only data quality value, but emotional value. There's value
in being connected to the place you live that can't be captured via
areal photo or governmental dataset.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Moving historic railroad ways from OSM to OpenHistoricalMap

[Serge Wroclawski]

Russ,

Replies in-line. I also mention my work in the DWG, but I'm not
representing the DWG here, just reporting on what happened.

On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 12:31 AM, Russ Nelson nel...@crynwr.com wrote:
 Brad Neuhauser writes:
   So, is the argument here that we should no longer delete features that no
   longer exist, just retag them? Is the argument that we generally should
   delete such features, but railways are a special case where we shouldn't?

 Yes, they are, because railroads went continuously from point A to
 point B, and they leave their mark on the world.

This is really the core of the issue. We're not talking about unused
railroads, where the tracks remain, but ones where the track does not
exist.

 Maybe you don't see
 it. Maybe I don't see it when I add a railroad=dismantled. But maybe I
 can USE THE MAP to do field work to find it.

But if you can't discover them while on the ground, eg if there's been
a building placed over it, if the area has been paved over, or is now
used as a field, then I see two problems:

1. It's not possible to validate
2.The railroad is no longer present, by definition

Let's look at #1 in context. If there was once a battlefield in an
area, but it's now a shopping center, what clues would I look for to
determine that there was a battlefield here? If there were signs
there, that might be doable, but in the absence of it, then I have
don't know how I'd identify a battlefield from a regular field. Maybe
an expert could. They could tell me that a certain land feature was
indicative of a bunker being there once, but without training, I
couldn't find it.

As for the second problem, the way I see it is that a battlefield
that's now a shopping center is now a shopping center in OSM. I don't
think you'd disagree with me here, just as I don't think you'd
disagree that a former playground in NYC that gets demolished and a
tower put in its place is no longer a playground.

 That's why I'm making a
 fuss -- because having even dismantled railroads in OSM is
 *useful*. It's useful to me, it's useful to railfans, it's useful to
 rail-trail creators, it's useful to property managers, it's useful to
 surveyors.

I hear you. This is something you care deeply about, that you've put
enormous sweat equity into in both time and effort, and you're
concerned about your work being for naught. That's something I don't
think anyone is forgetting, but in case you feel that it's being lost
in the discussion, let me be as clear as I can in saying Thank you
for doing this hard work, Russ.

That said, and not diminishing from it, the question before us is
about whether or not this data belongs in this particular dataset, and
utility is not the only measure we use.  Propertly boundaries is
something that people have wanted, and we've resisted putting in OSM,
despite it being useful for a variety of people. Similarly, we've had
people who wanted to put in sea routes which change weekly into OSM.
That's also *possible* to map, but something that has been generally
discouraged because despite its utility, is hard to verify.

 I don't understand why people are so eager to delete accurate and
 useful data, that people have spent hours, days, weeks, months, years,
 and decades adding.

I don't see people who are eagar to delete data. I see people who want
to know what to do when they encounter a feature they can't see on the
ground.

The issue came to my attention because we had a user (User A)
complaining about another user (User B) who had deleted a few
dismantled rail lines. User A contacted the DWG regarding this and
wanted User B to have administrative action taken against them. I
looked at what User B did, looked at the changeset comments, looked at
the discussions about it, and User B reports that they went to the
area, manually surveyed it, created new data where there were unmapped
features, and removed features which they could not see with boots on
the ground.

This area isn't anywhere near me, so I was stuck using the Bing
imagery, but what I saw was that some of what was being deleted had
other features on, such as houses where the rail line had been.

In my capacity as a DWG member, I basically punted, saying We have
two users who are both acting in good faith. User A believes the
railroads should stay despite no evidence on the ground, and User B
believes that former railroads that don't have visible evidence should
be removed. Both parties are are acting within what they believe to
be community mapping standards for data in OSM, and neither one is
acting with malice.

In this thread, I see people basically playing out this same dispute.
There's no consensus between groups on this issue- both parties are
acting on what they believe to be good faith.

My *personal* view is that OHM is a far better fit for this, because
not only could you have the tracks, but you could capture data about
them, such as what rail companies they used to serve, and what speeds
they used to support. It makes 

Re: [Talk-us] Facts about the world

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 11:09 AM, Eleanor Tutt eleanor.t...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hi, Serge.

 As a member of the chapter board, I feel a bit erased? misrepresented? by
 your email. It hurt, especially because I think you and I share some common
 ground about why we map and that it is important to feel a connection to a
 place.

You're right that I painted everyone with the same brush, and that
wasn't my intent; I'm sorry. It's hard to be critical of an
organization and not the individuals, but you're right, I probably
could have done a better job.

 At any rate, while you are more qualified to speak to the history of OSM as
 a whole than I am, I do want to say a few things that will maybe help you
 get the know my personal history with OSM:

There are people on this list who were involved in OSM longer than me.
I don't believe I have special qualifications beyond being there.

 When I was new to OSM and first learned about editathons, I didn't know
 anyone involved with OSM or have any preconceived ideas about the project.
 All I knew was that editathons sounded amazing, so I made the effort to
 connect with other local mappers and start building more of a community in
 my region.  My first editathon - led by another community member - involved
 walking around outdoors on a college campus.  My second editathon - led by
 myself - involved walking around outdoors in a neighborhood commercial
 district.  In my experience, editathons have always been a way for community
 members to get together and map in whatever manner made the most sense -
 sometimes outdoors, sometimes indoors.  There can be value in both.
 I remember Paul's post, I was elected to the chapter board, and - it's true!
 - I don't have very many OSM edits compared to many members of the
 community.  That doesn't mean I don't go out and map my community - I
 described in a different email how I do so.  But I contribute in other ways
 as well.  Last month, I led a group of students in a survey of a nearby
 neighborhood.  I spent hours walking through the neighborhood with them,
 helping mark points, and then helping them enter their data when they
 returned.  I did not personally make a single edit with my OSM user name.
 However, I contributed to those edits invisibly, behind the scenes, and I
 believe several of those students will become regular contributors.

Maybe time erases this stuff, and that's a good thing.

Again, my apologies. Especially as someone who doesn't have a car, I
know the challenge that mapping can be for folks like us, and major
kudos to you for your mapping and community work.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Facts about the world

[Serge Wroclawski]

Eleanor,

I don't see a reason not to be public with my reply to you.

I organize mapping parties during the warmer months (have one next
week) and during the colder months, organize indoor mapping events.

The indoor events tend to get less participants than the outdoor ones,
which is surprising.

Why do I map outdoors? To me, the importance of OSM is in two part.
Firstly and most importantly to me, OSM is part of a larger group of
activites that I participate in regarding the Free Software and Free
Culture worlds. I see OSM as part of that larger effort that I care
about. I'm not a Geo person- rather I'm someone who has a passion for
providing universal access and personal empowerment, and I see OSM as
one means to that end.

When we think about OSM, I do think we want to consider issues of
lifespan. Will OSM be necessary if we had every town or county in the
US providing us full access to their data, and we had access to every
business data. If we had that, at least in the US, OSM would be
largely redundant. But the fact is, we don't.

In the meantime, here in the US and around the world, there is a
desperate need for access to high quality geographic data. I don't
know if you read a blog post I made about a year ago
(http://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2014/01/04/why-the-world-needs-openstreetmap/)
but we can't hand off this much power to third parties, even ones who
act benevolently for the moment.  Instead, this needs to be in the
hands of all of us- every single one of us.

Mapping can be hard work. The day after a big mapping party, I
sometimes need to just sit in my apartment alone. The whole experience
can be exhausting. But I do it because it's important. It's important
to think about these spaces as *ours*. This is why projects like the
NYC Community Garden Mapping project here in NYC are important
(http://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2014/12/01/nyc-blooms-with-openstreetmap/),
because we can't rely just on governments or companies to tell us what
our world looks like.

It's great to do humanitarian mapping, and it's awesome and amazing
that we have access to resources like governmental datasets and
imagery, but those can't substitute for going out and doing the work
of looking at our neighborhoods for ourselves.


That's why I map, and that's why I organize local mapping events.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Moving historic railroad ways from OSM to OpenHistoricalMap

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 12:15 AM, Russ Nelson nel...@crynwr.com wrote:

 But the map *already* doesn't render abandoned railways,
 much less razed railways.

C'mon, let's not conflate the renderings with OSM.

 I can understand if someone deletes a railway by hitting the wrong
 key. I can understand if someone deletes a railway that is tagged
 incorrectly as disused or abandoned when it should be tagged as
 dismantled.

 I can understand if somone goes to the location of an
 abandoned railway, and doesn't see the evidence that an expert
 sees.

You're saying that these railways could be used for farming or build
over, right? To me, having something else over where a railroad was
indicates that the railroad is gone. There might be a legal right of
way, but if someone else is using the land for some other purpose,
then that's the current usage.

This is similar to the NYC community gardens. Many community gardens
in what the NYC government calls abandoned lots. The government sees
abandoned lots, but the community sees gardens. The gardens are
visible from the ground, so I say they're gardens.

But if someone builds over the previous community garden and puts up a
building, the community garden is gone.

In another mail, someone else (or maybe you) make the point that
there's still a legal right, and therefore the railroad should stay.
But then what does one do about someoen making fake abandoned railroad
tags? How, with the only evidence being legal right, can I judge
what's a real abandoned railroad and what's not a real abandoned
railroad? It's enormously difficult to disprove the existence of
something.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] user damages administrative boundaries around Rapid City

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 4:21 AM, Greg Morgan dr.kludge...@gmail.com wrote:

 The last thing that I would want to do is involve the Data
 Working Group.

I'm sending this mail as a DWG member- but I'm only speaking for
myself, and not on behalf of the DWG.


I don't think most people realize that the DWG will often get
complaints, and usually don't take administrative action. It's quite
frequent that we get a complaint, and our resolution to the matter is
to mediate a disagreement, or focus on education of one or more
mappers.

Most of the time a resolution can be found without needing to take any
official DWG actions. The DWG member's role in those situations is as
a third party who can come in, hear everyone's side, and try to find a
resolution that works for all parties.

In fact, I think that one thing the DWG members would like is if more
mappers took time to try to find another solution before contacting
the DWG. Many times we'll get a complaint from one user about another
mapper's mapping practices and the person complaining hasn't used
changeset discussions to, or in some cases even having send someone an
in-system message. In other words, the person being complained about
may not even know that there's someone whose upset.

Reaching out to your fellow mapper should your first step in any
conflict resolution. If that doesn't work, the DWG is there to help,
and you should feel free to contact them.

The DWG email address is d...@osmfoundation.org

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Boundaries and verifiability (was Re: Retagging hamlets in the US)

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 2:30 AM, Greg Morgan dr.kludge...@gmail.com wrote:

 1. Every time this boundary debate or accuracy debate comes up, I image that
 I am supposed to have $20,000 of GPS equipment[1]; post process the data so
 that it is accurate; before I dare put the data in OSM.

I agree with you that things which you can't verfiy without thousands
of dollars of equipment doesn't belong in a generalized dataset like
OSM.

 3. It is my belief and experience that the ground observable rule is
 something that only applies to Europe or older metropolitan areas.

Then you're going to have problems with all of OSM, since we use that rule
to handle virtually any dispute.

  I am curios what river or wash I just drove
 over.  It is not posted.  I had to go to the US government sites to find the
 information because it is useful in OSM.

It's entirely possible that the names the locals use for that river
differ from the  government dataset, in which case, OSM would prefer
you use the local name as the primary name, and not the official one.
Ground observable in this case is Local knowledge. Of course that
requires consensus, but this is why we have so many tags related to
names

 6. The ground observable rule is trying to take over the more important
 rule: Mappers with local knowledge of their area add valuable data that
 commercial mapping companies cannot always afford to add to the map.

This is based on a misunderstanding of your understanding of what the
ground observable rule is. A person who lives in an area and can talk
about it will actually trump most other sources, including signage,
but that requires that we get lots of people involved and working in a
diplomatic way.

 7. The ground observable rule is a barrier to new mappers. I helped a new
 mapper at a Editathon add taco stands.  She did everything wrong. I did say
 no you cannot add that node. We have not gone and surveyed that node exists.
 I let her add the node with abbreviated street names and all.  She was so
 exited to add here research data to OSM.

Why not help her ensure that her data be in OSM by being a teaching resource?

Also, what does sign names have to do with ground surveying?

 8. The ground observable rule is a barrier to new mappers. Most of the new
 mappers I know started mapping by signing up and adding data.

Adding data they surveyed or adding data they got from another source?

 9. Taking Serge's example of neighborhood boundaries to the logical
 conclusion, nothing should be put in OSM because an edit war __could__
 ensue.

This is quite the stawman argument you've build in my name, but it's
not my argument.

OSM has a long history of encouraging surveyed data.

 11. The ground observable rule fails to acknowledge that not every feature
 is observable but still is useful to OSM.  I had to talk the rent-a-cops out
 of arresting me for taking pictures around Chase Field [8]. I could not see
 around the building or under the 7th street bridge via satellite imagery. In
 this post 911 world, the ground observable rule is an unrealistic
 requirement.

I've never encountered a problem with law enforcement officials when
mapping, so I can't speak to your experience.

 12.I am passionate about what I do with OSM and the out reach that I do.  I
 am game to survey and map my city, county, and state.  It feels like this
 growing number of people believes that every mapper has to map just like
 Steve Coast did ten years ago. Congratulations Serge!  It is my growing
 belief that your growing number of people has stymied growth in new and
 different valuable ways of mapping data.  I failed to map for months because
 it sounded like I had to have a GPS five years ago before I could map.

Last year (or was it the year before) at SOTM US, there was discussed
with Ian Dees leading the discussion about using municipal data in a
separate dataset, and yet I don't see you being as viscous against
him.

Whether it's deliberate or not, please stop misquoting me to further
your arguments.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Boundaries and verifiability (was Re: Retagging hamlets in the US)

[Serge Wroclawski]

I agree 100% with Bryce.

- Serge

On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 12:29 PM, Bryce Nesbitt bry...@obviously.com wrote:
 The nice thing about mapping a neighborhood name as a point feature is:

 a) It helps people locate the neighborhood
 b) it completely sidesteps the question of the exact, possibly fuzzy,
 boundaries.

 For 10% of the hassle you map 90% of the benefit.

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Re: [Talk-us] GNIS POI populations

[Serge Wroclawski]

Mihn,

If we do any en-mass edit, there are a few things I think we want to consider:

1. Before anything else, we need to make sure it's community approved,
source data and code examined and approved by the community.

2. I think that in principle this is a good idea, but we'll also
encounter some issues where census data shows that objects:

a. Have moved
b. Have been renamed
c. Are present in one dataset but not the other


We want to flag these for secondary processing (likely manual).

3. I think it'd be nice, if we're doing en mass mechanical edits, to
connect objects to Wikidata

While it makes sense to keep our own copy of various attributes (like
town/city classifications) in OSM, if we connect the data with
Wikidata, in the future we could pull the data out of Wikidata for
what's classified as what.

They're going to be more inclined to have this kind of data updated
regularly than we are, so this seems like a good way of moving towards
this model, even if today we don't have a way of retrieving the data
from the two datasets and reconciling them.


I'd be okay with #3 being left to a separate task, but I think it
deserves some thought.

- Serge

On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 8:34 AM, Minh Nguyen
m...@nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us wrote:
 It looks like most of the place=city/town/village/hamlet POIs from GNIS are
 tagged with 2000 Census populations in the population tag. These population
 tags allow renderers to label places with font sizes corresponding to
 population, which is a pretty common use case.

 I think we should consider a mechanical edit to update these tags to the
 2010 Census figures en masse. I've been updating individual places as I edit
 them for other reasons, but this tag is most useful when its vintage is
 consistent across the board.

 --
 m...@nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us


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Re: [Talk-us] Edits near Lexington, KY?

[Serge Wroclawski]

Shawn,

My memory is fuzzy but there was a HS class that incorporated OSM in
the curriculum in around 2009/2010.

It was discussed at the first SOTM US in Atlanta.

There were a number of issues with the instructional effort on all
sides of the equation. For the school, they felt our tagging
system/editor was offensive because it included features that
conflicted with local morals and laws (brothels, for example). For
teachers, the teaching material was thin. For the OSM community, as
you pointed out, the students engaged in what we'd consider vandalism
(tagging each others' homes as bars and brothels) and I'm guessing
that you're seeing more of that kind of vandalism.

Using OSM in an educational setting is a laudable goal. It teaches
kids not kids not just the material but lets them work on something
that really matters. It teaches them to be part of a larger
community and work within that community. It also hopefully teaches
them the value of the kind of work we're doing, our ethos of Free Data
and collaboration, etc.

At the same time, as you've seen, unless this is done carefully, it
can be a real problem. In OSM we've seen classes using OSM doing mass
imports, for example. We've seen these kind of edits that we'd
normally classify as vandalism, etc.

The Wikipedians see something similar when they work in schools, and
this issue of quality is always an issue.

As we see OSM used more in education, we have to really make the
instructors aware of the issues and make sure that monitoring the
student edits for quality is part of their workflow, both in terms of
instruction/grading but also in terms of ensuring that the OSM data
remains of high value.

- Serge


On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 7:04 AM, Shawn K. Quinn skqu...@rushpost.com wrote:
 Does anyone know anything about a school course (middle or high school
 most likely) incorporating OSM in or near Lexington, KY? I saw one
 changeset comment mentioning something about extra credit but not
 mentioning what the edit actually was. In addition I cleaned up plenty
 of vandalism: a road on top of another road labeled Short cut to
 school, three exclamation marks added to a street name, undeleted a
 fire hydrant (!), and a couple of other things that I'm drawing a blank
 on right now.

 While I support OSM-related lessons in the classroom on general
 principle, but I have to wonder if some of the garbage edits that come
 with it offset the good edits. And to put it bluntly, the higher the
 grade level this is coming from, the more disappointed I will be
 regarding our public education system in 2014.

 http://www.openstreetmap.org/history#map=13/38.0462/-84.4885

 --
 Shawn K. Quinn skqu...@rushpost.com


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Re: [Talk-us] changeset 25081346 spanning contiguous United States

[Serge Wroclawski]

Peter,

It's great you reached out to the user. The DWG is really the best
place for such complaints/concerns at this point. The email for the
DWG  is d...@osmfoundation.org

I've forwarded your email to the DWG and you should receive a reply
about it shortly from a DWG member (most likely myself).

- Serge

On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 12:33 PM, Peter Dobratz pe...@dobratz.us wrote:
 Hi,

 I noticed the following changeset which touches UPS Store objects across the
 whole contiguous United States:

 http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/25081346

 I have contacted user andrewpmk inquiring about communications prior to
 making this change and I have not received a response.

 After checking a few of the objects, it looks like this change removed
 shop=copyshop and added amenity=post_office.  I don't necessarily
 disagree with this change.  In my mind I had been reserving post_office for
 entities controlled by the government-run United States Postal Service, but
 after reading the wiki I see that private companies can be also designated
 as post_office, and the UPS Store certainly fulfills many of the same
 functions as government-run post offices.

 I don't think that sweeping changes like this across large geographic areas
 should be made without communication of some kind.  One option would be
 sending OSM Messages to all of the users whose work is being changed.
 Another option would be sending a message to this talk-us mailing list.
 Is there some other communication channel that I'm not aware of?

 Thanks,
 Peter



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Re: [Talk-us] changeset 25081346 spanning contiguous United States

[Serge Wroclawski]

There is... this is something I'd consider a contentious edit but not
*strictly* incorrect.

The author of the changeset should have consulted the US/Canadian
community before making it, and if he had done so, would have seen
that he should have added an operator= or some other tag indicating
that this is a commercial entity as per
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Post_office


Personally, I don't agree with this new nclassification, but it's not
*wrong* per se, just the way it was done is not the way we (as a
community) should be going about such things.

- Serge

On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 12:43 PM, Eric H. Christensen
e...@christensenplace.us wrote:
 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 Hash: SHA512

 On Mon, Oct 06, 2014 at 09:33:08AM -0700, Peter Dobratz wrote:
 After checking a few of the objects, it looks like this change removed
 shop=copyshop and added amenity=post_office.  I don't necessarily
 disagree with this change.  In my mind I had been reserving post_office for
 entities controlled by the government-run United States Postal Service, but
 after reading the wiki I see that private companies can be also designated
 as post_office, and the UPS Store certainly fulfills many of the same
 functions as government-run post offices.

 Isn't there a way to specify the provider of the service (outside the name?)? 
  I've run into this while marking post_box for UPS and FedEx drop points that 
 I run across.

 - --Eric
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 Version: GnuPG v1

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Re: [Talk-us] Statistics of board candidate edits

[Serge Wroclawski]

Alan,

The number of edits a user names is a data point. For some people,
it's an important data point, for others it may not be, but it's an
interesting piece of information.

By analogy, if this were a cyclist organization, I would hope that a
board member had experience as a cyclist. The number of edits a user
has made is only one factor, but it can illustrate quite a bit,
especially the type of edits a user has made, and the frequency of
their edits.

What's just as interesting, if not more interesting to me is how many
edits a person has made through on the ground surveying vs using other
datasets or imagery. That is hard to capture, but getting a user's #
of edits in the US, and their core location gives me some hints. If
I know someone lives in Orlando, FL and their edits are mainly focused
in Africa, I can make a reasonable assumption that unless they travel
to Africa frequently, that they're using imagery.

Why is that important? For me it speaks to someone's mapping modality,
and therefore their experience with the project. It speaks to their
involvement, their experience editing, etc.

What I've found really curious, and frustrating, is the amount of
negativity directed towards Paul for simply putting out data about the
candidates. To me, this is the same kind of information that we
celebrate when organizations like the Sunlight Foundation aggregate
and distribute. Others are free to disagree, certainly, but I found
the data to be helpful. It won't be my only factor in the decision
making process, but it will be a factor.

Now there are other questions for the candates I'd like to know, such
whether or not they're paid to work on OSM, and if so, by who. I'd
like to know from the incumbents what they've done in the past that's
notable or some other way by which we can judge their performance.

Maybe someone would like to ask these questions- I'm pretty turned off
my the negativity and largely disengaged from the process other than
my need to stand up when I see someone being unfairly attacked simply
for providing information.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Statistics of board candidate edits

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 2:13 PM, Darrell Fuhriman darr...@garnix.org wrote:

 On Oct 3, 2014, at 08:28, Richard Weait rich...@weait.com wrote:

  It is just one lens through which one might view the candidates.

 Sure, I get that. I’m just saying it’s at best a meaningless lens, and a 
 misleading one at worst.

I must say that I disagree strongly with your message, and that your
tone is extremely disrespectful. Paul is giving information about the
candidates, whether you choose to vote based on it or other criteria
is your choice, but I feel that your messages are downright rude to
Paul.

 I don’t see anything in that description that required editing experience. 
 (Relatedly, I’d be curious to see some of the TODO lists, but the github repo 
 seems to be private.)

If you don't feel that participating in the core activity that this
community is founded on is important- then *that is your choice*, but
calling is misleading, etc. is really beyond the pale IMHO.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Road abbreviations

[Serge Wroclawski]

Toby,

Thanks for the pointer. I think you're right that in this case
especially, there's no reason to admonish anyone, but perhaps we can
examine the data and see if there's a safe way to expand it, like we
did the TIGER data.

That may also explain some large portion of the contractions I found.
Maybe it's worth trying to map them

I'll have to spend some time with tilemill to get a visualization.

- Serge


On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 12:30 PM, Toby Murray toby.mur...@gmail.com wrote:
 I believe this was an import done in 2009. Here is an example changeset that
 is obviously an address import in the area:

 http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/3407483

 The import is documented on the import catalog page[1] on the wiki and
 mentioned on the California imports page[2] as well. It isn't a recent rogue
 import so please don't send angry messages. This was done before the first
 TIGER name expansion bot was run (in 2010) so I'm not really sure if the no
 abbreviations consensus had been solidified at that point.

 But yeah, it should be fixed and it will take a bot to do so.

 Toby

 [1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Catalogue
 [2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/California/Import


 On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 9:32 AM, Clifford Snow cliff...@snowandsnow.us
 wrote:


 On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 12:22 AM, Hans De Kryger
 hans.dekryge...@gmail.com wrote:

 I just came across a import of address data in San Diego. I checked the
 data and all of it is using road abbreviations. Is that normal?


 Not normal nor acceptable. I would suggest sending a message to the
 importer asking them to stop and fix what they imported.

 As Serge suggested, send a link an area in San Diego with the bad
 formating.

 Clifford

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Re: [Talk-us] Road abbreviations

[Serge Wroclawski]

Clifford,

I think the thing right now is to really understand the problem in
depth. The issues the community gets into and complains about
regarding automated edits is when they come out wrong. For example,
the expansion that was run before that was turning all E's into East.
That's very bad and we need to make sure that doesn't happen.

We have to make some tradeoffs between what we can reasonably assume
and what we know absolutely to be true. For example, if I see Rd at
the end of a highway=residential way, I'm pretty sure that is a
contraction for Road. Of course if there's a street somewhere named
Main Saint rather than Main Street, well, it will be wrong, and that
will be bad, but hopefully this kind of problem can be minimized if
we, for example, try to match the roads up with newer TIGER data road
names and use the TIGER metadata, or any local street address data
which we can use to validate against.

This is why I want to map this problem visually, to see if there are
localized clusters of problems and to see if we can reduce the
problems by using local data sources alongside the software's
educated guesses.

And we also need to realize, as a community, that automated edits,
like manual edits, will never be 100% correct. I'd be happy with 99.5%
correct. That's better than the rate of typos and other problems we
see with our normal mappers. The remaining .5% will be something that
either local community members will fix, or some further iteration of
a tool will fix.

So if you have expertise in Tilemill, I'd love the help in setting up
some tiles that show probable abbreviations.

- Serge



On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 3:44 PM, Clifford Snow cliff...@snowandsnow.us wrote:

 On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 9:48 AM, Serge Wroclawski emac...@gmail.com wrote:

 Thanks for the pointer. I think you're right that in this case
 especially, there's no reason to admonish anyone, but perhaps we can
 examine the data and see if there's a safe way to expand it, like we
 did the TIGER data.

 That may also explain some large portion of the contractions I found.
 Maybe it's worth trying to map them


 I agree with Serge and Toby's post - this is old data that should be fixed.

 I pulled the data from a Mapzen city extract (San Diego  Tijuana). There
 are 488,571 address points. Looking at OSMI, the whole area has addresses
 with abbreviated street names.

 Serge, anything I can do to help you with the expansion bot, just let me
 know. Knowing how to do this would help me down the road as we try to figure
 out how to update address info from my local county.

 Clifford


 --
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 OpenStreetMap: Maps with a human touch

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Re: [Talk-us] Road abbreviations

[Serge Wroclawski]

 Paul,

Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out where the problems are- not trying
to dig deeply into them yet- I'm looking for clusters of problems (ie
San Diego), or I heard about a problem in Michigan where someone
decided to revert a bunch of the bot-mode changesets because he didn't
like the way they rendered, so in this case, I'd just look for some
known contractions at the end. We may change that later, but that's
where I'd start.

- Serge

On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 8:31 PM, Paul Norman penor...@mac.com wrote:
 On 7/30/2014 1:45 PM, Serge Wroclawski wrote:

 So if you have expertise in Tilemill, I'd love the help in setting up
 some tiles that show probable abbreviations.

 I have the databases to do this, but it's not clear to me how to visualize
 this. Just color roads in that have abbreviations?

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Re: [Talk-us] More road name expansion thoughts

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 9:01 AM, Mikel Maron mikel.ma...@gmail.com wrote:

 Here in Washington DC, the street names are all suffixed with the quadrant
 (NW, SE, SW, NE) the road lies in. The official names of the streets kept by
 the DC city government all use the contraction. Historically, I could find
 no maps that used the expansion.

The city maps may use the same contractions as TIGER, etc. but we know
they're contractions, which is distinct from being words, so I don't
the city maps as being a reason for changing the way the entire OSM
project handles contractions.

BTW, for anyone who isn't aware, I lived in DC from 1996-2012, which
is both a long time, and also a recent time. I consider myself
essentially a local in this matter.

 For spoken navigation systems, this is probably the easiest situation to
 identify and handle, without ambiguity.

The real issue is trying to standardize the OSM data for data
consumers, which text-to-speech systems will benefit from, but they're
not the only ones.

 OSM maps of DC now just look a bit bizarre.

The MapBox folks seemed to have figued this out US-wide and
re-contract the road names and the directional identifiers. This is a
rendering problem- one which I agree with you 100% that it should be
fixed, not just for directions but also for road identifiers, because
we in the US are used to seeing contractions.

Another proposal I've seen which seemed interesting (though not free
of problems) is the idea of a new tag that was basically the name of
the road exactly as it appears on a road sign.

I agree with you 100% that we should strive for a map that looks
American for US map users. The MapBox folks seem to have done it, so
really this is a problem with osm.org's map. Their map is really
British-Euro centric in many ways, and it would really be nice if we
had a good, solid alternative, much like osm.fr. Maybe MapBox can
share some of their style with us, or if not, we have our work cut out
for us, but I'm sure we can do it.

 So I don't recommend we apply this expansion without consideration of
 regional variation. Before any expansion scripts are run, in DC or anywhere,
 the local community needs to be consulted sufficiently.

Can you elaborate on this?

- Serge

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[Talk-us] More road name expansion thoughts

[Serge Wroclawski]

Hi all,

After reading about the issues with Scout and problems with name
expansion, I decided to do a little thinking on this issue.

The short answer is that Scout (as well as other text to speech
engines) should not need to be expanding values, ie E - East. The
reason for this is that practice is error prone. We can (and largely
have) solved this problem through expanding names in the raw values.

A couple of years ago, I ran a bot that expanded hundreds of
thousands of names in OSM. The bot was very conservative about what it
expanded, which was good, but it also meant that we had a lot of names
that were left unexpanded- and as we know, if there are enough
exceptions, we have to treat those exceptions as the norm. That leads
to exactly the kind of problem Scout is experiencing now. From their
perspective, if there's a large number of unexpanded names, then they
have to do the expansion themselves, so I decided to look at the scope
fo the problem.

I took an extract of OSM of North America and looked at the last words
in road names and looked for words that looked like contractions I
found the following words that look like abbreviations:

Dr, Rd, St, Ave, Ln, Blvd, Cir, Pl and Hwy.

The total number of instance of finding one of those at the end of a
road name was 71100.

In addition, I found a bunch of directional prefixes that are probably
directional abbreviations, NE, NE, SW and SE. There were
29,130 instances of those.

And then for N, S, E, W, there were a total of of 13,494

When you look at the total of these values, the number becomes pretty
scary- over 100,000 objects, which is just about 10% of all roads.
That means that if you're parsing OSM data, 1 in 10 roads you find
will have contractions. The numbers get worse when you realize  that
this analysis only covered the last word in a road name, not any other
word in it. I suspect the real number would be much higher.

I think we (the US OSM community) should try to make it easier for our
data consumers to work with our data by making it more consistent.

So here's what I'm thinking, and I'd really like a dialog about this:

1. I think for the first case, for Rd as the last word, we can be
reasonably sure that this is a contraction for Road and we can
expand it. This won't trigger the Saint problem because ot would
only trigger if St was the last word in the name.


2. I think we can do the same thing for NW/NE, etc. Those seem safe to me.

3. We could probably do the same type of expansion of NE, NW, SE, SW
if it's the first word in a name.

4. We work on some better ways of detecting these contractions and
decide what to do with them in the future (maybe find a way to expand
them automatically, maybe use MapRoulette, maybe use notes, etc.)

I'm not saying I'm going to do this. I'm not even officially proposing
it yet. I'm pointing out a problem and potential solution. My feeling
is that if we can drop the number of problems in our dataset by 90%
without much effort, then we should do that.

I really want to hear people's thoughts on this.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] More road name expansion thoughts

[Serge Wroclawski]

Thanks to all the folks who've commented on this thread and also to
the folks who contacted me off list about this. A majority of the
feedback I received was very positive, which I'm thankful about. I
attribute much of this to the very conservative approach that was
taken last time, because there were so few problems, people are more
open to more of the same kind of work.

I want to give a comprehensive answer to a lot of your questions.

* Problems with bad TIGER data

I heard that there were a few questions raised about the last bot
expansion. It turns out that there were problems last time related to
bad TIGER data. So for example, the TIGER data may have included
something indicating that the road had a directional suffix for East,
and the road name was Foo T E, since the road had a TIGER tag
indicating the directional suffix, the name was changed to Foo T East.

The previous bot used the TIGER data to do the name expansions. If
TIGER was wrong, so was the name expansion.

* Missed contractions in the previous name expansion

I received some feedback about lesser used contractions not getting
expanded. This should probably be addressed. I'm collecting these and
will likely propose just quickly running through them, outside of this
expansion.

* Common contractions

People seemed pretty to agree that for a majority of cases, if the
contraction is either a prefix or suffix and is relatively
unambiguous, like Rd or Blvd, we can just expand it. I think this
also extends to NW and other two letter directions.

* Concerns about ambiguous contractions and local editing

A few people brought up a concern about words which could be
contractions but aren't always, such as E or S. I agree with this
concern and I think we need to put the plain ordinals into a separate
cateogry.

I agree and I also agree with people who expressed concerns that the
only way to solve these problems is through direct survey. Maybe the
solution here is to create notes?

* Continually running bot

There was discussion about a continually running bot that would go
around and fix these, as well as other problems. This is something
that OSM has has in the past with fixbot, xybot and currently has with
WALL-E in Germany. I think it might make sense for us to have
something similar here in the US  to address common problems, like
expanding Rd to Road, or road to Road.

I'm in favor of this idea, but I'd like to hear more feedback about
this. If we did it, I'd want the process to be as transparent as
possible.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] How is Scout?

[Serge Wroclawski]

Martijn,

How often would this be? If it's once every few months, that might not
be so bad, but if it's more frequently, maybe Twitter would be better.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Nominatim in CDP

[Serge Wroclawski]

CDPs in OSM have been an ongoing issue of discussion for a while.

NE2 stated that he would delete them all unless someone could show him
a single example of them being useful.

I pointed out that Bethesda, MD (noted for being where the NIH and the
Naval Medical Academy, along with several other large landmarks) is a
CDP, as is Silver Spring, MD, which is the 2nd most dense place in MD
except for Baltimore.

After some discussion, he agreed not to delete the objects in the whole US.

The general feeling from many people were that the CDPs were useless
information- only interesting to the census workers and not the
regular people on the street. For them, it probably made sense to
delete the CDPs. For places where CDPs do make sense to keep in, it
would be sad if someone deleted them, but that's likely what happened.

This is (yet another) reason why I believe so strongly in Ian's effort
to move government boundary data out of OSM and into another dataset.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Nominatim in CDP

[Serge Wroclawski]

Clifford,

I do not like your statement in favor of deleting Bethesda from OSM.

- Serge
 On Jun 11, 2014 4:21 PM, Clifford Snow cliff...@snowandsnow.us wrote:


 On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 11:20 AM, Richard Welty rwe...@averillpark.net
 wrote:

 however folks may feel about CDPs, they aren't administrative government
 entities and the current tagging of them with an admin_level is clearly
 wrong (which Paul Norman pointed out to me a little while ago and he's
 absolutely right). if we can't get them out of the database then we should
 at least make an effort to come up with better tagging.


 After reading the message thread, I agree that CDP's do not belong in OSM.
 I do think they describe some small rural areas but they are not
 administrative boundaries in the in the state, county, city, neighborhood
 sense.

 I think that Ian is correct that Nominatim is failing to find the address
 because of the CDP boundary. But does that make Nominatim wrong or the
 admin boundary? I can fix the admin boundary for this area, but that leaves
 hundreds of others untouched. Anyone want to help me understand how to
 remove the CDP for Union Hill-Novelty Hill CDP so I can test out if this
 fixes the address search?

 Serge, I like having administrative boundaries in OSM. For one it makes
 overpass area queries slick. I would prefer that boundaries be in a
 separate layer. Just recently I've been adding park and rides in NW
 Washington State. A number of the parking lots were connected to completely
 unrelated objects. The parking lots had grown since they were originally
 mapped. It made changing them a pain. That alone doesn't justify layers,
 but instead it makes OSM somewhat easier to maintain. How layers get
 implemented might involve separate tables or even databases, just so long
 as the contributor has the sense that if the admin boundary needs fixing,
 it is done from a separate layer.

 Clifford
 --
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[Talk-us] Fwd: USBRS WikiProject seeks volunteer mappers

[Serge Wroclawski]

Russ,

My opinion is that this is a single data source issue. Unlike other
data that we collect, there is nothing in the ground indicating the
existence of this as a route. There's no sign indicating where the
route is, so there's be no way to collect this data other than by
looking at an external dataset and either importing or tracing.

I think that's an import, because it's taking external data and
applying it to OSM without even the potential for ground validation.

I did mess up in that I needed to have stated, and will state now,
that I was not talking from the position of the DWG.


We have a lot of data that we could include in OSM that would be
useful. Every so often someone wants to add property lines. I think
those would be potentially interesting, but unsurveyable. These bike
routes are similar. There's nothing on the ground that tells you that
you're on the particular bus route- which means that the only
definitive answer we could have about a bus route is some external
dataset. If two OSMers disagree, the answer will always be What does
the original data say? - rather than What does the ground look
like? - right?

I think that this kind of data doesn't belong in OSM. It's not
something that lends itself well to OSM. It think it could be mixed in
during rendering or for routing, but it doesn't belong in OSM proper.

The issue of tracing vs importing is orthogonal to this question.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] USBRS WikiProject seeks volunteer mappers

[Serge Wroclawski]

Steve,

On Sun, Jun 1, 2014 at 8:34 PM, stevea stevea...@softworkers.com wrote:

 After my talk, Serge and Paul (Norman) had lunch with me, and while they
 said that they did not represent the DWG, in fact they actually did.  Serge
 characterized this as If a cop pulls you over and says 'I'm going to let
 you off with a warning', you don't then respond 'But I wasn't doing anything
 wrong' or more apropos, 'The law is unclear.'  He challenged my assertion
 that a USBR is a real, tangible thing that ought to be mapped in OSM when it
 doesn't have signs:

Steve, there's so much wrong with your claim that I can't begin to
take it all apart, but I will certainly defend myself against what I
have no choice but to classify as plain ol' lies.

What I said to you at that time was that I was not wearing my DWG hat
in talking with you because the DWG hadn't received a complaint about
the proposed routes, which were the issue we were discussing. These
were not official routes, these were (and now I will quote you)
[Using OSM as a] platform for discussion and debate in where the
routes should be placed. I said that OSM was not a place for things
which do not exist and are up for debate. That issue is quite clear
and we had not one or two, at least three emails about it, in addition
to the nearly hour long discussion we had at SOTM US.

You then officially went to the DWG asking about the proposed and
official routes, and the DWG position was that we were not going to
intervene unless we received a complaint from a community member, but
that if you kept pushing the issue, then the DWG would need to do an
investigation, which might result in the deletion of your data. I
didn't want to have to do that because while I think you were in the
wrong, you were generally acting on what I felt to be good faith. I
suggested to you that you drop the issue unless you wanted to make
this official DWG business. In fact, you escalated the issue several
times and I pleaded with you not to because I wanted to avoid needing
the DWG to take an official stance on this data. That is where we left
it.

Proposals/plans do not belong in OSM. That is very clear. OSM is not a
platform for debate about where things should be- it reflects ground
truth only.

USBR data is an edge case because it is not universally ground
verifiable. The DWG has not taken a position on whether or not it
belongs in OSM, but I personally believe that data which comes from a
single source and is not ground verifiable does not belong in OSM.
That view extends to government boundaries such as state and county
boundaries.

 No mention was made at
 that lunch about Import Guidelilnes or that the network's entry into OSM
 was an import.  That came later.

That's correct, because you told me the work was done. If it was done,
there was nothing left to discuss in regards to an import.

Whether or not the non-proposed route data would be classified as an
import is a matter of discussion. I personally believe that this would
be an import- but am happy to entertain the idea that it's not- or
whether or not the data belongs in OSM at all, which is still a
discussion that needs to happen.

The issue of utility, of course, is separate from the issue of Does
it belong in OSM, as we have had the question of ground verifiability
many times with data which would be useful to have, including property
lines, bird spotting data, wifi access points, etc.

Your email contains things which I believe you know to be false. That
kind of behavior certainly does not make for a condusive collaborative
environment and I believe that you owe both Paul Norman and myself a
personal appology.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] USBRS WikiProject seeks volunteer mappers

[Serge Wroclawski]

Since there is no signage for these routes, this is an import and should be
following the import guidelines.

- Serge
On May 31, 2014 3:19 PM, stevea stevea...@softworkers.com wrote:

  OSM's USBRS WikiProject seeks volunteer mappers to help map new APPROVED
 United States Bicycle Routes.  Please see
 http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_U.S._Bicycle_Route_System
 , a reference and status report for the project.  Effective immediately,

 USBR 1 in Massachusetts
 USBR 10 in Washington state
 USBR 36 and 37 in Illinois
 USBR 50 in the District of Columbia and
 USBR 50 in Ohio

 were declared by AASHTO as approved national routes.  These are
 essentially equivalent to freshly opened Interstate highways, except these
 are for bicycles.  Very helpful would be additional experienced OSM
 volunteers, comfortable editing OSM relations, to improve/complete USBRs 1,
 10, 37 and 50 (in Ohio) by adding additional route members to a relation
 from a soft-copy map or text description of the route.

 If you wish to help build our national bicycle network in OSM, please
 contact me to obtain route data to enter into OSM.  The wiki offers
 technical/tagging guidance, as well as acts as a progress reporting
 mechanism.

 It is important to communicate your intentions and progress via email or
 preferably wiki.  The project has established process and enjoys new growth
 by asking widely for additional volunteers, so please pay attention to the
 many moving parts by keeping communication flowing where it needs to.  (Get
 route data via email, wiki update your progress).  USBRS is ~10,000
 kilometers and has momentum to grow to 20,000 in the medium-term future.
 Help out by adopting a route near you!

 Though this work isn't difficult, each route might take a few hours of
 effort starting with an email.  After you complete a route in OSM, one
 reward is to see the red line of a new, official USBR blossom in Cycle Map
 layer.  Other rewards happen for on-the-ground participants (cities,
 counties, state DOTs, the public, stakeholders, bicycle coalition
 groups...), who see the route in our widely available map.  This encourages
 more routes to emerge in a geographically friendly way, facilitating
 harmonious progress and further growth in our national bicycle network.

 To begin your contributions to this OSM WikiProject, reply using steveaOSM
 at softworkers (dot) com.  Put USBR mapping in OSM in the Subject line
 and say where you'd like to map.  Thank you!

 SteveA
 California

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Re: [Talk-us] USBRS WikiProject seeks volunteer mappers

[Serge Wroclawski]

Ian,

OpenTripPlanner can handle routing, which is a pretty core part of
handling bus data. OpenTripPlanner can also be fed directly from the
GTFS data from the transit authority, which simplifies updates, etc.,
making a really ideal choice for applications where you want to work
with local transit data.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] [OSM-talk] Highly suspicious edit

[Serge Wroclawski]

The DWG moderators can only block accounts on a temporary basis.

DWG moderators can't make permanent blocks, or delete spam diary
entries, or spam profiles (at least not at this time).

The OSMF has only banned a single user AFAIK; Doing that requires
intervention from the OSMF board.

IME spammers and vandals go away on their own.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Sidewalks as footpaths

[Serge Wroclawski]

Being an American has nothing to do with a really bad data design.
I've been an American 35 years and I think this is really not a good
way to model sidewalks.

The problem (aside from the issue of data clutter) is that the
sidewalk data can't be used for pedestrian routing because the
information about the street is not captured. You can't tell someone
to follow Main Street, because the path is not labeled as such.

In my experience, people trace the sidewalk because it looks pretty in
the renderer. What we really want is better rendering of sidewalk
tags, not data which can't be used.

- Serge

On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 9:36 AM, Paul Johnson ba...@ursamundi.org wrote:
 As an American, I'd say tracing out the sidewalk is perfectly legitimate,
 considering jaywalking laws that typically apply in locations with
 sidewalks, the total non universal nature of sidewalks.

 On May 1, 2014 11:40 PM, Tod Fitch t...@fitchdesign.com wrote:

 It is my understanding that in the US the roadway design in a
 urban/suburban environment includes the sidewalks, possibly a
 parkway/planting strip, the curbs and the traveled way. From that point of
 view I'd only consider mapping a walkway as a separate way only if it did
 not run parallel and close to the road.

 -Tod



 On May 1, 2014, at 8:35 PM, John F. Eldredge wrote:

  Here in Nashville TN, sidewalks in some business districts alternate
  every few yards between having concrete extend all of the way to the curb,
  and having planted strips with grass, flowers, and small trees between the
  sidewalk and the curb. It would be rather tedious to have the tagging have
  to alternate between sidewalk and footway every few yards.
 
 
  On April 30, 2014 11:19:31 PM CDT, Russ Nelson nel...@crynwr.com
  wrote:
  Kai Krueger writes:
  But in the US (at least in suburbia), the sidewalks are often much
  more detached from the road with wide grass strips between
  them. They also sometimes aren't entirely parallel to the road.
 
  Indeed. In Potsdam, NY, we get enough snow that we need those wide
  grass strips to plow the snow onto. But they're not practical in some
  places, so the sidewalk can come close to the road in places. It's
  still a sidewalk, though, and not a way of its own.
 
  There is not a wonderful solution for how do map pedestrian routing
  when it differs from road-associated routing.
 


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Re: [Talk-us] Sidewalks as footpaths

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 7:36 AM, Mike  Dupont
jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com wrote:

 On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 4:58 AM, Serge Wroclawski emac...@gmail.com wrote:

 I've been an American 35 years and I think this is really not a good
 way to model sidewalks.


 Ok, serge, well how do you address my issues here in Kansas. How will you
 model that you have sidewalks of different quality for each property on both
 sides.

I don't know what you mean by quality but if a sidewalk isn't usable
as a sidewalk, then don't label it as such, just as I wouldn't be
inclined to map a road that's unusable as a usable road.

 How are we going to model damaged sidewalks as I wrote? Adding in points on
 the sidewalk way?

If you insist on micromapping, then you can use complex objects like
relations, but your is a special case, most sidewalks mapped are not
micromapped in the same way.

In other words, I wouldn't bother to map sidewalks that are not usable.

- Serge

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[Talk-us] Fwd: Sidewalks as footpaths

[Serge Wroclawski]

Bill,

You're right that we should map what exists on the ground. I think we
need to really consider a few factors here:

1. Why we map sidewalks at all (in either style)
2. What benefits one mapping method has over another
3. The data as it exists now

1. Why map sidewalks

This is a judgement call. In NYC it's reasonable to assume that a road
has a sidwalk. It would be better to map roads without sidwalks than
roads with them, because a vast majority of roads have sidewalks.

In DC, where I used to live, many roads did not have sidewalks, or
only had sidewalks on one side of the street.

Maybe where you are, it's closer to DC, or possibly even less. Or
maybe you are trying to bright some light on the state of sidewalks in
your area.

2. Benefits of one mapping method over another

I think we've beaten this topic to death, not only on this thread, but
several times in the past on this and other lists. Benefits of
sidewalks as attributes: simplicity (which often wins in OSM).

Benefits of mapping them as separate ways: Potentially more data about
quality, breaks in the sidewalk, etc. Downsides: Routing engines can't
know what sidewalk is associated with what street.

Benefits of using relations is that it gets around the routing
problem, except that AFAIK no router does that.

3. Usage

The biggest issue here is usage. It's not what mappers should do,
but What mappers actually do and what mappers actually do is not to
create relations. Most sidewalks are either mapped as separate ways,
as attributes, or not at all.

That's why I'd prefer it to be made as easy as possible for them.

Ultimately this is a decision people can make for themselves. I'd
rather they map than not map, but certainly people have their own
ideas on how people should represent things.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Fwd: Sidewalks as footpaths

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 8:02 PM, Paul Johnson ba...@ursamundi.org wrote:
 I'm trying to work out how using name=* on the sidewalks isn't the easiest,
 most obvious answer.

Because there are walking paths with names, and that's not what you're
talking about.

What you want is essentially a reference to another object, which is
why relations are useful- but they're complex to work with.

Additionally, using any name reference means that you now need to keep
the two objects in sync in non-obvious ways.

Let's take an example from NYC.

If I had a sidewalk for 6th Avenue, what would the associated street
tag name need to be?

6th Avenue
Sixth Avenue
Avenue of the Americas

These tricky edge cases aren't insurmountable, but they add a great
deal of complexity to software needing to parse the data in a
meaningful way, the end result of which is that more times than not,
if the data model is too complex, the programmer simply doesn't
bother.

That's why I advocate using tags like sidwalk=yes/no/left/right/both
directly on the road object.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Burning Man old data, publicity opportunity

[Serge Wroclawski]

I have to say that I have very mixed feelings about Burning Man being in OSM.

While I think that it's interesting because the event is so large and
there's potential utility, there are two things that bring me a bit of
concern:

1. Based on past years, the data is added but not deleted. The event
lasts one week, so even if you were to assume that it took time to
remove the various structures, the majority of it is gone, if not
entirely removed from the landscape, then it's at least gone in
functionality by the end of the event, and thus needs to be removed
from OSM. Burning Man's website on exodus states that the event should
ideally leave no trace. The same should then be true in OSM- the data
for the event should be gone as soon as the event is over.

2. In OSM, we map things which are permenent, and Burning Man's
transient nature puts it right on the fence. If I saw a sign for a
Weeklong Sale on the street, I'd be disinclined to map that sign.
But then again, if I knew that a major road was temporarily out due to
flooding, I'd indicate it.  HOT mapping of temporary structures would
work the same way- I'd map them, despite being temporary. This issue
of permennce and prominence is somewhat of a personal call, but
because Burning Man is transient by design, it bears mentioning.

So if it's valuable to Burning Man attendees to add it to OSM, and
it's meaningful, etc. then I don't see a problem, so long as it gets
cleaned out of OSM afterwards.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Last call spring #editathon

[Serge Wroclawski]

As much as I love when people use MapRoulette, OSM NYC will be holding
a mapping party this upcoming weekend.

- Serge

On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 8:40 PM, Alex Barth a...@openstreetmap.us wrote:
 This weekend the annual OpenStreetMap spring #editathon takes place in the
 US.

 Are you planning to host an #editathon this upcoming weekend?

 Put your place on the list to be in the blog announcement on
 openstreetmap.us tomorrow:

 http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/US_Spring_Editathon_2014

 Learn all about #editathon's here:
 http://openstreetmap.us/2013/07/why-editathons/

 Alex

 --
 Alex Barth
 Secretary
 OpenStreetMap United States Inc.

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Re: [Talk-us] Vandalism in NYC - reverted

[Serge Wroclawski]

Alex (or anyone else),

If you find vandalism like this, please do not email DWG members
individually, but instead, you should:

1. Free free to revert it. You do not need permission to do so.

2. Message the user through the OSM message system

3. If you want help, please email d...@osmfoundation.org. We have
people in the DWG with geographic, cultural and linguistic diversity,
along with access to (as mentioned) put temporary blocks on users or
remove data where necessary.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] mappy hour tonight, 8:30pm eastern time

[Serge Wroclawski]

Richard asked me to start the hangout.

The URL is:

https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/7acpifm4a9c1h4a4l7ef511218?hl=en

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] OpenStreetMap Isn't All That Open, Let's Change That and Drop Share-Alike

[Serge Wroclawski]

Alex,

Some of the points you continue to make are patently false.

 1. There is more open data coming online by the day and we are not compatible


Let's take this apart. If the data is open, by which you mean that
it would fall into something like the definition of
freedomdefined.org, then there are only a few ways in which the ODbL
would be incompatible:

1. Requirement for attribution

If this were the case, dropping Share-Alike would change nothing

2. Requirement for Share-Alike

If this were the case, dropping Share-Alike would make us less compatible

3. An addition requirement on the data

If this is the case, it's not open data and thus the statement is false

 The world is doing more stuff with raw data.

Yes, they should do more stuff with Free data, and what they can do
has virtually no limitations.

 OpenStreetMap's problem is that share-alike's diminishing effect on utility 
 is more severe for data than for software.

Hyperbole, and as shown previously, based on statements which are just not true.

There are unfortunate side effects. It would be nice if OSM were
compatible with governments, for example, but unfortunately do to so
would grant our non-Free competitors far too much advantage over us.

How do I know this to be the case? Because it's happened already. It's
already happened that companies like Google have used OSM data, and
have bad to take that data down after it was pointed out that the
license was incompatible.

The minute that OSM data were put out without Share-Alike, we would be
utterly demolished by other entities taking OSM data, adding data to
it, and then selling enhanced versions.


- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] FW: Report of Explosion, Building Collapse in Manhattan

[Serge Wroclawski]

I saw smoke from my apartment, but I was going to wait to go over there
until the smoke cleared and they'd handled any hazards.

- Serge


On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 10:23 AM, Russell Deffner russdeff...@gmail.comwrote:

 Anyone want to individually figure out the building and update in OSM?

 =Russ



 Russell Deffner

 russell.deff...@hotosm.org

 The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team

 http://hot.openstreetmap.org/







 *Feed:* NBC News Top Stories
 *Posted on:* Wednesday, March 12, 2014 7:52 AM
 *Author:* NBC News Top Stories
 *Subject:* Report of Explosion, Building Collapse in Manhattan



 Authorities are responding to reports of an explosion and collapse in
 Manhattan.


 http://share.feedsportal.com/share/twitter/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fnews%2Fus-news%2Freport-explosion-building-collapse-manhattan-n50786t=Report+of+Explosion%2C+Building+Collapse+in+Manhattan
  
 http://share.feedsportal.com/share/facebook/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fnews%2Fus-news%2Freport-explosion-building-collapse-manhattan-n50786t=Report+of+Explosion%2C+Building+Collapse+in+Manhattan
  
 http://share.feedsportal.com/share/linkedin/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fnews%2Fus-news%2Freport-explosion-building-collapse-manhattan-n50786t=Report+of+Explosion%2C+Building+Collapse+in+Manhattan
  
 http://share.feedsportal.com/share/gplus/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fnews%2Fus-news%2Freport-explosion-building-collapse-manhattan-n50786t=Report+of+Explosion%2C+Building+Collapse+in+Manhattan
  
 http://share.feedsportal.com/share/email/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fnews%2Fus-news%2Freport-explosion-building-collapse-manhattan-n50786t=Report+of+Explosion%2C+Building+Collapse+in+Manhattan




 http://da.feedsportal.com/r/191801213722/u/191/f/663303/c/35002/s/38174c0c/sc/20/rc/1/rc.htm
 http://da.feedsportal.com/r/191801213722/u/191/f/663303/c/35002/s/38174c0c/sc/20/rc/2/rc.htm
 http://da.feedsportal.com/r/191801213722/u/191/f/663303/c/35002/s/38174c0c/sc/20/rc/3/rc.htm


 http://da.feedsportal.com/r/191801213722/u/191/f/663303/c/35002/s/38174c0c/a2.htm


 View 
 article...http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/663303/s/38174c0c/sc/20/l/0L0Snbcnews0N0Cnews0Cus0Enews0Creport0Eexplosion0Ebuilding0Ecollapse0Emanhattan0En50A786/story01.htm

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Re: [Talk-us] FW: Report of Explosion, Building Collapse in Manhattan

[Serge Wroclawski]

Ian, are you going to manually survey the location to see if there's
any secondary damage?

- Serge

On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 11:02 AM, Ian Dees ian.d...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 9:23 AM, Russell Deffner russdeff...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Anyone want to individually figure out the building and update in OSM?


 Did it in this changeset:
 http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/21065388

 Buildings:
 http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/265792217 and
 http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/265792216

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Re: [Talk-us] historic schools (amenity=school; name= * (historical)

[Serge Wroclawski]

All gnis objects that are (historical) are no longer present and
should be removed.

- Serge

On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 5:38 AM, Theodin theo...@posteo.de wrote:
 Hi fellow mappers,

 While doing some TIGER cleanup, I often stumble over historical schools 
 tagged as:
 amenity=school
 name=some small town school (historical)

 which are rendered on the map with their name. Are there any ideas for a 
 better tagging as most of
 them (all?) arent really schools any more.
 I tagged some as
 historic=school
 which was in the database 80 times. Any better ideas?

 Regards,
 Theodin

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Re: [Talk-us] historic schools (amenity=school; name= * (historical)

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 9:19 AM, Theodin theo...@posteo.de wrote:
 OK. It says the same on the GNIS-Wiki-page so Im going to do that in the 
 future. Although it might
 be a valid information for history-buffs to get an image of how things were.

We don't store historical information in OSM. There are other projects
which do, but OSM looks at what's currently in the ground. Also, gnis
tags are notiously wrong by large distances, sometimes up to 1km.

They're a classic example of the kind of data that, once imported,
people are afraif to touch. I had to explain to a mapper recently who
knew that a school wasn't present where the map said it was, that it
was allright to delete it.

He'd been to the location himself and found out that it wasn't a
school at all, but it was a drug rehab center! Despite having been
there and knowing this, he was afraid of messing up the import.
This was an OSMer who'se been an active contributor for years.

This is why imports can have dangerous side effects.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Local user groups

[Serge Wroclawski]

I agree with Alex and Paul here. It would be ideal to say Oh we can
replicate the functionality of a user calendar- that's absolutely
true. The discovery functionality is what's not replicatable.

I've had one user here in NYC who does not wish to participate on the
meetup because he doesn't want to sign up, but wanted to be kept
informed about events and discussion.

At this time, there's an ical feed for events, and an RSS/Atom feed
for the mailing list. This doesn't allow for full participation, but
it allows anyone who doesn't want to sign up to Meetup to be kept
informed of the events.

Additionally, a third party could collect all the ical feeds and
construct a calendar.

This is not ideal, but neither is Facebook, or Google, or any other
third party service, and it's a lot better than the alternatives.

- Serge

On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 6:27 PM, Alex Barth a...@mapbox.com wrote:

 On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 3:25 PM, Clifford Snow cliff...@snowandsnow.us
 wrote:

 However the cost is expensive for individuals to start a Meetup group.


 I recommend either crowd funding a meetup group or getting a local company
 to sponsor. Like Ian said, at OSM US we've spent quite some cycles on how we
 could support local communities US-wide with paying meetup.com fees but no
 matter how you turn it you're looking at a non-neglectible administrative
 overhead to manage this plus the very real possibility of paying for meetup
 groups that have gone inactive. Funding locally is the most organic and
 effective approach.

 Funding locally is also a great opportunity to create an active trust of
 meetup hosts or involve a local company in OSM :-)





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Re: [Talk-us] Tags to use for chain stores in the United States

[Serge Wroclawski]

Ian,

I had a working list of this stuff, partially built from Paul Norman's list
and partially built from Wikipedia.

If you tell me a place and a format, I can convert it to that.

- Serge


On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 11:44 AM, Ian Dees ian.d...@gmail.com wrote:

 I get this question a lot during mapping parties -- probably because I
 suggest these sorts of places as a user's first edit.

 I wonder if we should add presets to iD for these sorts of places with
 tons of locations (Starbucks, McDonald's, etc.) so that they show up when
 searched in the preset list by the user.

 Is that too close to selling out?


 On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 10:36 AM, Brad Neuhauser brad.neuhau...@gmail.com
  wrote:

 Personally, I tag big box stores like Target, KMart, WalMart etc with
 shop=department_store, just because that seems like the closest fit that
 isn't too restrictive (they're much more than a supermarket, to my mind).

 You can pick an area and run Overpass Turbo and see what you get with
 different tags, for example:
 http://overpass-turbo.eu/?value=department_storekey=shoptemplate=key-value

 Alternatively, you can run a search by name (ie
 http://overpass-turbo.eu/?value=Targetkey=nametemplate=key-value) and
 see what you get. I did this in Chicago, and found Targets tagged
 department_store, supermarket, and hypermarket(!)

 Brad


 On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 10:08 AM, Russell Deffner 
 russdeff...@gmail.comwrote:

 Seems the stores you listed are going to have different tags, example the
 'dollar' stores are probably best tagged shop=variety_store, the wiki
 has a
 pretty extensive list/description of the shop tags here:
 http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:shop

 However, I would say that K-Mart, Target, and Wal-Mart (especially the
 'super' kind) maybe don't fit any of the documented tags; I think there
 was
 some talk about adding a big_box or superstore, maybe hit up the
 tagging
 talk-list to see if that's still in the works.

 =Russ

 -Original Message-
 From: Will Skora [mailto:skorasau...@gmail.com]
 Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 8:49 AM
 To: talk-us@openstreetmap.org
 Subject: [Talk-us] Tags to use for chain stores in the United States

 Hi,

 At past OSM meetups that I've organized, new mappers have asked me
 what shop=* tags to use for several chain stores in the USA and I had
 not found any clear or consistent practices of what tags to use for
 these stores and even as a relatively experienced mapper, I wasn't
 sure what tags to encourage them to use.

 I am writing to hear what you've used, which ones are most popular,
 and perhaps the US community could build a consensus on them (gasp!).

 For example, several chain stores that we have wondered about include:
 K-Mart, Target, Wal-Mart, Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar,
 'Bed, Bath, and Beyond'; TJ Maxx; Marshall's; Radio Shack; Meijer's;
 Kohl's; Costco; BJ's; and Big Lots.

 I know there's taginfo (including one for the US!
 taginfo.openstreetmap.us) but unfortunately, it doesn't let you find
 out what tag combinations are being used with a name=* (For example,
 finding what tag is used most often with name=Dollar-General).

 Regards,
 Will Skora


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Re: [Talk-us] Currently available good GPS for use with OSM mapping in the USA?

[Serge Wroclawski]

I've used two eTrex GPS units (an old one and a relatively new one), a
Columbus v900 (the voice recorder that Russ mentioned), and I've used
OSMTracker for Android.

The v900 is super cool, and cheap, but my experience with it was that
it took forever to lock in, and when it did- it was pretty inaccurate-
blocks off. And after about two years, it just stopped working.

The eTrex units are pretty nice. They're very accurate, they have
amazing battery life, and are really rugged. But they have a pretty
awful interface.

Using an Android phone is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it locks in
very quickly, because it can use the cell towers to assist it. It also
has software like OSMTracker which can do photo mapping, or voice
mapping (like the Columbus V900). But the battery life is pretty
awful.

It's also worth mentioning that the type of environment you're in
makes a huge difference. When you're in a rural or suburban area,
you're fine, but if if you're in a place with very tell buildings, or
very large trees, or mountains, the data you capture won't be as
accurate.

- Serge

On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 1:34 PM, Eric Fischer e...@pobox.com wrote:
 I've been using a Garmin eTrex 20 for most of the past year and am pretty
 happy with it.

 Compared to the earlier eTrex Legend HCx, it supports GLONASS, gets better
 battery life (about 40 hours of use on two AA batteries), gets a fix much
 faster after powering on, has more attractive (but slower) map rendering,
 and can log tracks and use OSM (Lambertus) base maps without having to
 install an SD card.

 The tracks are definitely higher quality than from phones I've tried (mostly
 Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy Nexus) but newer phones might do better.

 Eric



 On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 6:17 PM, Joseph R. Justice jayare...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 [I am subscribed to Talk-US and will see responses to this message sent to
 that list.  -- J]

 So, I've been thinking about getting involved with OSM, particularly in
 terms of improving the map in the area I live in (Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA).
 Looking through the wiki, the Beginner's Guide, and all of that, it seems
 like one of the most popular and useful ways to do that is to collect and
 upload GPS traces.  That's something I can do on the ground in my area, and
 at a pretty detailed level because I'd be doing it on foot.

 I have several Android devices that contain GPS functionality.
 (Currently, I have and actively use a Google Nexus 7 (2013 ed) tablet and a
 Samsung Galaxy S II on the Virgin Mobile USA (Sprint) network, and less
 often a Toshiba Thrive 10 tablet; I have a couple of other devices that are
 not currently working.)  However, I'm thinking that their capability to make
 accurate and precise GPS measurements might not be as good as that of a
 dedicated GPS device.  Also, I understand that having GPS signal reception
 separated from that of the other functionality of a Android device will help
 improve the battery life of the Android device.

 Therefore, I am thinking about getting some sort of GPS receiver, either a
 standalone one and / or one that can communicate via Bluetooth to my Android
 devices.  However, I do not have any experience with dedicated GPS devices
 per se.

 To that end, I am wondering if anyone here would wish to offer suggestions
 on GPS devices that are currently available in the US which I should
 consider.  I have been doing some research, but there's a lot of
 possibilities out there, both well-known name brands with lots of
 advertising and not so well known brands, and like I said I do not have
 personal experience with this sort of thing.

 I was originally considering getting just a pure receiver, with no display
 capability and perhaps not even any logging capability, e.g. something that
 would simply receive and process a GPS signal and relay the results (e.g.
 coordinates, etc) via Bluetooth to an Android device, which would then be
 responsible for everything else.  However, I've subsequently considered that
 having a GPS device which could be useful by itself without needing anything
 else might be more useful in general, even if it costs somewhat more.  So, I
 am not restricting myself to considering just GPS receiver-only or
 receiver-plus-logging-only devices.

 I'm pretty sure that even if I get a device capable of working as a
 standalone device, that I would want it to be able to communicate with my
 Android devices, so I'll probably want Bluetooth (or possibly WiFi but I
 suspect that is more costly and power-hungry) no matter what.  I'll probably
 want USB *if* I get a device capable of making an internal log, so I can
 easily transfer data to my PCs.  (I don't know that it makes sense or is
 even feasible to try to connect a GPS device to my Android devices via USB.)

 I'll probably want something capable of receiving signals both from the US
 and Russian (GLONASS) GPS systems, since they're both available and it looks
 like using GLONASS can help provide a more 

Re: [Talk-us] Advice On Data Removal Problem

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 8:46 PM, Greg Morgan dr.kludge...@gmail.com wrote:
 So there is a fairly new mapper in the Phoenix area removing valid data.  I
 would like advice on what to do.  I don't to want dampen this mapper's
 efforts.  However, another mapper has complained to me about the problem as
 this mapper has removed both of our work.  Change set
 http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/18867333 is an example where
 CartoCrazy even uses a change set description of Cleaned up clutter of
 pedestrian crossing markers,...  I am all for data revisions but this is an
 example of vandalism where the mapper doesn't realize that highway crossings
 are valid map data.  The damage isn't limited to highway crossings.

If you've asked the mapper ans he hasn't replied back, then you can
send a report to the DWG to investigate- that's their job. Just email
d...@osmfoundation.org

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Admin borders in the US: CDPs

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 7:03 PM, Greg Troxel g...@ir.bbn.com wrote:

 (I realize that in Alaska
 there are some areas where CDPs seem to matter.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethesda%2C_Maryland

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Admin borders in the US

[Serge Wroclawski]

The answer to your Where is the line is actually quite a simple question...

We have a logical inconsistency right now. We tell people that OSM
contains a map of verifiable things. In fact, we remove things which
are not observable!

But political(administrative) boundaries are an exception to that.

The explanation is always Because a map is expected to have these
boundaries, which is true, but it remains a logical inconsistency.

For years there's been this standoff between consistency and
practicality. The proposed solution would be to have another instance
of the OSM database (just like we have the dev database) which uses
the same API and same credentials.

So what would go in there? Political boundaries.

As for splitting the project- I think it does a little, but in a
very well defined way. Only administrative boundaries would go in the
administrative boundary map.

You're right that it does change the nature of the project in a way,
moving us from one to multiple (2) databases, and it may even be true
that if we did this, people would want new databases.

There are issues with any solution, but I do see a lot of consistency
in this one.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Public Labs/balloon mapping?

[Serge Wroclawski]

As others have said, balloon mapping is wonderful, it's great, it's
awesome, it's everything cool, but the field of vision one gets from a
kite or balloon is quite narrow.

Planes or satellites are much higher up and so can capture much larger
areas, while drones can (baring any legal restrictions) move, so that
their field of vision can be as narrow as a balloon (or even less),
but it can move, which makes it less of a problem.

When capturing a small (or even medium sized area), such as a school,
a small park, or a canal or oil spill, balloons are perfect. For a
town-sized area, they won't work unless you can get many areas.

- Serge

On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 9:35 PM, Ian McEwen
ianmcorvi...@ianmcorvidae.net wrote:
 Hi; I've been recently looking around http://publiclab.org/, especially
 at their tools for doing ground-tethered balloon and kite mapping
 (http://publiclab.org/wiki/balloon-mapping). The bulk of the prose on
 the site seems to be activism-oriented -- documenting the BP oil spill,
 Occupy encampments, etc. As you might guess I'm more interested in the
 potential to use this for OSM, but stories of others doing that seem to
 be sparse.

 Has anyone here used balloon mapping or these tools (or similar ones)
 who can share experience, pitfalls, etc.?

 --
 Ian McEwen

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[Talk-us] NYC Import Kickoff Tomorrow!

[Serge Wroclawski]

Hi all,

If you live in or around New York City, please join us for the OSM NYC
Building and Address Import Kickoff Tomorrow:

http://www.meetup.com/osm-nyc/events/143967422/

This event will be our official launch of importing the one million
buildings from the New York City government dataset into
OpenStreetMap, along with their addresses.

This will be a community driven import, meaning that every building
imported will be checked by a human being. That also means we need you
to help!

At the event this weekend, we will be providing background on the
import, as well as providing instruction for how to import the data.

This will not be an easy or short process. I estimate that it will
take about a year to complete the import, but once it's completed, we
will have an incredible resource on our hands from which to build on.

If you're unable to make tomorrow's event but still want to be
involved, don't worry; we'll be having other events like this in the
future, and we will be refining our documentation so that even if you
can't make an event, you will be able to follow along.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] GNIS tag removal proposal

[Serge Wroclawski]

Paul,

Agreed- and most of why I put this away was that I felt the discussion
had gone off the rails, with people loudly objecting to things which
had never been proposed.

The other suggestions were:

* Rename identifier tags which have the incorrect tag (feature_id
which are not feature_id).

* Reclassify objects which are currently gnis but should be other
datasets (non-gnis).

These two suggestions cannot be done organically without a concerted
effort, so we may want to create a separate proposal just to handle
them, separate from this proposal.

- Serge


On Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 4:54 AM, Paul Norman penor...@mac.com wrote:
 To recap and hopefully move forwards, I'm bringing this up again.

 From: Serge Wroclawski [mailto:emac...@gmail.com]
 Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2013 1:55 PM
 Subject: [Talk-us] GNIS tag removal proposal

 Hi all,

 I've been looking at the GNIS data and it's quite a mess.

 As a step towards cleaning up the mess, I'd like to discuss removing
 some extranious gnis tags in the editors (just as we do with TIGER and
 other tags).

 I would like to suggest that the editors remove the following tags
 entirely:

 gnis:ST_num
 gnis:ST_alpha
 gnis:feature_type
 gnis:created
 gnis:state_id
 gnis:county_id
 gnis:county_name
 gnis:feature_type
 gnis:import_uuid
 gnis:reviewed
 gnis:edited
 gnis:description
 gnis:County
 gnis:Class
 gnis:County_num

 To summarize the discussion

 - Several people objected to the removal of gnis:feature_id, and it's
   removal was never proposed.

 - There was objection to this changing the last edited user, which it
   wouldn't, it only removes tags when a user is editing the object
   anyways.

 In addition, I suggest that we remove two other tags conditionally.

 I suggest we remove the ele tag unless the tag natural=peak is present
 and that we remove source if the value for that tag is USGS Geonames
 (which is just GNIS).

 - Other cases where ele is useful were pointed out (aeroway)

 Given that we don't currently have the technical ability to do this while
 adding to the discarded tag list is easy, I suggest we put this on hold
 until later. We need to have a better look at what GNIS data has an ele=*
 tag and where it is silly.

 Unless there are serious objections I plan to open a pull request adding
 listed tags to the discard list.

 To reiterate, this does NOT impact gnis:feature_id and the tags will ONLY
 be removed if someone is already editing the object.


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Re: [Talk-us] GNIS tag removal proposal

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 1:09 PM, Jason Remillard
remillard.ja...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hi Serge,

 - If there are two tags for the feature id, we should pick one and
 change the other one.

There aren't two tags for feature_id, there's only feature_id.

This UUID tag appears to be related to the import script itself, and
isn't part of the GNIS dataset.

 - I would be ok with removing all of the gnis:* tags except the
 feature id. There is no reason for us to maintain the other data.


There was another, gnis:fcode, I believe, which people wanted
preserved. My solution to this ambiguity is to explicitly list the
tags to remove, rather than say All gnis tags except X,Y ,Z

 - You might want to keep the ele tags.

We don't keep elevation data in OSM- there are other datasets for
that, and they do a far better job.

There were some objections raised about removing elevation for peaks
(and now another POI), but for schools and other places, elevation is
not part of the data.

- Serge

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[Talk-us] GNIS tag removal proposal

[Serge Wroclawski]

Hi all,

I've been looking at the GNIS data and it's quite a mess.

As a step towards cleaning up the mess, I'd like to discuss removing
some extranious gnis tags in the editors (just as we do with TIGER and
other tags).

I would like to suggest that the editors remove the following tags entirely:

gnis:ST_num
gnis:ST_alpha
gnis:feature_type
gnis:created
gnis:state_id
gnis:county_id
gnis:county_name
gnis:feature_type
gnis:import_uuid
gnis:reviewed
gnis:edited
gnis:description
gnis:County
gnis:Class
gnis:County_num


In addition, I suggest that we remove two other tags conditionally.

I suggest we remove the ele tag unless the tag natural=peak is
present and that we remove source if the value for that tag is USGS
Geonames (which is just GNIS).

I'd like to open a discussion about these tags, or other tags people
suggest removing from gnis data.

- Serge

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[Talk-us] Walking Party in NYC on Saturday

[Serge Wroclawski]

Hi all,

I don't like to spam the entire list about local events, but there
hasn't been an announcement from NYC in white a while.

We're having a Walking Party tomorrow, and if you're interested,
please sign up. It should be a good time!

http://www.meetup.com/osm-nyc/events/134530942/

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Spammy-sounding survey sent to my OSM inbox today.

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Sat, Jul 27, 2013 at 4:12 PM, Bryce Nesbitt bry...@obviously.com wrote:


 Editing logs are there.  But demographic information (the bulk of
 padeshahekhoban's survey) is not recorded by OSM.  We have no idea who most
 mappers are.

You have the same issue with pretty much any project, whether it be a
FLOSS development project, or Wikipedia, or anything like that. OSM is
not unique, and that's a good thing.

 For example: people doing gender analysis of OSM users use
 name analysis (e.g. Jane is female).   Education level is relevant, but
 not recoverable.  Home country (for expats) is not recoverable either, but
 of interest in marking the participation level of local residents.  Human
 languages spoken would also be of interest.

 If osmf collects just a bit more demographic data, the vast bulk of public
 data becomes more useful to research.

OSM collects the minimal amount of information about its members that
it needs to.

You're arguing it should increase that minimal amount- so what's the
need you're addressing?

 There are privacy issues, for those accounts who provide demographics only
 to researchers.

It's far deeper than that, though.

Once you start collecting information, you cannot uncollect it. Once
we have data, there will be various types of entities (commercial
organizations, governments, etc.) that will be interested in it, and
will use a variety of techniques to collect it.

The solution to this problem is to collect as little as possible.

 Beyond that I think it reasonable to ask more of mappers.  Wikipedia has a
 good argument for anonymous editing.  OpenStreetMap?  I think not so much.

I  think that OSM strikes a good balance in the minimal amount of
personally identifiable information it requires from its users.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] How did this weekend's editathon go? (was Re: Steady increase in the number of mappers in the US)

[Serge Wroclawski]

NYC went well, we had about seven people show up for a mapping party
in Brooklyn. We had a good mix of existing mappers, new mappers, and a
new convert- someone whose been mapping prolifically recenly but
doesn't have much connection with the community.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Steady increase in the number of mappers in the US

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 12:56 PM, Kai Krueger kakrue...@gmail.com wrote:

 We need publicity!

 Yes! Publicity is in my opinion one of the biggest things we need and should
 try and work on as a group.

I wish this was the case, but it's not. I'll elaborate.

 Looking at the data, it is clear that when ever
 there was significant publicity on OSM, the number of editors (particularly
 new ones) has shot up, at least for a while.

Unfortunately our long term trends aren't effected by this.

 While local mapping events are great and important, they probably only
 manage to get a handful of new mappers if at all. Having an article in a
 news paper or significant blog on the other hand is likely to get many more
 new mappers.

When I was in DC, t the Washington Post to covered MappingDC. The
Washington Post is not only the largest paper in DC, it's one of the
largest newspapers in the United States, but the result of the story
was that we got a few signups to our list, but we saw no increase in
our events, and no one came to a mapping party saying they'd heard
about us from the newspaper.

Similarly, when the Washington Post covered the local DC hackerspace,
we had two people stop in at the space (only two!) and neither of them
joined.

 So perhaps instead of setting targets of that we want to achieve X number of
 active mappers in a certain time frame, we could set a target of aiming to
 have Y articles about OSM in the press and Z talks / booths at conferences
 by then.

I love publicity, but what's really important to us is sustaining
community members and mapping activity.

 Those targets are much more tangible than the number of active mappers as
 how any given action will effect that number is rather more speculative.

It's not born out by the numbers in my experience.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Steady increase in the number of mappers in the US

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 12:21 PM, Clifford Snow cliff...@snowandsnow.us wrote:

 On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 8:51 AM, Richard Weait rich...@weait.com wrote:

 This doesn't have to wait for funding, or permission!  There are
 hundreds of OpenStreetMap ambassadors reading this list, right now.


 Are you saying that you are satisfied with the number of active US mappers?
 Really?

That's not what Richard is saying.

Remember that Richard Weait was a professional OSM Ambassador, and has
many years of experience with OSM community organizing,

The real lesson of the ambassador program was that running mapping
parties in other cities than your own results in press (sometimes),
results in various size turnout, but has no track record of creating
sustainable community.

What does show sustainable community is regular events. That's why in
DC, I tried hard to run an event every month, and why in NYC, I'm
trying to do the same.

Eventually, if you do this, you get not only people who are curious
about the project, but you get regulars, and you find that people hear
about the events, and they map regularly.

That is how you create a long term sustainable community.

 We already have an active local group that meets regularly.  It currently
 has over 125 members signed up.

Awesome!


 3) Connect with other nearby local groups to share and enjoy.  Drop in
 on Serge's group when you are in NYC.  Thank him for starting it!   Do
 the same when you travel to other places with local groups.  Welcome
 distant mappers when they visit your local area, too.

I'm trying to reach out to groups outside the direct NYC area (less
than two hours away) to see if we can run combined events.

This is a bit of an experiment, but the hope is that if I can
connect with locals in other cities, they will take over and make
regular events.


 Ambassador Program  Pah!  Just get on with it.  :-)

 Sorry, I believe we need to think outside of our current box.

Were you aware of Richard's background when he wrote this?

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Steady increase in the number of mappers in the US

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 7:42 PM, Clifford Snow cliff...@snowandsnow.us wrote:

 Similarly, when the Washington Post covered the local DC hackerspace,
 we had two people stop in at the space (only two!) and neither of them
 joined.

 I'm not sure that two events are enough data points to state that publicity
 doesn't work.

Let me give you more datapoints.

We actually has two stories about MappingDC, one in the Post, and one
in a government publication. Neither of those created any sustainable
community.

Atlanta had a huge event through Cloudmade's ambassador program, with
200 attendees, and CNN coverage. Thea (the ambassador) invested a ton
of time and energy into that community. But a couple of years later,
and they were gone.

Their community consisted mostly of OSM consumers, people working for
groups interested in consuming OSM data, or talking about imports, but
not of mappers. I really wanted Atlanta to work. There was enormous
investment of time and resources in it, and outreach to universities,
government agencies and businesses.

I was hopeful at the time that data consumers would turn into
contributors, but it largely didn't happen. These organizations are
very interested in OSM as a datasource, but contributing is another
matter, and organizing is yet a different matter still. These people
were interested in OSM, but they weren't invested in OSM emotionally.

I want to be clear that I think there's a very important place for
outreach to data consumers, but I've learned not to expect that these
people will turn into OSM contributors (I'm thrilled if they do, but I
no longer come with the expectation that they will).

I also feel that I owe both Russ Nelson and Richard Weait an apology.
It's because of Richard's initial visit to DC that I heard about OSM
and became interested in it, and it's because of Russ Nelson's visit
that Kate Chapman, Steven Johnson, Katie Filbert and I all started
MappingDC (and we started it together, as a group).

So yes, it's possible to spark a community by a visit, but AFAIK, for
all both of their hard work, DC was the only community where the work
was sustained.

 Any thoughts on what sustains members?

Yes, it's consistency. That's the #1 most important thing that
sustains members. Run events regularly, monthly is best. And if you
can, make it the same day. And if you can, make it the same place.

In DC, we used a bar in downtown DC that had a lot of space, and we
had a monthly event that was just us sitting around and drinking. Kate
coined it Mappy Hour (if you were wondering what the origin of the
Virtual Mappy Hours were- that's the story).

We can mapping parties too, but the drinking events were super popular.

The reasons we haven't done that here in NY is that I have some
medical issues that make it difficult for me in a bar environment, and
bar space is limited and very noisy in Manhattan (for the most part).
If we found a good place, though, I'd try again.

BTW, Russ, our mapping parties have been good- we get Brooklynites
coming to Manhattan, we get Manhattanites coming to Brooklyn, folks
coming in from Jersey, even Connecticut, so it can happen.

And after several months of this, we're finally starting to see
regulars, folks who will come to most or all the events, and it
takes a long time. It's also can be pretty hard work in the beginning,
even lonely work, when you set up an event and 30 minutes before the
event, half the RSVPs cancel, but those that do show up regularly,
they stick with the project, they map, and they stay involved.

 Maybe we need to ask people, what got them interested in OSM and what keeps
 them active. Maybe one of the activities we should undertake is to collect
 that data to help develop plans go active mappers.

I think the commonality between dedicated mappers I know is that
they're usually already involved in an existing project of similar
ilk. They're FLOSS developers, or they're Wikipedians (or both).

We get other people, from other backgrounds, but in my experience, the
ones who stick around for months and years tend to be people who
understand why OSM is so important. We get others to come out- they
hear about the project, we get them through their first edits, but
they don't stick around.

I think there are things we can try to do to bring those people
further along, but I think we also need to recognize that OSM has the
same issues as Wikipedia does, and that other projects of the same
type have- that sustained user involvement hovers at around the same
level, and that a very large percentage of contributions come from a
minority of users.

So in addition to more people, the thing I think is most important is
understanding the supermappers near you, bringing them into the
one-on-one community, and also making sure that those people are
happy.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Edit-a-thon promotion

[Serge Wroclawski]

Indeed, I'll reach out to them.

OSM NYC is planning on mapping Hurricane Sandy damage (I was planning
on a trip to Wall Street to scope out locations).

I'll reach out to these folks and see what they say.

- Serge

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 9:48 PM, Jason Remillard
remillard.ja...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hello,

 There is already a mapping party at NeighborLand, mapping seats in NYC!

 http://handbook.neighborland.com/nyc-mapping-party/

 Bummer, they are not doing this on top of OSM! The site is using
 google for everything, even storing the raw data.

 https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1dpQr55ZhmgcExT2ldCYeI6jbejuAI0Nf4n9oGX0#rows:id=1

 Jason.

 On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 9:19 PM, Martijn van Exel m...@rtijn.org wrote:
 Hey all,

 I found out about NeighborLand today and am using it as one of the channels
 to promote the SLC edit-a-thon --
 https://neighborland.com/ideas/salt-lake-city-to-improve-openstreetmap
 Perhaps it's useful for you as well, either for promoting a local
 edit-a-thon or just to let people know about your local OSM group. At least
 the people on there are somehow concerned with what's happening around them,
 so they might be a good target demographic for your next mapping party or
 mappy hour!

 Martijn

 --
 Martijn van Exel
 http://oegeo.wordpress.com/
 http://openstreetmap.us/

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Re: [Talk-us] Mappy Hour

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 9:39 PM, stevea stevea...@softworkers.com
wrot It's that Monday again!

 I know this has been raised as an issue here before, but are we any closer
 to answering:  Is there an online (audio/video) venue which has less onerous
 Terms of Service than Google's?  A way to technologically solve a
 delightfully impromptu meeting like this without using a corporate host that
 insists upon taking from us everything we discuss within its digital domain?

We discussed this yesterday in the context of the US Import Committee,
which has filled up and not everyone was even able to join and
participate.

The short answer is no.

The longer answer is that other services do exist, but they have
limitations which do not allow them to fit the bill. These limitations
include:

1. Presenter oriented

There are a number of tools which are designed to be presenter
oriented, such as Big Blue Button. These tools are very powerful (and
may be useful for OSM in other contexts), but do not fit the more
casual model, where anyone is able to speak and participate fully.

2. They are audio only

We could do audio only conferences pretty easily, and we could just
use a phone conferencing service (rather than a web service), but
there's a lot missing in a phone conference- from social cues, to
being able to share and discuss at the same time.

This is useful for the US Import Committee when we are going over a
dataset and want to highlight some specific feature, or demonstrate a
tool.

3. They don't work with enough simultaneous participants

The newest tool in this arena is the WebRTC standard, which is in both
Chrome and Firefox. It can do real time communication with video, but
it's unfortunately not yet able to handle more than two participants.
It's planned, but it's not there yet.


That leaves just a few remaining options. I think Skype can handle 10
participants in a video call, but the problem with Skype is that my
understanding that you have to have a special kind of account for
group video calls, and that participants must specifically be invited
to participate.

Google Hangout isn't ideal, for sure, but I think for now, it's the
only option that solves a majority of our needs.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] what do we mean by geocoding?

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 12:09 PM, Mark Newnham m...@newnhams.com wrote:

a. Both Google and Openstreetmap don't know anything about actual
 addresses in the US. For reverse geocode purposes, they just guess based on
 the approximate lat/long location.

   b.  An easy example to show you is this -  A search for 6188 South Poplar
 St, Centennial. CO in both google and openstreetmap will both return
 results - Google will even give you a Streetview. But that property simply
 doesn't exist.  It never has/

It's easy to understand how you came to this conclusion, but what's
happening inside is a bit different than this.

What's happenijng when you search for this address in OSM is that
you're using a service called Nominatim. What Nominatim is doing is
saying I don't know about this address, but I do know about this
street, so I'm going to do my best to give you the information you've
asked for.

If you click on the details link in Nominatim from this query, it says
that this address is estimated.

I can't speak for Google and what its geocoder is doing.

 USPS provides an easy to understand, comprehensive addressing method that
 would allow OSM to provide a consistent addressing methodology to addresses.
 For example, An armchair mapper might map an address like  North Caley as
 North Caley, Nort Caley NTH Caley or N Caley. (These are the most common
 ways by the way for manually entered addresses).

Yes, but they won't give us access to this data, so it's a bit of a moot point.

The data that Bryce is talking to us about is post office locations.
And even this, as we've begun to dig into it, is of limited value to
the project, since we have to do the geocoding for this data.

It's still worth discussing with USPS, both for political and
technical reasons, but this is a very limited subset of our data and
not the same as the USPS crown jewel of all US addresses.

- Serge

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[Talk-us] Hamlets!

[Serge Wroclawski]

During the TIGER import, small neighborhoods were imported as hamlets.

I am not sure what this means in rural areas, but in urban places,
hamlets are often just places like apartment complexes, or other
nondescript places.

They don't rise to the prominence of even a neighborhood (putting
aside the neighborhood discussion from last week), but they do confuse
the heck out of both mappers and the tools.

I'm wondering what other people's experience with the hamlets are. Are
they useful where you live? Are they nonsense (as they have been in
NYC and DC)?

I'm thinking that it might be worthwhile to take some kind of action,
either converting them to something else, or if there's really
consensus, deleting them.

I realized only after last week's discussion about neighborhoods that
the hamlets (which are distinct from nehighborhoods) are the things
messing up the geocoder. A neighborhood is understood to be a place
that's not often in an address, but a hamlet is a village, and so a
hamlet in the middle of an urban place doesn't make sense.

So, what do people think?

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 9:32 AM, Richard Welty rwe...@averillpark.net wrote:

 i think this varies state-to-state.  the following applies to NY.

 hamlets are not incorporated areas and have no government functions.

 in urban areas, hamlets are generally once distinct communities
 that have been absorbed into larger entities. they have no legal standing,
 but frequently the postal service will still deliver based on the name.

 in rural areas in NY, hamlets generally have white on green road signs
 erected by the state highway department and may have a CDP boundary.
 local post offices and/or school districts may use the same name as the
 hamlet.

 the CDP boundaries are at best vaguely related to the post office delivery
 routes sharing the name.

I'm disinclined to touch a CDP based on my experience of living in
one. In some places, they have the same function as a town.

In NYC and DC, the hamlets were not places I'd ever heard of (even if
they were close by). If they're just apartments, then it seems silly
to keep them around, even if the post office delivers to them.

So if I read you correctly, it seems like in urban areas that we know
it's generally safe to reclassify them (either as a building, or
building complex (as a multipolygon), or perhaps a neighborhood.

Is that a fair statement?

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Hamlets!

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 7:52 PM, Mike N nice...@att.net wrote:
 On 6/21/2013 9:17 AM, Serge Wroclawski wrote:

 I realized only after last week's discussion about neighborhoods that
 the hamlets (which are distinct from nehighborhoods) are the things
 messing up the geocoder.


   I would say not to touch any hamlets; let the locals fix them up
 appropriately.

The goal is to share our experiences with them and determine what, if
anything, should be done.

It's clear that in NYC, some of them are neighborhoods, some are
public housing projects, some are historical, and we aren't sure what
others are.

People in other places are reporting their experiences, which seem to
be highly localized- everything from the data is worthless, to these
hamlets are being used to describe small communities.

 Their presence doesn't hurt anything, aside from the small
 geocoding hiccup or map not rendering optimally.

The map should reflect ground reality, so unless there are hamlets in
these places, we should strive to fix them. By sharing our
experiences, we can have a better sense of how others are doing that,
and we can use that to inform our local decisions.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] SOTM-US compared

[Serge Wroclawski]

Frederik,

Thank you for this valuable feedback, in particular regarding the sprints.

I feel very badly about how the sprints went, and I want to go into
detail why, and what I'm going to try to do next year about them.

First, I want to say that for those people who were calling this a
hack day, I don't blame you, for two reasons, but that I hope this
changes in the future.

1. OSM does not have institutional experience with sprints

It was evident to me that many OSMers were interested in the sprints,
but had only attendeded hack days, so to them, the terms were
synonymous. They are not.

A sprint is far more organized, more like BoF sessions going on, each
with their own space. Imagine if a conference tried to have every BoF
going on simultaneously in one space at the same time. This wouldn't
work, and so what we had at the event was the equivalent.

2. There were not sufficient resources were not put into the sprints

Running sprints is expensive. It requires multiple rooms, or a very
large room with lots of room for groups to work independently of one
another, out of each others way

In addition, I had expected that we would have a session for
lightening talks, as we'd had in previous years. Lightening talks are
key to getting sprints going, as it gives the opportunity for sprint
organizers to talk about their project and lay out the goals for the
sprints (which are very result-oriented).

It was a surprise to me that we didn't have lightening talks, and by
the time I found out, it was too late to change the situation, and so
there wasn't any coordinated efforts around the sprints.

Lastly, the number of days we were sprinting changed from two, to one,
back to two, and the information about the sprints changed on the
website. This lead to a lot of confusion in folks' mind.


The feedback I received has been very positive on this topic, though,
with more developers coming together than we had ever had before at a
single OSM event (roughly 10% of attendees attended one or both sprint
days). There is clear willingness by the community to work on
challenging technical issues.

I am hopeful that given the amount of interest, that sprints will be
featured next year, and will be given proper resources. In addition,
we should re-introduce the lightening talks, and bring up the sprints,
and sprint coordination, at the opening ceremony, and again at a
closing ceremony (which we also didn't have this year).


I'll be doing my best to make sure this happens next year so that we
move towards a more successful sprint in 2014.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Parking rendering

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 4:12 PM, Nathan Mills nat...@nwacg.net wrote:
 (I switched to talk-us for this reply because it doesn't touch on import 
 issues)

 I don't think it's so much a bug in the stylesheet as much as a bug in the 
 world we're trying to map. Many cities simply have excessive amounts of 
 parking and that shows up on the map.

This is partially (though not entirely) a US problem, and while we
can argue the issues around parking in general, the map clutter is due
to a combination of rendering issues and other problems.

For example, in the Washington, DC area, there are many small, narrow
parking areas which are in reality just street parking that has been
improperly imported.

I suspect that if we examine many areas where parking is so cluttered,
we will find some combination of rendering issues and data issues.

The data issues will need addressing, then the rendering problems are
likely going to be fairly solvable.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Neighborhoods / Zillow

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 12:49 PM, Clifford Snow cliff...@snowandsnow.us wrote:

 I agree that most neighborhood boundaries are subjective. Of the cities I've
 lived in, some neighborhoods are clearly define, usually by natural or man
 made artifacts, others are definitely fluid. When importing addresses into
 Seattle we considered adding a neighborhood tag to each address or building
 node but decided against it. Administrative boundaries seemed like a better
 plan. After this discussion I'm not longer so certain.

 So what are the pro and cons for importing boundaries?
 Cons:
 Neighborhood boundaries are fluid
 Most neighborhood boundaries can not be surveyed
 3rd party data users and overlay their own boundary polygons

 Pros:
 Helpful when doing queries
 Search results show neighborhood boundaries
 Irregularly shaped neighborhoods better depicted by a polygon than a node

 Personally I don't have any objection if someone wanted to import
 neighborhood boundaries for their city.

There are really two questions here, which have different answers:

1. Are neighborhoods useful?

2. Are neighborhoods good to put  in OSM?

The answer to #1 is Yes, neighborhood data is useful.

The answer to #2 is No, for the reasons outlined.

But that's okay, because we have other datasets available to us, like
TIGER, or Quattroshapes or the Flickr neighborhood dataset (should it
ever be made available), or even something like OpenGeocoder.

This data can then be fed into a renderer, or geocoder to create the
useful output.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Neighborhoods / Zillow

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 6:35 PM, Martijn van Exel m...@rtijn.org wrote:

 These are *your* answer these questions. I disagree with your conclusion on
 #2, for reasons outlined.

Let's not get personal here...

I don't see how any of the discussions here have addressed some basic
questions, so please explain it to me. Specifically:

1. How can someone survey a neighborhood? It seems that in many cases,
neighborhoods are subjective, and people may disagree on where it is,
and both be right. How does your proposal address this issue?

2. If I understand your proposal correctly, you are saying that your
solution is that nodes, rather than polygons, offer a concept of
fuzzyness, that solves some of the subjectiveness issues. But if you
know the data is fuzzy then isn't it also, by definition, then a bit
wrong as well, since we can't make radius assumptions about
neighborhoods, and our scale of neighborhood changes so much depending
on where we're talking about?

3. We already have issues with neighborhoods messing up the
geocoding problems in OSM. If we have lots of new users who are adding
nodes, won't this just get worse?

4. Why not agree to use another service for this data other than OSM?
Or conversely, why not use an existing dataset other than OSM, which
already contains neighborhoods, such as the Flickr dataset?

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Neighborhoods / Zillow

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Martijn van Exel m...@rtijn.org wrote:
 Hiya,

 I am not proposing an import, but a local MapRoulette
 challenge might work where people with local knowledge accept / reject
 proposed neighborhood points, or something along those lines.

I think neighborhoods are not something that really fits the OSM model well.

OSM is great for visable (ie surveyable) features, but does a
historically poor job at features which are not ground surveyable,

I think it's better for us to use these services for rendering and
geocoding, and not putting this data in OSM.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Mass deletion in shawnee county, ks

[Serge Wroclawski]

Mike,

There are multiple components to this situation, but I want to start
with the most timely and important, not so much for you, as for others
in the US community who might be unaware of the situation in its
complexities.

Paul Norman is not a rogue mapper, he is a member of the DWG, OSM's
arbiter of what is and isn't allowed in the OSM database, so if he has
taken an action, it is presumably either with the DWG, or with the
implicit seniority that Paul's work or association carries with it.

Secondly, to re-emphasize what Paul said- you have not followed the
DWG's guidelines regarding imports, and according to your own mail,
you are continuing not to follow those guidelines through use of
automated editing (a bot).

Thirdly, from my perspective you never contacted or contributed to the
US Import Committee, either meeting or mailing list- if you had, then
you'd know that our processes are even more stringent than those of
the DWG. Yet Toby (who you CCed) has been able to follow them (and has
helped clarify and expand them). So it's doable, and it's doable by
people you want to be part of this conversation.

Fourthly, you have been a part of this project for several years and
know the issues about imports, and certainly know the importance of
community discussion and approval in relation to imports.

In fact, you have felt so strongly about the OSM community, that
several years back, you decided to be part of an OSM fork, which you
continue to advertise in your mail sig.

If you want to be part of this community, meaning the OpenStreetMap
community in the United States, I and others would welcome you, but
you should be participatory and follow the  guidelines that this
community (the DWG and then the US Community) has regarding imports.

- Serge

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[Talk-us] Mapping Party in NYC Next Sunday

[Serge Wroclawski]

Hey all,

Just in case anyone here is in/around NYC and isn't aware of the
mapping party next week:

http://www.meetup.com/osm-nyc/events/118375942/

Whether you're a new mapper or an experienced mapper, you should join us!

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundary level quirk in NYC

[Serge Wroclawski]

Clay,

Thank you for bringing this up. I have a number of thoughts on this
issue, so it may take me a bit to get to the proposal in your email.

First, I think that this is a good illustration of why some of us
would like all administrative data taken out of OSM and moved into
another dataset. The maintenance of it is quite complex and even in
areas where it seems objective, is not.

Secondly, I think for any major area change, such as this, I'd like to
suggest you touch base with the OSM US Import Committee, even though
this is not an import, it will have similar effects as one (effecting
a large, very populated area in many ways).

Thirdly. I'd like to suggest you meet with other OSMers in NYC to
discuss. Since we're having a mapping party next weekend, this seems
like a good time to introduce yourself and discuss this proposal.

Fourthly, I'm going to assume that your proposal is *just* to change
NYC and the 5 boroughs, right? If not, then this needs discussion on a
larger scale.

Fifth, I have some concerns about granularity. By doing this, you've
effectively made admin level 10 the last usable admin level that we
currently measure. In your NYC example, 9 becomes the borough, but
that means 10 has to be neighborhoods on a very gross level. For
example, do you differentiate between Greenwich Village''s West and
East Village? I certainly do, and I think most New Yorkers would, but
they're both part of the Village itself.

My other big question is What does this solve?, in other words, what
problem are you seeing that needs correction by this action?

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] TIGER Expansion Bot Complete

[Serge Wroclawski]

The West Coast was already expanded, so the bot was only fixing a typo.

- Serge

On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Alex Barth a...@mapbox.com wrote:

 This is a viz of bot-mode's edits (yellow points are changeset centroids).

 11,188 changesets
 4,156,347 objects modified

 Serge - how do you explain the west-east difference in edits? Did you change
 the number of objects modified per changeset at some point?

 https://tiles.mapbox.com/ruben/map/map-13xkjfwx#5.00/37.861/-79.517




 On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 12:35 AM, Toby Murray toby.mur...@gmail.com wrote:


 Great news and thank you for all the work you put in on it.

 Note that there may still be a few abbreviated street names around. The
 bot was not a general purpose name expander. It looked at specific TIGER
 tags and only changed ways where those tags matched what was in the name
 tag. But it did expand a vast majority of them. The rest may be looked at in
 the future.

 Toby



 On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 9:16 PM, Alex Barth a...@mapbox.com wrote:

 That's amazing, Serge.

 Should we blog about this on OSM.us?


 On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 6:48 PM, Martijn van Exel m...@rtijn.org wrote:

 On 04/25/2013 02:31 PM, Serge Wroclawski wrote:

 Hi all,

 The TIGER expansion bot is complete.

 Great, that is excellent news! Congratulations. Finally no more Ct, Rd,
 Pl, Ave, St, etc.
 I am looking forward to ensuing import-related discussions about lessons
 learned from this.
 --
 Martijn van Exel

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[Talk-us] TIGER Expansion Bot Complete

[Serge Wroclawski]

Hi all,

The TIGER expansion bot is complete.

There was a lot to do (more object than the Redaction bot), and with
this process, there was a lot to learn about efficiently making so
many changes.

But it's done, and we're now in a much better position for any future
bots we'd like to run.

I do have a few suggestions, which I'll propose to the import
committee via the import committee list, and then share with the
larger community.

Thank you all for your help and patience,

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] NYC neighborhood data

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 6:06 PM, Simon Poole si...@poole.ch wrote:
 Kushal

 welcome to OSM. Please feel free to improve our data, while adding the
 neighbourhoods as a first project is going to result in a fairly steep
 learning curve for you, it is certainly doable.

Hi Kushal,

I'd suggest that you come to the upcoming OSM NYC meeting before
changing any of the neighborhood data in NYC.

Neighborhood data, especially in NY, is a pretty tricky thing. Some
neighborhoods are well established and understood, while others are
not, and are fluid. I'd love to see improvements of those which are
well established, but some others are not so clear cut.

It's always important to try to work with the local community on some
massive changes, and you're lucky enough to live in a city with an
active OSM community, and we have monthly meetings and a mailing list.

http://www.meetup.com/osm-nyc

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Updating unchanged TIGER imports to TIGER 2013

[Serge Wroclawski]

Eric,

I'm in general favor of your idea. I think that if we can get more
accurate, up to date data out of TIGER, then we should.

I'd strongly encourage you to join us on the OSM US Import Committee list:
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports-us

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] TopOSM 2

[Serge Wroclawski]

Looks very pretty, and I think this would be a great thing to have on
the new US servers!

One small styling thing... It's sometimes a bit hard to read the text.
Could you replace the white halo with a black one, maybe?

- Serge

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[Talk-us] Doodle on next US Import Committee Meeting

[Serge Wroclawski]

Sorry about the long delay in getting this meeting scheduled, I've
been dealing with some big personal stuff at home.

I want us to get on a regular meeting, especially now that the Kansas
country work is done.

I have worked a bit on the document I promised to draft for
guidelines, and now, Ian Dees has Chicago building data, so let's
schedule a meeting!

People said the meeting time didn't work for them, so I've made a new
Doodle with several meeting times, and we'll use the results to
schedule the next meeting.

Please fill it out!

http://doodle.com/b4bbny9z25dzdzt5

Thanks all,

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Doodle on next US Import Committee Meeting

[Serge Wroclawski]

Ugg, wrong list again.

I'm sorry all.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] parcel boundaries and associated data in OSM

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 3:29 PM, Brian Cavagnolo bcavagn...@gmail.com wrote:

 We really want a nationwide consolidated, standard parcel database to
 build upon.

 This idea is [obviously] inspired by OSM.  And my immediate thought
 was, Fun!  Let's add parcel data to OSM!  How do we do that?

We've started an Import Committee to help with such questions. I need
to schedule the next meeting, but I invite you to join us and help
shape the conversation. I'm facilitating the committee but the
opinions I'll express below are my own.

 This
 inquiry has of course led to numerous more detailed questions, the
 most fundamental one, of course, being: Is parcel data welcome in OSM?

As you found out, this is a complex question that will depend on who you ask.

  I've spent some time reading through the mailing list history.  In
 addition to gaining an appreciation for some of the issues regarding
 the management of parcel data, I promptly learned that this is a
 controversial question.  For each claim that a consensus exists
 against parcel data in OSM, a parcel data advocate seems to emerge.
 This leads to debate, which seems to focus on a specific set of issues
 that I have posed as specific questions below.  I've also dusted off
 and enriched the wiki page and associated talk page on the matter
 (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Parcel).  My hope is that people
 can respond to these questions and we can reach a clear consensus on
 {whether,what sort of,conditions under which} parcel data is welcome.
 And of course feel free to bring up any issues that are not
 represented in this list.

 Finally, even if you believe that parcel
 data does not belong in OSM, but that a nationwide open consolidated
 parcel database would be useful (and possible:) I'm super interested
 in this perspective.

I am of this view. Furthermore, I think that projects should Free
datasets intermixing this way, just as we do with topo data.

 Is parcel data useful to OSM?

This is actually a three part question.

1. Is the data useful?
2. Is the data useful to OSM users?
3. Does the data belong in the OSM core dataset?

In my opinion, the answer to question 1 is yes. The question to two
and three are more subtle. I think the data is of use to the OSM
project, but does not belong in the OSM dataset. What I mean by that
is that we have tools (renderers, geocoders, routers, etc.) which may
want to use parcel data. I think that such tools should be able to.
But I think the data belongs alongside the OSM dataset, rather than
part of it.

So to make this clear: I think the data is useful, but would be more
useful to OSM users if it's not part of the OSM crowdsourced dataset.

 Can parcel data possibly be kept up to date?

Parcel data (with very few exceptions) can't be manually surveyed by
amatuer mappers. Therefore it doesn't benefit from the OSM process of
survey, refinement, survey to provide additional detail and over-time
accuracy. Put in plain English How can a regular person, with no
additional information, survey the area to find mistakes in the survey
data? - the answer is that for the most part, they can't. Parcel data
is determined by a central authority.

So then if we had it in OSM's core crowdsourced database, we would
need a synchronization process. This is something many of us have
wanted, and worked on, for several years, and not come up with a
solution for.

But if we had the data as a database that could be integrated by
tools, then the data could be optionally rendered, used for geocoding,
used for routing, etc. in just the same way as OSM data, and OSM users
would get the benefit of current, up to date parcel data. That would
be a real win.


 Does parcel data meet the on the ground verifiability criteria?

I don't see how, but I'm open to being shown that I'm wrong.

 Can tools be adapted to accommodate parcel data density?

I don't understand this question.

To summarize, I think this is a great idea. I'm in total support. I'd
love to see the data available to OSM, but not part of OSM itself.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Turn restriction dispute

[Serge Wroclawski]

This issue has come up before and the problem is that it falls
through the cracks of OSM's governing bodies.

The DWG often handles issues of vandalism or copyright violation, but
NE2's edits are neither obvious vandalism, nor direct copyright
violations as far as anyone can tell.

But this type of behavior has been identified as damaging to the
community on numerous occasions and in several ways.

The issue here is that unlike others, NE2's behavior always rides a
more delicate line.

Nonetheless, I think it's time we step up as a community and request
OSMF assistance on this issue.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Turn restriction dispute

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 8:56 AM, Michal Migurski m...@teczno.com wrote:
 I don't agree. NE2’s edits, most of all the route relations, are enormously 
 valuable to OSM in the US. I'm not aware of any precedent for banning a user 
 like this, and I'm not eager to see one set.

Mike,

Your information on NE2 is grossly inaccurate.

NE2 makes very few positive edits, and many, many destructive ones, as
well as previous threats to make more edits that conform with his (and
only his) vision of the world.

I realize that from a numerical standpoint, it may seem like he is a
positive contributor, but this is due to our general acceptance of
people even in the face of disagreement. But in NE2's case, he is a
bully, and having a bully does not serve the community well.

Regarding precedent, this would not be the first person that the OSMF
has had to take action on. Others have been banned, but NE2's
particular brand of edit has always ridden the line, as he's not
explicitly doing anything illegal (ie not copyright violation). But
OSM is not his personal playground, and his view that this project is
his sandbox to impose his will on (reality and community consensus be
damned) is just unacceptable.

It's understandable that if you are not familiar with NE2's behavior
first hand, that you would see this as a a misunderstanding, but NE2's
behavior has been damaging to the project for so long that we simply
have no choice but to take actions to protect the project's
cohesiveness.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Turn restriction dispute

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 11:32 AM, Russ Nelson nel...@crynwr.com wrote:

 His malice is encapsulated in his inability to work with other
 people.

Furthermore, he makes mass edits. There are not edits that one can
accomplish simply by hand. He is doing many thousands of edits, and we
have evidence that this must be automated. He ignores local mappers,
local edits, and insists that he's right (with edits) even when told
by on the ground mappers that he's wrong).

So what we have is someone running around, bullying the mappers, and
running bots on the system.

 For example, I dislike a particular global modification to my
 work that he has made. I know that he has more spare time than me to
 pursue his ideas, and so I haven't bothered to fighting on it, because
 I know he will fight me, and I know he will win.

 So I have resigned myself to allowing OSM to be a little bit worse
 because of him. How many other people have made the same decision?

From my interactions with mappers, more than a few.

And these are just the mappers who have talked to me about it.

 How much worse is OSM because of NE2?

Have people here read The No Asshole Rule? In this book, the author
outlines how bad behavior (bullying especially) is not neutral, but
had major negative impacts on workplaces.

NE2 is a bully, plain and simple, and his impacts are felt throughout
the community.

To answer others questions, we have banned others, mostly temporarily.
It is an extreme action that the community has taken in order to bring
the seriousness of a situation to light.

In my view, those who are the defending NE2 the most are the ones who
have dealt with him the least.

OSM should not be Mad Max, or a cowboy environment, and by allowing
assholes to be allowed to bully communities, we are making the
problem worse.

- Serge

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[Talk-us] Why you should attend a hack weekend

[Serge Wroclawski]

Folks,

This is a very large project, with over a million user accounts, and
tens of thousand of active mappers around the world, but we have a
relatively small developer community for such a large project.

If you've worked on some OSM related code, or are interested in
contributing code to OpenStreetMap, you should attend an OSM Hack
weekend. These events are unique in that they bring together other
developers in the same room. They provide an amazing energy and
opportunity that you just don't get online.

Last week, I was at the OSM Hack Weekend in London, and I learned
about several new projects, including one to help Humanitarian
Mapping, one to help with bicycle routing, one to help with data
conflation in Potlatch, and an amazing OSM router developed in C# used
 to help delivery people find the most efficient route to deliver
packages (ie to solve the traveling salesman problem).

In just one month, there will be another OSM Hack weekend in Toronto:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Toronto_Hack_Weekend_March_2013

I realize not everyone from the US can take the time/spend the money
to go to London, but Toronto is practically right at our doorstep, and
I'd like to encourage folks to attend.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Reaching out to Local User Groups

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 5:13 PM, Steve Coast st...@asklater.com wrote:
 Hi Paul

 I was basically alone starting the Seattle group for many months. We had a
 lot of churn (one person come one month, then a different person the next…)

Exactly.

MappingDC, when we started it, was four people, and now it's probably
the most active local OSM community in the US.

In New York, I had to start again. If you post on Meetup.com and do
nothing else, you'll find people who are curious. A lot of people will
show up for one meeting and you'll never see them again. But over time
(and it can be a long time) you'll find people who have the same
interest and will become your regulars.

If you have special events, or work with other local communities
(cycling communities in particular), you'll find interested parties.

Mapping parties get a lot of attention, but the truth is that the best
thing you can do is to be consistent, and to get your event listed in
the right places.

- Serge

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[Talk-us] Import Committee Meeting tonight on Google+

[Serge Wroclawski]

Hey all,

A quick reminder that there will be an Import Committee meeting
tonight at 8:30 on Google Hangout.

The topic will be catching up from last year, the current import we
have on the table to work with, improved documentation and new
imports.

If you're interested in joining, please drop me a line.

Thanks,

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Import Committee Meeting tonight on Google+

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 3:41 PM, TC Haddad tchad...@gmail.com wrote:
 hi Serge

 Are you saying 8:30 Eastern? and this is the new US imports committee? will
 the discussion be available afterwards?

Yes, EST.

This is the new US Import Committee, though it may be a short meeting
based on the folks I've heard from.

As for afterwards, it's not the mappy hour, but if there's something
import related, I guess we could talk.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] OSM Edit-a-thon January 26th

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 11:59 AM, Kathleen Danielson
kathleen.daniel...@gmail.com wrote:
 No problem.

 What would folks think of making this a semi-organized quarterly thing?
 Monthly is probably too frequent, but quarterly might be the right pace.

I have a few thoughts on this.

First, I think it's great to see OSM US step up and take a role in the
community that involves organizing these large events. We in the US
have a particular difficulty in comparison to our European friends in
that our country is so large and our population so evenly distributed
that we have trouble organizing. So I want to say how happy I am that
OSM US, and you in particular Kathleen, are stepping up and helping.

Secondly, outside it's currently 16F, and with the wind chill it's 3F,
so I won't be doing any walking and mapping, but as the weather
improves, I'd really like to see more organized mapping events, or
coordinated mapping events, where we're encouraged to go out and do
surveying.

This is really key for the long term sustainability of both the
project and the local communities, as we've seen in studies that those
people who are our most consistent and active contributors have stated
that local connectedness is at the heart of their involvement with the
project. So it behooves local community organizers to do more to reach
out and find those people, teach them mapping, and give them a place
where they can really apply that passion.

And the value that will bring to do the data will also be evident, as
we compare the contributions made by mappers of their local area in
Europe to the US, we see a clear correlation between localism and
highly accurate, up to date surveyed data.

Thirdly, I've been an OSM community organizer for two OSM communities,
MappingDC and OSM NYC and I think that one of the problems that local
organizers have is consistency. A community will spring up, have a few
events, then hibernate. I think by having quarterly events, that
encourages folks to organize mapping parties regularly, while still
leaving time for local communities to have their own events if they
want to.

Fourthly, I think this is great. I think this could be even more
awesome if there could be some feedback mechanism both before (and
maybe more importantly) after the event. If the local communities
could write up a paragraph (two max) and have it posted somewhere that
summarizes the events, so we can really see what happened. And a map
of all the local events happening would be awesome too.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] OSM-edit-a-thon, Growing US User Groups/Communities

[Serge Wroclawski]

I'm giving my .02 here based on my experience. Obviously everyone's
experience will differ, and I'd love to hear from folks with long
established communities in North America.

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 5:16 PM, william skora skorasau...@gmail.com wrote:

 Given Cleveland's population relative to other cities, our mutual interests
 and the sheer overlap between OSM and open source GIS tools (QGIS, postGIS,
 Tilemill, cartodb, etc), other co-organizers and I thought it would be a
 great fit for our user group to focus on both OSM and FOSSGIS/Open
 Geospatial tools.

In the places I've lived (DC and NYC) there was already an established
GIS group, with more or less emphasis on FLOSS, so we had a more or
less OSM centric group.

Ultimately you find what works for you and go with it, but in my
experience, there's a different mindset between GIS and OSM. A lot of
heavy OSMers are not GIS folks by trade, or they've gotten into GIS
through OSM, and while there are some awesome folks with a foot in
both camps, I think that while cross pollination is awesome and
encourages, OSM has grown to a point where its identity is distinct

 How often to hold meetings ?

The issue of meetings is an interesting one. We've run three meetings
so far in OSM NYC and even though I ran the first one, I don't think I
like them.

People are used to meetings. They're used to talking about meetings
and sitting down for meetings, where really successful local OSM
groups I've seen really don't do meetings. When MappingDC held
meetings they were not very productive, but when it switched to
Mappy Hours and Mapping Parties, the group worked a lot better- we had
better turnout, more community and a lot more fun (and it was easier!)

My suggestion is to have a regularly scheduled social event- be it a
Mappy Hour or some event where people just come and hang out and talk
OSM, and then, when you can, have mapping parties.

The most important thing is to be consistent. The time/place won't
ever be ideal for everyone, but if it's consistent, people will come.

When MappingDC had its monthly Mappy Hours, we had 20 people come to
these events, sometimes 30. Compare that to when we held meetings, we
had 6-8 people attending. It was awesome.

 Should we as a group choopse something to work on ?

You may find this works for you- when MappingDC tried this, it fell
flat and created frustration.

Mapping Parties, on the other hand, worked great, as did people
talking about what they were doing..

 One thing that I've
 noticed from last year's meetings and HOT: there were a few users who saw
 OSM to help them reach a particular goal or scratch their itch of a
 particular interest (verifying roads to facilitate routing, mapping all of
 the places of worship in an area, etc) and began mapping that but there were
 others who were interested but, for lack of a better word, were overwhelmed
 of what to begin mapping and where.

Mapping Parties help a lot, but so do social events. If you want to
more, there's talk about building more introductory documents.

 However, Potlatch's emphasis (on documentation, maintenance) is likely to
 decrease (maybe not, I'm just basing this on my impressions) soon as well.
 Interested to hear what others have done or planning to do.

I think that Josm is amazing, it's the editor I use. But Potlatch is
so much easier that I'd use that with new folks until iD is more
mature.

YMMV but I'd love to hear how it turns out.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Anyone ever talked about adding more Land Ownership data to OSM?

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 12:40 AM, Jeff Meyer j...@gwhat.org wrote:

 For example, requiring that any data imported into OSM have a lifetime
 maintenance plan seems like something that we don't require of *any* OSM
 data entry.

I don't think that we've discussed a lifetime mainteince plan
anywhere, but with most OSM data, it wouldn't be necessary. When I go
outside and add a restaurant POI, the maintence plan is that someone
else go out and do the same. But if the data is only sourceable from
the government, then one must come up with a plan for updating it
before doing an import.

(I can expand on this if necessary).

 All of the rules about observability and verifiability apply to country and
 state borders, as well, as Mike states, but we include them and somehow
 improve them.

We do include them, and as I've said, they've been a source of agita.

We simply can't improve state or municipal boundries.

 Neighborhoods are not a relevant comparison. There can be defined boundary
 neighborhoods and human perceptions of those boundaries, and the two can
 have different outlines - they are both correct.

And we do a poor job with both, so let's fix that.

 The inclusion of this information - as a few others have mentioned, is
 extremely helpful when going across doubletrack and unimproved roads in the
 American west.

That sounds like a good argument to make it available on a map, but
that doesn't mean it belongs in OSM's croudsourced dataset.

 Last year, I road a mountain bike from Durango, CO to Moab,
 UT with a group of friends. Whether we were in private, BLM, FS, or stat
 land made quite a difference in what we could and could not do off the
 roads, which in turn could have helped us with route planning. And, we could
 have improved the data by tracking POIs at the boundaries of these lands -
 they're usually pretty well marked.

Sounds like you should have that data on your map then, as an available layer.

- Serge

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Re: [Talk-us] Anyone ever talked about adding more Land Ownership data to OSM?

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 1:43 AM, Michael Patrick geodes...@gmail.com wrote:

 So there too, is a potential win for OSM. We could rely on current, highly
 accurate public domain boundry data and use that for rendering, geolocation
 and other places, while keeping it out of the OSM dataset.

 Please expand on this.

Okay.

 There are already communities around Disaster Relief,
 etc., and good etiquette would dictate that I wouldn't go in and edit their
 data.

You wouldn't go in and edit OSM disaster relief data? Why not? If I
had local knowledge of data in OSM that was of higher quality or newer
than what I found, I'd go in and fix it. I think HOT would want that.
If any other disaster group using OSM felt that this was
inappropriate, then they don't understand OSM.

 Conceptually, there is already a convention in place for a separate
 user account for a mass import, would it really be too much of a stretch
 that there be a separate access for changing that data ( for instance
 boundaries)?

We don't have these kinds of access controls. We why would we want to?
If a group needs static data, then they can use their own data with
OSM as a separate layer.

 Also, there are warning bells in Potlatch when I deleted a
 duplicate object - if the object concerned was one of these boundaries,
 maybe something similar occurs, if not a full stop?

There are only two possibilities here:

1. You could have something to add to the data
2. You can't have something to add to the data

In the first case, the editor shouldn't be stopping you.

In the second case, then the data doesn't belong in OSM.

 Just at the Federal Level, they have already dumped  400,000  geospatial
 datasets, and many states and counties are following suit with Open Data
 initiatives. Of course tree bettles and stuff aren't candidates for the OSM
 cartography, but some of those will enhance the end map for OSM (and
 derivative projects) users.

Some may, some may not. And some (like boundaries) are useful on the
map, but not in the OSM dataset.

- Serge

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[Talk-us] Import Committee Mailing List

[Serge Wroclawski]

Hi folks,

We finally have the new mailing list set up for the import committee as
discussed in December.

Initially I'd like to ask for folks to join who are interested in
participating as committee members. Committee members will be the folks
working with potential importers and will be initially focused on making
high quality documentation, both as educational material and as potential
community guidelines to help focus the work.

If you'd like to help with the effort, you can go to the list description
page at http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports-us and subscribe.

Thanks everyone.

- Serge
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