On Jan 25, 2018, at 12:16 PM, john whelan <jwhelan0...@gmail.com> wrote: > About six years ago I wanted to import the local bus stops but the licences > weren't aligned. It took about five years for the Canadian Federal > Government to first adopt an Open Government license that was open enough and > then for the City of Ottawa to adopt it. It still needed to be looked over > by the legal working group before being accepted by OpenStreetMap.
Yes, Canadian "public" (municipal, provincial and federal government) open data (OD) licenses appear to have a long history of evolving to become ODbL-compatible. Some very good work has been done here and it continues to evolve to a better state. For the BC2020i, OSM has two wikis that "track" what is going on here: https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/WikiProject_Canada/Building_Canada_2020 is the project's "front door." For a project with scope this huge (ten million buildings, nationwide in the geographically second-largest country on Earth...) communicating via wiki is very much "the OSM way" — and this BC2020i, simply put, IS an OSM project. While this wiki's Governance section does say that (in these early days of the project) much intra-project communication happened via email amongst the early movers and shakers, it also says "we are working to improve this." PLEASE, movers and shakers within BC2020i: wiki, wiki, wiki! A great deal of Project Management (critical to better establish in these early days of BC2020i) and indeed intra-project communication (status, how far along, what's current and upcoming...) can be communicated, very WELL-communicated, via this wiki. Go! The other wiki (linked to in the "main" BC2020i wiki's "Inventory of Current Building Data Sets" section): https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/WikiProject_Canada/Building_Canada_2020/building_OD_tables does a good (early) job of displaying in three tables open data on buildings at municipal, provincial and federal/other/thematic levels. Again, this project is in early days, and license compatibility with ODbL is also in early-to-middle (with encouraging progress) phases. As a veteran OSMer both familiar with and with having very hands-on experience at nationwide projects (bicycle routes, rail infrastructure and passenger routes...) I am encouraged to see this table growing, license compatibility improving, and the "main" BC2020i wiki solidifying. However, as a passionate OSM contributor, I'd like to see the "walled gardens" of more-private email communications and GitHub documentation come down, with such communications migrating their way into our wiki structure: doing so is an important acknowledgement that this is an OSM project (and it is). > The city though provided a file of every building outline in Ottawa. Then it > was just a matter of adding tags to the buildings for Stats Canada. That was > the Stat Can pilot project. And, in my opinion, it was a successful demonstration pilot project, a solid foundation for BC2020i to launch further progress. Keep up the good work! > The import did need to be carefully handled. As EVERY import does! (Especially an important pilot project one, and in the capital city, no less). The BC2020i links to the Ottawa Import Plan, which appears to be (as it is) OK documentation as to how the data were "harmonized from OD sources into OSM." However, WikiProject BC2020 (and that's what it is) needs to go much further, documenting a REAL Import Plan for the entire project. Our Import Guidelines at https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines MUST be followed, with an eye towards making the (nationwide, extensible to local sub-projects) Import Plan flexible enough to be handled by the full gamut of scenarios which may contribute data: from high school tech/open data "fests" to Mapping Parties and Meetup groups, to large-scale (university-based, technology-company based, stakeholder-based...) data import intentions at a more local level. > If you can get your hands on an Open Data file containing the building > outlines with the correct licensing it does make the task a lot easier. > Teaches the students about the value of Open Data at the same time. Yes, "having OD" is PART of it, certainly making easier achievement of the goal (vision) of BC2020i. However, as WikiProject BC2020 is an OSM project, there is more to it than that: OSM's tenets of good data entry (especially when imported from public sources) MUST absolutely resonate with future uploads. Our wiki as a "project blueprint" and a nationwide Import Plan, flexible enough to be locally-modifiable to be successful, MUST "rule" the HOWs of data importation. This "nationwide/project-wide" Import Plan, flexible enough to handle multiple scenarios and flavors of building data is ripe (overdue?) for completion. It is an ambitious project, and I wish you the best of luck and success! SteveA California _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list Talk-ca@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
