Hi, There are some technical issues that make imports more complicated than needed. First is the entire user account thing. I don't understand why it is needed. If something gets screwed up, either way, we are reverting the change set. Besides discouraging people form the import, I don't know we benefit it brings. It is like a residual limb that we needed before we had change sets, but keep seem to bring ourselves to let it go. The second technical issue that the apparent JOSM will upload a large change set that can't be easily reverted. It would be good, if ether JOSM would chop up large changes below the actual change set limit, or the 50K limit eliminated on the server side. Not being able to revert something in JOSM is a big issue. We can't be all relaxed about things if we can't do reverts.
Some people think all imports are are bad, some are just worried they will be screwed up, in either case the result is the same, a hostile mob waiting for you on lists. This has the effect of driving most of the constructive import discussion off list. For my import, 80% of the useful feedback was off list in private emails because people don't want to deal with the rude behavior in the list. I made a bunch of decisions that might seem weird to people that just follow the list. But I assure you that I cared a whole lot what the 4 people who signed up actually help thought about all of the issues. For example, I was upset/surprised today that Greg said we went too fast. I had to weight peoples opinions on the list much lower because they don't have any skin in the game (not helping do the work, not from MA, they have an agenda contrary to the project goal, and they are not in the loop). Regardless, this is not that much fun, why go through this. If you setup a user group to "help" with the imports, I think it will be overrun with people that don't like all imports or are terrified of them being screwed up. It will be like the UN human rights committee. More hostility, but now with an official sounding group name. In a sane world, there would be mappers that would be dedicated to imports. They would build up expertise in licensing, data conversion, batch imports, large scale reverts, OSM processes, merging, efficiently communicating with locals, etc. However, if you came out and said "I do only imports", you would be getting hazed by the two groups of people all of the time. Does not sound like fun to me. This is my most important point. The map in US is not mature. We need people right now more than we need a good map. I would accept a screwed map of MA in the short term in return for 20 new dedicated MA mappers. We should be optimizing everything we do to get more help, and if the map needs to get screwed up occasionally to accomplish that I am 110% OK with that tradeoff. This project is not going to take in the US without a ton more mappers. The population of MA, is 6.5 million people. My little tiny itty bitty state is larger than Denmark, Slovakia, Finland, Ireland, Lithuania, Latvia, ,etc, etc. I am not sure we even have 25 active mappers in the state. Until the people that are still angry about the tiger import from 5 years ago let it go, and the people that are scared of screw ups, decided that right now, building the community is more important than the map, nothing is going to change. I think we are likely stuck in this rut for a long while. I might as well be wishing for world peace. Jason. On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 11:50 AM, Alex Barth <a...@mapbox.com> wrote: > Two more quesions just came to my mind: > > - Are there any volunteers who would love to run with guiding imports better? > - Would also love to learn Jason Remillard's perspective of what could be > done better given that he's in the middle of working on the MassGIS building > import :) > > On Dec 17, 2012, at 9:42 AM, Serge Wroclawski <emac...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Folks, >> >> I know what it's like to be excited about OSM, and I know what it's >> like to be frustrated with OSM, struggling with low data quality, or >> lack of data altogether. >> >> And then you get access to a large dataset, and you know that having >> it in OSM would improve things. It would improve the quality, and >> maybe even get people mapping. At the same time, I think many of you >> have seen the damage that bad imports can do. >> >> The result is that folks like myself and others are frustrated by the >> import process, and folks who have good, useful datasets are frstrated >> by the import process. >> >> So I'm proposing a new committee, run by the US Chapter, to help guide >> imports and large edits. >> >> This will give step by step guidance to those who want to import data, >> and offer the larger community time to review and provide feedback. >> >> When I helped create the US Chapter several years ago, this was one of >> the main reasons I thought it should exist, but I think there's >> finally the amount of data and interest to justify it. >> >> What do folks think? >> >> - Serge >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Talk-us mailing list >> Talk-us@openstreetmap.org >> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us > > Alex Barth > http://twitter.com/lxbarth > tel (+1) 202 250 3633 > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-us mailing list > Talk-us@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
