Dear Frederik and all, I’d like to apologize for a couple of things, on behalf of Stamen, GreenInfo Network, and CaliParks.
First, we've done a really bad job of communicating, and we'll do our best to improve on that. Second, the language used in the subtitle of the CityLab article (that CaliParks is trying to "mute" OSM) is not how we would describe the situation. That makes it sound like OSM is bad and we're trying to avoid using it. In fact the big picture is the opposite: rather than ignore OSM, we want to expose OSM to a wider audience and to grow the OSM community. Many of the park managers we're working with have dismissed OSM entirely, and we're trying to convince them how useful and important it is to have the public contributing their knowledge to the map. Now, accepting that we should have communicated more and gained consent from the OSM community first, I want to point out that this is a very small number of trails we're talking about here. According to taginfo at this moment, there are only 17 features tagged with highway=social_path. It's true that the first comments on our changesets came 5 months ago, but in our defense, we haven't been tagging any additional social_path features since that time. We had always intended to seek input from the community to make this tag an officially recognized one, or to come up with an alternative solution. We were mindful that we didn't want to do a lot of editing before talking to the community, which is why we didn't do any further editing. In that sense, please think of those 17 features as an experiment to feed into the discussion that we're all having now. For 5 months our plans have been on the back burner, and we've made no further edits with that tag. But this week (with the launch of a new version of CaliParks) we planned to start the discussion in earnest. A few days ago we started an RFC on the wiki [1] but we hadn't yet sent an email to this list or the tagging list to get input. We're glad that discussion is happening now, a few days before we were ready! Also, I'd like to clarify Frederik's comment about this being "commercial" editing. One of the reasons that this has been on the backburner for 5 months is because this is a project that is led by non-profits and for non-profits (yes, Stamen is a for-profit entity but our partner GreenInfo is a non-profit, and CaliParks is funded by philanthropies on behalf of the Parks Forward Commission, also a non-profit). This is a small, scrappy operation being done for the benefit of the public, not to exploit OSM for corporate greed. I'd also like to emphasize that this is very much on-the-ground mapping. By bringing park managers into the OSM fold, we're getting some of the most local, most on-the-ground experts you could ask for. This is very different from remotely tracing paths from imagery or bad gps traces. We fully believe in mapping "what's on the ground", but of course there are often differing opinions about how to tag what's on the ground. Above all, I want to emphasize that we're not wedded to this particular tag. The features using this tag are very small in number, and localized to a small area in Marin County, California. If the community decides that a different tagging scheme is more appropriate, we're happy to change what we're doing. Again, I'd like to apologize for our lack of communication, and I look forward to the discussion we're having now. I'll send an email the to tagging list shortly. Alan McConchie Stamen Design [1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Social_path _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
