For what it's worth, I tested the hypothesis that Go uses OSM by walking http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/142843552. It's a highway=footway inside a leisure=park, which I added in OSM years ago and still isn't in Google, Bing, ESRI, or HERE (they do have the rest of the town mapped). This town is generally pretty boring to play Go: no gym, 3 stops very far apart, and rather few spawns. I've been playing Go regularly for a few months, here and in a much more Go-friendly town.
While this is only an anecdotal result, there are clearly a lot more spawns on this walk than in the surrounding area (I regularly get 10-15 spawns on this 700m footway, but only 1-2 covering the same distance along the primary to get there). IMHO, the biggest news here is that (a subsidiary of) Google is using OSM data in a high-profile product. If this is true, this is a very big "switch2osm" story and it'd be great PR for OSM. I encourage other OSMers to test suitable areas. If the OSM community (which is IMHO better suited at asserting this than the Go community) can gain enough confidence that Go is indeed using OSM data, a friendly and public request from the OSMF to get OSM credited in Go would be in order. Concerning the fear that Go players will deteriorate the OSM data to suit their Go needs, I'm not too worried. Being aware of potential bad edits is good, but we've dealt with problematic user groups before (bitcoin shops for example). Having more OSM contributors is always good, but contributors coming from the Go community would be particularly so, because it is has demographic that differ from the OSM average (most notably by being 63% women), and OSM sorely needs more contributor diversity. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
