Hi Tim, On 11.05.2018 17:19, Tim Frey wrote: > Out of this, we consider, heavily, to “open source” the licensing of the > user created STAPPZ content for the OSM community. In addition, we also > consider to open source the backend of STAPPZ and the IOS and Android > app to make a community project out of it.
I'm going to split this reply into two parts: About the content, and about the software itself. As for the content, a lot depends on if you can publish the images under the terms of an open license.¹ That's a legal question, but probably also a bit of a social one (i.e. would this be in line with what the creators expected when they shared their images on your app, or would they be unpleasantly surprised/unhappy about this). Assuming the answer is that yes, you can publish them, the next question is what to do with the images. OSM does not currently have an image hosting platform, so if we're only talking about contributing the images, they would need to be donated to a separate platform. The obvious recipient for such an image donation would be Wikimedia Commons, as they're the most popular repository for open-licensed media. Images on Commons can be linked with OpenStreetMap POIs² and are used as such by some OSM-based maps. Of course, they're also used by Wikipedia and its sister projects – notably Wikitravel, which is a crowdsourced travel guide (although much closer to the traditional book format than your project). A caveat is that such a donation would likely require some manual effort to filter out lower-quality pictures or duplicates, and to add meaningful descriptions. Still, assuming the legalities work out, it seems feasible to donate the images and would be a generous contribution to the open content ecosystem. Ok, so let's talk about the app and backend a bit. I'm not sure how familiar you are with OSM's organizational model, but as a rule we're very decentralized – even core components of OSM are being developed as mostly independent Open Source projects. For you, this means that even if there's community interest, any re-use of your project would probably still start out with _you_ spearheading its development, re-imagining it as something you believe fits a need of the OSM community, and trying to gain mindshare in the OSM contributor and developer community. Of course, this may be at odds with your goal to focus on other projects. If this does not discourage you, though, let's consider what needs the software could serve. I don't have any amazing ideas to offer, but I could see two basic roles in the OSM ecosystem an image platform might potentially be able to fill. Broadly speaking: * Images could be used internally by OSM contributors as a data source for mapping in addition to sources as aerial imagery and GPS tracks. * Images could be displayed by user-facing sites and apps alongside OSM data. (I believe this is what you were getting at with your Google Maps comparison.) The former use case is already partially covered by Mapillary/OpenStreetCam, so the question is if there's enough of a niche left for another app. The latter seems more ambitious. As I mentioned before, mappers are currently using tags like image=* with links to external platforms to add images to OSM POI. Those links can technically point anywhere, although Wikimedia Commons currently appears to be the most popular platform to host the images. Inviting users (including non-mappers) to easily contribute images to a dedicated, OSM-affiliated platform might be a worthwhile cause. Not sure how well this fits your platform's existing social features, though. Tobias ¹ Typically one of the open CC licenses: CC0, CC-BY or CC-BY-SA. ² Using http://wiki.osm.org/Key:image or http://wiki.osm.org/Key:wikimedia_commons _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
