This is a vision from a user in US. In Europe the situation is dramatically different, and OSM is far better than proprietary solutions. The fact is that US contributors did not embrace OSM as much as they could have done, and then they left proprietary solutions take the lead everywhere.
Outside US and Europe, and notably in developping countries, OSM is already better than proprietary solutions that are full of errors, approximations, or extremely incomplete. But yes OSM is still too slow to grow there and it could easily be overwhelmed there by proprietary solutions (notably by Google creating maps based an automated imagery processing). But develoing countries prefer avoiding this dependency and want to develop accurate maps based on local contributions and with the possibility for local governements and for NGOs to focus specific areas forgotten by major proprietary map producers (which cannot infer lot of details and notably local names, translations, social and community development, small commercial activities, or even accurate roads taking into account their real usability or assesment of risks caused by floods or damaged surfaces, and the more specific usage not just by 4-wheeled cars but also by motorcycles, bikes, traction by animal, tracks created by them or by pastoral/nomadic agriculture, or their seasonal state). In developing countries or poor areas, proprietary maps only focus on major urban centers, just to locate shops, they cannot locate correctly the taxis, small buses, markets, or religious places and many community areas, so these maps are almost unusable (all they can produce correctly is aerial imagery and some automated processing of buildings, full or errors because buildings are hard to determine in dense cities: see the example of Mexico or Bangladesh !). Moist prorietary maps have imported "blindly" some poor data created initially with lot of difficulties by local authorities (most of these are completely outdated, even the names are now false). So where OSM is loosing ground ? Basically only in US, but this can change (even if proprietary maps are attempting to keep the lead, by creating "cute" maps with lot of tools, what they create is a dangerous dependancy on how US citizens perceive their territory and what they can or cannot do on it). There's no real reason why US cannot progress on OSM like what happened in Europe. What is only needed is more involvement by the public (and unfortunately, US still does not have a really active OSM US chapter organization that can also become a force of proposition to federal and local governments and all their agencies). So we should urge US users to creating local communities in each one of US state, to become state chapters, and founding an association/federation of these state chapter that would become the OSM US chapter in the OSM Foundation. This can start already is some states where there are very active members (e.g. in NY, FL, CA states, and in DC). In the Midwest, there's still a severe absence of contributors. The OSM US federation should work on creating and sustaining the local state chapters, with help of universities, or Wikimedia chapters, or important NGOs (like the American Red Cross), or other partners (HOT). It seems that most US users don't care much about OSM, and OSM is in fact hidden by other US companies working with OSM data (but not only), such as Mapbox. 2018-02-17 10:05 GMT+01:00 Shohreh <codecompl...@free.fr>: > Vous l'avez peut-être déjà vu passer: > > "Why OpenStreetMap is in Serious Trouble" by Serge Wroclawski > https://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2018/02/16/osm-is-in-trouble/ > > > > -- > Sent from: http://gis.19327.n8.nabble.com/France-f5380434.html > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-fr mailing list > Talk-fr@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-fr >
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