On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 4:53 PM, Jason Remillard <remillard.ja...@gmail.com> wrote: > Beyond attributing OSM, hopefully our large commercial users can take > it a step further and provide a way of editing OSM from their user > interface.
I'm really interested in this topic, but it's tricky. Long ago when I was at MapQuest, some kook (me?) floated a crazy idea that we should switch the whole thing over to OSM -- all 50mm monthly unique users at the time -- and give the tools to edit any errors (this was Potlatch II back then). Quite obviously this didn't/wouldn't happen! Why not? Because if you make a venn diagram of users who want to use a local/mapping product and users who want to edit one *actively*, there's honestly not much overlap. Products need to do right by their users. We offered the ability to edit the map on the open products at MapQuest, but I don't remember there being much new interest. I suspect this is the same for Foursquare -- people use Foursquare for the social & recommendation aspects, not to edit a map. The use of *passive* user data to improve a map would be a lot easier, and of course mapping products with their own datasets do this all the time. But it's not easy to do that with OSM due to licensing and community issues. And that's all good, of course! I would be interested to see a new class of companies using the OSM API, signing in new users with OSM's oauth service, and then using OSM as their database of record for POIs, etc. If a new entrepreneur starting something like Yelp or Foursquare now were to do this successfully, that would be interesting. Of course the point can't be "editing a map" -- there has to be something to lure in your average user. -Randy _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
