On 24/03/2016 15:50, James Umbanhowar wrote:
Regardless of the community's eventual solution, I think the most
important part of this event was the lack of engagement of Caliparks
and Stamen with the community.

Well, let's cut the individual editor a bit of slack here. They've done exactly 16 edits to OSM, and I'm sure that before my 16th edit I'd done a few silly things too :)

If you look at http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions?c=United States you'll see lots of "hello and welcome" messages (some from people in the US, some from people outside) explaining to new mappers how to get the hang of things.


Is there a similar process for
institutional (business, government, non-profit) editing of data as
there is for imports?  There should be.  I think institutional
engagement with OSM can bring many benefits, but has similar dangers as
imports.


I'm not aware of anything currently - a mapper is a mapper is a mapper - although there's fairly regularly been discussions within the community about how to work with "institutional" editing. I suspect the first thing that comes as a surprise to e.g. someone mapping on behalf of a business is that they just think of OSM as a dataset or a map; they don't expect it to talk to them when they add stuff to it.

When a business tries to talk to OSM I suspect it comes as a bit of a surprise that there's not much of a hierarchy - there are just people adding data, and people trusting other people to do various jobs (writing editors, creating map styles, ensuring that international boundaries don't get broken) because they've done that job well in the past. Everyone complains about everyone else, but somehow it seems to work...

Another thing that a business might not be prepared for is the need to compromise - that their vision of what and how things should be mapped may need to be discussed and considered among others. Sometimes organisations think that they can just dump their data into OSM, and it's job done, when instead people in OSM will tell them they need to think about data quality, maintenance and other things. For example, I found one of the paragraphs of the precursor post to the one that Marc Gemis posted interesting:

https://hi.stamen.com/on-the-right-trail-39e386ba977f#.gggx7v77j

"We are also spreading the word about how to use the “social_path” tag through social media, the OSM community, and in our work with other parks and public land agencies and grassroots groups such as Nerds for Nature and Maptime."

It's a real shame that one of those "grassroots groups" didn't actually include OpenStreetMap :)

Best Regards,

Andy


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