On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 11:32 AM Ian Dees <ian.d...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hearing that Americans "inhabit a culture of ad-hoc expedience and > sloppiness" or getting an email from a member of the Data Working Group > threatening to revert your contributions is not particularly inspiring. It's > no wonder it's so hard to build a community in the US. Our own community is > working against us! > > Let's not tone down the rhetoric: OSM is a great project and we should be > excited about it. Let's just stop pushing away mappers who are trying to help.
TL;DR: I am an American myself, and I do recognize that our standard of mapping is considerably less tidy than what the Europeans have come to expect. We have, in fact, mapped rather sloppily and with ad-hoc expedience. We've had to. If we tried to reach the European standard out of the gate, most of our map would be entirely blank! We do the best we can with the resources we have, and often fall short of the mark. Don't put us down for that, we're aware of it, and we're trying, really! And try to be patient when we get prickly - we all get tired of hearing in how many ways we fall short. (More details...) We inhabit rather a messy country, from the data management perspective. We confound the tagging people with ambiguities, mess up the map with indefinite boundaries, don't have a well-defined system for road classification, and so on. It's untidy, but that's how our country works. Please don't try to get us to fix it, that won't be productive. For just one example, I know there are township lines in the Adirondacks that have overlaps and gores. You know what? They do on the official maps, and they do in the field. Mostly, they're in the backwoods where nobody cares. Some of them haven't ever been surveyed accurately. (Gore Mountain, https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/357562059, is named because it lay between townships for decades. Then Barton found garnets there, and both neighbouring townships contended for the right to tax the mines. That border, at least, got resolved.) We still like to map our administrative regions with closed polygons, because so much of the rendering software breaks when administrative boundaries fail to close. We fudge the errors of closure. That's an unclean, ad-hoc expedient, and reflects precisely what we have in the field! We have a shortage of mappers trying to cover an extremely large land area. We may also have other cultural issues that inhibit our recruiting - I seem to recall that in addition to having much less population density, we have fewer mappers per capita. I'm at a loss to explain that, but I will confess to not being a terribly effective recruiter, myself. I talk to people about it. Few act upon my talk. It could be that our recruiting was irretrievably damaged by such things as the TIGER import - Frederik would certainly argue the case, and present provocative sociological studies advancing the claim. But, for weal or woe, that train left the station years before I got here. I try to pick up after the tiger. It's a daunting prospect, and I've not got very far. It's not my chief interest in mapping. I more got into the project to do hiking maps, and a lot of my mapping has been devoted to that aim - including trying to produce trail maps in less-popular areas where no accurate trail maps exist or have ever existed. This, too, implies a certain degree of expediency and sloppiness. I don't *like* it that https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/4286650 was largely produced from single GPS tracks without redundancy, but gathering even the data that I had meant a couple of weeks spent in the backcountry, without network access, and with access to AC power to recharge my devices at only two intermediate points. I'm sure that the accuracy leaves much to be desired, and the currency of the data has fallen behind as well. I know of at least one reroute around beaver activity that has not been mapped, simply because I don't know anyone who's got in there with a GPS and a functioning battery. But it's still more accurate than the latest map from National Geographic! We do indeed have newcomers leaving awkward messes behind. Some of them claim to be acting in the name of big projects. My guess is that the OpenSidewalks project people at University of Washington, if indeed they're still a going concern, have not even heard of the people who decided to contribute to their effort at the University of Texas at Austin. Just because the UT-Austin people identified with the project's goals, doesn't mean that there's any coordination between them. (You can think of a lot of these projects as 'OSM in miniature, without the DWG'.) By the way, I'm not impugning the DWG in any respect. I've had to contact them a few times, for this and for that, and never met with anything but patience, helpful hard work and good cheer. That's what I've seen in my interactions with Paul, Toby, Andy, and yes, even Frederik. For that reason, I'm sure that the remark was a momentary lapse. Nevertheless, it was infuriating enough that I can surely understand Bryan's equally ill-considered reply, which I also ascribe to a heated moment. _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
