To elaborate on what Frederik said a bit... The DWG has seen some what we're calling "organized mapping" which we can generally define as a set of mappers being directed or working on behalf of an organization.
The difference between what OSM experienced and what Wikipedia experiences regarding paid contributors is a bit different, so I'll elaborate on this a bit. For Wikipedia the issue is really about independence. If I work for GloboChem and write in Wikipedia that GloboChem has a wonderful environmental reputation, there's an issue of bias and possibly truth. That's not the kind of thing we're seeing or thinking about. Instead, we're seeing issues like: 1. One mapper (on behalf of an organization) mapping in a very sloppy way. This might be something like extranious nodes, disconnected roads or broken relations. These aren't necessarily wrong in the sense of vandalism, but they may not be correct either. 2. If you ask the mapper about what's going on, they don't answer. 3. You might see more than one account doing the same type of mapping 4. The DWG has to find the "responsible party" on their own because #2 and #3. This is not always easy, and it's often time consuming. 5. If the DWG sees that there's a lot of problems being caused by #1 or perhaps something more extreme, then even if we are able to get through to a single mapper, other accounts (that turn out to be from the same organization, though not necessarily the same person) continue the same problematic mapping activity in the same style 6. Organizations differ in how they want to be communicated with. Some want us to treat them as a single entity and use some external communication tool (ie not OSM messaging), while others want us to treat mappers as individuals, and sometimes they want both, depending on the context. This complexity puts a burden on the DWG to find the right communication channel for each mapper in each context, using up our volunteer time and resources. 7. Once a problem has been identified, it's often difficult to get the individual or organization to take ownership of the problem and especially to fix previous mistakes. 8. It's not infrequent for these organizations to be using remote mappers, so sometimes you will see things mapped how they think they should look based on where they live/how the imagery looks rather than the on the ground truth. This gets more complicared when conflicts arise between these remote mappers and existing mapped data from local contributors. It's not a matter of vandalism, because it's not malicious, but it can be hard to figure out the right way forward in these situations. The proposal, which was relatively modest IMHO, mainly focued around the issue of transparency, making it easier to identify when a mapper is working on behalf of a larger organization, and if they are, the best way to communicate with the organization. In my opinion this would benefit all of OSM, especially our concerned users who come to the DWG with these complaints. It would probably end up reducing or eliminating the need for DWG involvement in many cases. As Frederik implied, for some reason the discussion on this turned quite bitter. I think it's inevitable that we'll have to address this topic, but I get the impression that parts of our community aren't ready to address this topic yet. - Serge _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
