How should non-OSM projects advertise themselves here?

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There are many projects around the OSM ecosystem that use OSM data to achieve their goals - this might be commercial companies using OSM data as part of their business model, and it includes the many humanitarian organisations using OSM too. This of course isn’t a problem - OSM data is designed to be used.

However, sometimes lines can be blurred when a project is described (here, on the OSM wiki, or elsewhere) without making clear who or what is behind it. The processes around these sorts of projects are covered by https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Organised_Editing_Guidelines - there’s a clear set of steps that projects should follow, and the first bullet point in the documentation list there is to describe “the coordinating person or organisation”.

Occasionally these commercial and other organisations will want to talk about their projects here, for example https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/welcome-to-the-tasking-manager-collective-how-to-join-contribute/679. Obviously that makes sense (it wouldn’t be much of a project without contributors) but should there be a clarification that in cases like this there should be a clarification about which organisation is involved (in this case it appears to be https://www.hotosm.org/) and what their goal is - perhaps with a link to the appropriate https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Organised_Editing/Activities entry?

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How is this being currently handled in other OSM channels like mailing lists or the old forums? (or even irc/telegram/slack… other osm chat spaces)

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On IRC, you’d expect a discussion about a HOT tool to be in the #hotosm channel. On the lists, you’d expect it to be on the hot@openstreetmap.org mailing list. On the forum, you’d expect it to be in the (barely active) “Crisis mapping” subforum.

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Hi all. I’d welcome suggestions on how better to label and add any posts related to HOT products. For the example on tasking manager, I used these tags events, humanitarian, tasking-manager, tools. Were they helpful? @Richard also posted the same post in #tasking-manager Slack channels but wanted to make sure it is shared more widely through the discourse forum.

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This feels like an over reaction. Firstly the suggestion in the title that entities that use OSM data are “non-OSM” projects just seems unfair. They should be as welcome here as anyone else. Second, there is no need for a rule here. If people post using “we” and forget to say who “we” refers to, then a polite question is all that’s needed. Let’s not make this a hostile place - there are enough of them already.

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@Petya_Kangalova I think that might have been a different Richard - I don’t really use Slack!

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Welcome to the Tasking Manager Collective: how to join & contribute! - #2 by Petya_Kangalova is written in some corporateNGOspeak and does not really explain what is happening, but as I understand it - Tasking Manager is not qualifying as “non-OSM project”

I have some serious problems with HOT but describing it as “non-OSM project” is a quite weird take.

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On Discord? warn/kick/ban for posting about non-OSM projects in OSM-specific channel (depending on severity: in general it would be treated as offtopic and/or spam)

On Telegram? The same.

Though minor discussion that diverged from something ongoing is OK (“I went cycling on my new bike and mapped XYZ → oh, you finally bought it? which one?” would be fine)

But “here is link to my NFT scam project” would be an instant full eternal ban. Likely even in cases where it exploits OSM and is OSM-related.

though HOT would be considered as on topic as it is OSM-adjacent at least

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I didn’t mean that you posted on Slack, my sentence was not clear. I wanted to tag you to let you know that I also posted on Slack, should have included a comma after tagging your name. Hope that makes it clear…

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