First of all, I feel this question must have been asked before, but I couldn’t find it. Sorry if this is the zillion-th duplicate.
As the title goes, I’m not sure how to map multiple activities in the same building.
In one situation many different activities have offices in the same building, but they all share the only entrance from the road. In another situation, three associations share an office: the same rooms host a union on Monday, a food bank on Tuesday, and another union on Wednesday.
I suppose I should place multiple nodes, but should I overlap them or place a slight offset? The offset would be better for reading, but especially in the second situation, it could be confusing, since the shared office is on a wall where there are five other entrances as well (on the north side of the internal court of this building, if that helps).
An important thing to keep in mind is that we are not a business directory. We are a map (database). Therefore we want to record what is “on the ground”. The less the presence of something “on the ground”, the less its importance for us.
In the extreme, if there was a lawyer’s office containing the “headquarters” of 1,000 companies, all duly listed on a huge plaque near the letter box - we’d generally not try record those 1,000 names (even though, somewhere in the OSM universe, some over-eager mapper surely will - the community consensus would very likely point towards ignore).
As for shared use of rooms, I’d say try to capture what it “looks like” from the outside. There will certainly be some internal arrangement (office belongs to A, is rented out to B, who sub-lets to C and D) but that, in my opinion, is of lesser importance than the outward appearance of the situation. If one of the users of the shared space has a big sign outside and people go there for consultations, whereas the others quietly rent office space, then map the clear and obvious user and drop the others. If the others have customers/visitors and signs as well, then use individual nodes slightly offset.
But as I said - we’re not a business directory and it is not our main aim to record every single business or organisation that might be renting part-time office space somewhere.
Ideally their position would correspond to location within building.
(and yes, mapping unsigned offices is unlikely to be a good idea, though I would have low requirements for sign. And mapping registered location of business is in general a terrible idea, many businesses have no presence whatsoever at their registered location)
Thank you both for your answers, you made it clear how to map in my situation.
About whether to map the places - I see that part of my question isn’t well worded. The offices I’m talking about are not headquarters dedicated to some internal activity, they provide services to the public in general. E.g. workers union A says “if you need help filling in your tax forms, come at our office at place X on Monday”, and workers union B says “if you need help filling in your tax forms, come at our office at place X on Wednesday”. I think this is a weird arrangements from the municipality to grant spaces to multiple groups. The situation is similar for the associations: they are a music school, a library and an art gallery, and they happen to have their own spaces to hold their lessons/readings/exhibitions in the same building. Also, they all have similar signs on the road.
Since they provide services that anyone can use, I think they are useful to map - am I wrong?
The simplest way to map multiple small businesses/clubs/amenities in a single building is to place multiple nodes at the building with appropriate tags, such as: