In New Zealand every Member of Parliament has an electorate office in the area that they have been elected to represent.
Members of the public can go to the office to discuss issues of importance to them with them or their staff.
These also exist in the UK , Australia and potentially other countries but I have been unable to locate examples in Open Streetmap or diacover how these offices should be tagged. Can someone help
Together with government=office!
On the ones I’ve tagged, I’ve also included name=<So & So> MP, State / Federal Member for
A few years ago, a tagging mailing list discussion settled on office=politician based on the role of these offices in the UK. Some mappers wanted to avoid office=government because “the Government” refers to the majority party in the UK system.
That conclusion is illogical in the U.S. for multiple reasons, so I’ve refused to go along with it. Instead, I’ve continued to use office=government government=legislator for constituent service offices, contrasting them with office=political_campaign for campaign offices. But I’d assume New Zealand’s system has more in common with the UK than the U.S. anyways.
Here is how I mapped an MP’s office in Canada when I looked at how to do it a year and a half ago, no idea if it’s the best way, but it’s one way: Node: Honourable Ahmed Hussen (12080345921) | OpenStreetMap
A few years ago I mapped (what we call) a constituency office for a provincial Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) as office=government, government=office. More recently I mapped another one as office=government, government=legislative.
Not saying either way was “right” or “best”, just giving examples.
An office=politician tag seems to be more appropriate solution in Polish context, as using the office=government, government=legislative combination would unnecesarily suggest that people working in such an offices are employed by government.
Mapped my local MPs constituency office https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/12977236086
Safe to assume that the ‘politican’ in office=politican was a typo…? 
I understood that personal information should not be tagged in OSM. Surely name=persons name should not be included, even if it is their named public office? Or is this an exception that proves the rule?
Literally everyone in that constituency ought to know the name of their Member of Parliament, and in my experience it’s extremely common for the MP’s name to be prominently displayed on the door. This isn’t privileged or otherwise private information.
If a person’s name is included in the name of the POI it’s perfectly acceptable to add it to the map. I similarly wouldn’t balk at adding name=Philip Marlowe, Private Detective if the door to the place quite literally has “Philip Marlowe, Private Detective” painted on it.
Oh I understand the nature of the publicity side of being an MP, good and bad. I also realise that OSM can claim it’s the name of an office that is probably a legal person.
Its verifiable as in the name is in on the sign.
No different to the 1000s of shops or businesses with the owners name.
Fair point
I understand it’s more about private information rather than personal information. The documented consensus and best practices in Mapping private information - OpenStreetMap Wiki states:
Do not map where individuals live; specifically, do not add the names of inhabitants to dwellings. […]
Do not name individuals in OpenStreetMap tags unless their name is displayed on a business sign visible from the street, is part of the business name, or is otherwise publicly available. For example, tagging operator=* based on data printed on receipts is normal.
No prohibition on names used publicly in a business or official capacity.
(Just to state this explicitly… don’t map where the MPs/officials live. Do map where their public offices are.)
Just to clarify my earlier post, I use government=legislator for an individual legislator’s constituent service office, whereas government=legislative is documented as the tag for a legislature’s offices, which are generally more centralized.
I think your legislator vs legislative distinction makes a lot sense. And thanks for linking that mailing list discussion earlier, I have since read it.
Like you said, it seems that the chief objection the British mappers had to using office=government was wrangling with terminology in the Westminster tradition, where the members of the party leading the House of Commons are said to sit “in government”, and MPs who are members of the other parties sit “in opposition”. So an opposition MP, though an elected member of the legislature, isn’t part of “the government” per se. Personally I think this isn’t a particularly important distinction to make, because either way the constituency office’s purpose is to serve as a contact point for the legislative branch of the government.
office=politician at first blush seemed to be a reasonable compromise, but the more I think about it the more I think it’s more problematic than office=government, government=legislator (or the like). A politician is anybody who makes a living in politics, whether they actually hold any position in political office or not. The constituency offices are (at least here) staffed and operated by the individual politicians—again, not “the government” per se—but they’re operated specifically in their capacity as an elected member of the legislature, and funded mostly through the legislature’s internal operations budget. The purpose of the constituency office is for the constituents to contact their elected member of the legislature, and for that elected representative to receive their comments and concerns and pass them onward to the governmental apparatus in whatever capacity they may have; regardless of whether they’re a member of an opposition party, member of the governing party, or even a member of cabinet. (In point of fact for many years the member of the provincial legislative assembly representing my constituency was the premier him/herself, and they had both a local constituency office in their capacity as MLA and a separate Premier’s office [in the capital] in their capacity as head of the legislative branch of the government.)
The offices of a prospective legislator (NOT their campaign office, just an office space they have outside of the election cycle) could ostensibly be tagged office=politician too, which completely muddles the purpose.
And mapping the office of every prospective politician could easily turn into a full-time job. (Official Voting Results: Battle River - Crowfoot 
)