I’m not a native speaker of American English, but ”summer camp” is a fairly established real world concept, and it maps fairly well to ”leirikeskus” here in Finland. I.e. a facility for hosting multi-day stays for a group, typically children when they’re out of school, i.e. the summer.
Some sort of guided activity is typically provided and the location is often quite rural and the marketing may focus heavily on these aspects. But the main point is: your kids will be looked after in a safe location and kept too busy to get into too much trouble.
The facility itself might be rented out for other purposes, especially during the off season (who wants to own buildings that are unused for 3/4 of a year) but that doesn’t change what the facility is.
It’s not ”camp” as in ”camping”: there often is indoors accommodation. It’s ”summer” not because of any characteristic of the season, but because that’s when kids are not in school.
I prefer the “outdoor education center” term. They aren’t always used in summer vacation. There can be stays at other times. It’s similar to, or can be grouped in a category with team-building courses, or adventure challenges. tourism= can be considered to be used for the accommodation. Then leisure= can be this for activities.
As a side note, Overture team_building_activity has no corresponding tags listed yet Overture categories - OpenStreetMap Wiki
”Outdoor education centre” has the benefit of being a British English term and sounding more generic in some ways (but not in others, as mentioned). It also seems significantly more recent and less established than ”summer camp” (which you can find in, say, Oxford English Dictionary). The core meaning does seem more or less the same.
I have absolutely no sympathy for the idea of grouping summer camps with random other kinds of places where groups of people go to do things. We don’t do that for hotels, motels, hostels and chalets either.
On the topic of company retreats / team building in particular, that is an activity, not an established kind of facility. Some summer camps may market this kind of activity, but so do hotels, conference centres etc.
As a US English speaker, I agree with what a few others have posted above: “summer camp” is a well-established and well-understood term for a specific kind of facility. They can be used outside of summer and are still called “summer camps,” and they are still called “summer camps” in regions where there aren’t the four traditional seasons of temperate latitudes, e.g. Arizona or Hawaii (where the time of year between June and September is still called summer colloquially).
“Outdoor education centre” sounds unnatural, unspecific, and overly legalistic to my ear for these kinds of facilities: their main purpose is not always seen as educational, and they are not necessarily outdoors-focused either. And they really are not events venues of any kind. I think leisure=summer_camp is a good tag for these facilities and would welcome it being better supported in tooling/rendering, and the tag’s natural growth without much formal endorsement seems to support that mappers see it as filling a need.
For better or worse, id-tagging-schema’s preset names default to American English because that’s what the computing industry has standardized on as a development language. But we try to give other Englishes a good experience too via localizations, and of course the point of presets is that the underlying raw tags don’t have to be spelled or worded the same.
I don’t know if it’s also the case in British English, but the proposed alternative conflicts with a term that’s already established in the real world for very different facilities:
It’s unfortunate that it was named summer_camp since some camps operate year round and other camps specifically cater for winter, eg. snow camps.
Something like recreation_camp would have been a better choice, but the tag is already established now, and has 1,473 uses. I think best to accept leisure=summer_camp but define it as appropriate for any recreational camp, including snow camps. I’ve gone ahead and updated the wiki, but if we think that’s wrong happy to discuss.
Based on this we should encourage use of seasonal=* to specify seasonal camps.
The advantage of getting it into the tagging schema is we can localise the preset, so in areas they aren’t known as “Summer Camp” can set the preset name based on the localised term.
It’s probably well establish and well understood in the US, but not necessarily in other countries. Though I think this is okay, so long as we document the tag well enough, other countries can localise the term into something better.
I think having a tag called summer camp being used for other similar camps in winter or for tech camps and so on might be confusing even though it’s a well established term.
I think the tag needs further sub-tags anyways but then leisure=summer_camp + summer_camp=snow_camp/ski_camp would be really weird.
I think a generic leisure=recreation_camp would be more suitable for a widely adoptable tagging scheme. In German for example we also use the more generic term “Ferienlager” meaning holiday camp. But the term summer camp is also well known due to the influence of pop culture.
1400 uses is still a manageable amount of things to convert. The unfortunate part is that it has been in use since like 2014, so convincing people to shift might become an issue.
In the previous thread, I pointed out that a “summer camp” is technically a program rather than a facility. A summer camp can be held in a city park or sports center or even indoors. The nice ones are held on dedicated campgrounds, which may host other activities throughout the year or simply go dormant. Sometimes people just say “camp” to avoid restricting it to a particular season or activity.
Many of these campgrounds are being tagged with iD’s “Group Camping Area” preset for tourism=camp_sitegroup_only=yes that shows up if you search for “campground”. This tagging scheme has been popular for even longer than leisure=summer_camp and data consumers already support it well, as long as we’re OK with renderers marking them with the same as any tourism=camp_site. The “campsite” terminology is very confusing for American English speakers, but the preset already solves that problem.
On the other hand, if we want to map the “camp” programs themselves, we would need a distinct tag for them. (In the same manner, people sometimes use amenity=school to represent one of several educational institutions on a schoolground or amenity=place_of_worship for one of several congregations in a church building.) How about removing the “summer” to make it leisure=camp? We would just need to make sure that people continue using tourism=camp_site for the overall campgrounds, especially for commercial touristic campgrounds.
I find the use of tourism=camp_site a bit confusing for a summer camp facility, both colloquially and in OSM. It seems like that would conflate recreational campsites, areas designated for people to pitch tents or show up with RVs, with summer camps, which are often centrally operated, have only cabins, and are associated with significant, often private, infrastructure (cafeterias, recreational facilities, etc) that may not even be open to adults or the general public. I feel like these are very different objects, maybe you could get away with tents=no, caravans=no, cabins=yes but it starts to feel a bit troll-taggy.
Meanwhile, the wiki emphasizes the existence of pitches at a tourism=camp_site, which I agree is conceptually important to a camp site in my mind, although it says cabins can be present. If there’s significant usage of camp_site for cabin-only areas maybe the text should be revised.
I agree that maybe there’s some conflation of the camp facilities for for the camp programs themselves as entities, although they can be hard to separate. Maybe a dual-tagged tourism=camp_site (infrastructure) and leisure=summer_camp (permanent program/operator/company) would denote this?
I think leisure=camp might be confusingly vague for an organized camp program, people would probably use it on normal campgrounds. leisure=recreational_camp is a bit better. A maybe more seasonally neutral term in use in the US is “sleepaway camp”, maybe that would be clearer?
I agree that it should not be subsumed into tourism=camp_site: while there are a few similarities, education camps are not open to general public, normally do not feature tents, and we don’t want them included in something like OpenCampingMap, if that’s a thing (if it’s not, I’m sure it will soon be).
While I agree that “summer camp” may be a misnomer, the tag is already in moderate use, and hey, it’s just yet another Osmenglish term that may not fully cover all use cases. We’ve seen far more worse than that.(such as path, ehm) If there was a better alternative, I would be all for retagging, but we can’t seem to agree on one (I proposed youth_camp somewhere, and we have recreational_camp, outdoor_recreation_facility and whatnot suggested, none with substantial frequency)… however, even for me as a non-native speaker, “summer camp” immediately brings associations what it is about.
It seems like there’s some demand for further classifying the programs offered on the campground, such as day camp, scout camp, sports camp, space camp, weight loss camp, or ski camp. That’s where leisure=summer_camp goes from merely awkward to actively confusing. A troll tag, if you will.
Do we agree on the things that should not be tagged as tourism=camp_site? Understanding the scope would help us come up with a suitable term or three to use as a tag value.
Ok, the Finnish term I’ve been using is definitely just the facility, which are typically owned by the municipality, the church or a NPO/NGO.
The raison d’etre of these facilities is to host summer camps, Confirmation camps of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, or non-religious camps intended to provide a somewhat analogous coming-of-age experience.
The facilties are not generally staffed outside these camps, but available for rent to the general public, e.g. for hosting events. For practical reasons, some are not available during the winter.
I’m assuming, and it was my impression of the tag prior to coming to this thread, that we’re primarily concerned with mapping the facility/place with summer_camp. (I have no opposition to mapping the activity / activity provider too if the camp area is exclusively used by them.)
Edit. I would strongly prefer not mixing any facility that is typically reserved by a single group at a time with camp_site.
I agree here. I have read and edited Tag:tourism=camp_site, but practically nothing there suggests that it is meant to cover this kind of facilities. on the contrary:
Note that while camp sites might (or might not) include occasional building=cabin or other housing accommodation, those are neither required nor indicative of tourism=camp_site (which is defined by having pitches for placing tents and/or caravans/RVs),
Now that you mention it, there’s indeed sparsely explained group_only, which looks crammed somewhere onto that long list of attribures.
I was having in mind only the fairly narrow definition of “summer camp” as in the wiki, catering for youth. I agree that we don’t have consistent tagging for fairly similar facilities, offering short-term recreation and education programs with (typically modest) accommodation. Another awkward hack that springs to my mind is using tourism=chalet for the entire site.
stuff:
as any