How should we map Scout groups (or anything similar really).
Surprisingly I didn’t find much to go on, I’m hoping some people here can help me make a strong proposal.
What is a scout club?
In my understanding (as a scout and leader for a number of years) there are some general things we can say. Scout groups are independent youth organizations which are members of a national association. Any one country can have many scout groups with focus on different activities (typically air/sea/land) and membership of one of several national organizations. The different national organizations typically exist because of historical disagreements about how scouting should be done.
Club or building?
The guidance I found focuses on buildings. This is not flexible as many Scout groups use a building which they do not own or operate.
Since I see no discussion on the wikipage how to map a I’ve made my suggestion for how to map a scout club directly on that page with a comment linking back to this discussion.
My intention is some guidance that can work on nodes, buildings, polygons or addresses. Whatever works best in each situation.
There’s not so much in that documentation, I want more. But I see on the discussion page a bit more context, and some out of date suggestions re use of the community_center tag.
It’s possible that I’m making an issue of this one mapping type because so much of OSM is new to me, so there’s a lot I’m unsure of and have trouble finding definitive examples to work from.
Firstly, if not already done, map the building the scouts are operating out of. That could be as simple as building=yes but ideally would be more specific. Draw this as an area with the edges matching the outline of the building.
Now map the scouts club. You can do this using a node (point). Just add the node somewhere inside the footprint of the building. Add club=scout plus any other information that seems useful (such as the tags you’ve outlined). If there are tags which you think would useful to describe the scout club that don’t already exist, then you’re free to use any tags you like to describe it. Just be sure to do a thorough search to make sure something doesn’t already exist (it may be named slightly differently).
In cases where the scouts are the only users of the building, you can add the club=scout tags directly to the building (e.g., building=yes + club=scout). Though do check with your local mapping conventions as some areas tend to discourage this approach.
The above steps are pretty common tagging in OSM - especially for clubs and similar.
That’s fine, we’re always happy to help. For examples, it might be worth looking at this query: overpass turbo This shows you all club=scout currently in the OSM database in Europe (it will take a minute or two to run). Maybe have a look in your country to see how others are tagged.
Here’s my next question as I go through setting up danish scout groups…
Many scout groups (not just in Denmark) have rather old, technical or whimsical names. For example “Tydal”, “Århus Gruppe” and “2. Ry” are scout clubs in Denmark. Neither the danish nor english word for scouts is part of the name. So I note that doing a regular nomatum search for “spejder”, the danish word for scout, gives me no scout clubs (instead a chain of outdoors sports stores called ‘Spejdersport’).
I found short_name, alt_name and description as possible fixes where I could write something like the name of the city and the world scout. So instead of simply name=1. Division Thourup I can add description=Hedensted Spejdere
Ideally I would like nominatim to understand that a search for “spejder” in a danish context should give results for club=scout. But that’s just not how it works.