For context: we had a quite some messages bouncing and had a short video meeting the 12th of august where I pointed towards some basic OSM tools.
So, the most relevant (and recent emails) for this discussion are:
On 19/08/2024 14:12, Petr [family name redacted for privacy] wrote:
Hey, Pieter,
how are you?
I have a topic I would like to touch base on with you, if you don’t mind – so we continue to add and update places on OSM but, as could’ve been expected, work and holiday interfere with that quite a bit. Some people did not have time to make a single update in the past week at all, but we’ve had couple other coworkers join in the effort.
Anyway… at this pace I am really worried we will have the information outdated before we can add a meaningful amount into OSM. (We do update our data, but it’s not a constant process and we do it only once in X months).
Thus I am thinking about bringing some of the freelancers we work with into the effort. I think this should be discussed as we would actually pay these people to verify and update the information and I want to make sure it would not go against OSM’s guidelines in any way. We would brief them, guide them base on our experience so far and we would monitor their behaviour, so I am not worried about a difference in quality of changes made. But still I would like to hear your opinion whether such behaviour would be acceptable or whether it simply is too much.
Thank you,
Petr
My answer
Hi,
First of all, I really appreciate the effort you are putting in. It is great to see so much enthusiasm!
However, I don’t understand why you are rushing so much. Two months ago, none of you had any meaningful contributions to OpenStreetMap - yet now you are adding hotel data as if you lives depend on it… Why is that?
For context, OpenStreetMap has just celebrated its 20th birthday. While having the hotel data will indeed open up some more use cases and make it more useable for some people, going a bit slower won’t hurt the project as well.
Furthermore, I’d also recommend to take some time to learn more about the wider OSM-ecosystem and community. Try some of the other thematic maps on MapComplete. Try a few of the other pieces of software used to edit OSM or some of the quality assurance tools. Learn about some of the OSM principles, such as the good practices, such as not tagging for the renderer or via the beginners guide.
And most importantly, get in touch with other people involved with OSM - especially from your area.At last, I’m only the toolmaker. Of course, the tool (MapComplete) will partly shape the data that is created with it. However, your endeavour to bring in lots of hotel data is wider then just this tool (as it can be done with e.g. iD or JOSM as well - which might be more suited).
This is why you need to discuss this with people whom you are impacting, thus the people from the areas where you add hotels.As you are thus expanding the scope even more, you will have to write a post on https://community.openstreetmap.org/ where you explain what you do, how you approach this and where all your data is coming from. And yes, quite some work in OpenStreetMap is not actually mapping, but learning, explaining others what you are doing or getting the data model right.
Kind regards,
Pietervdvn
The response: (21th aug, 12:08)
Hi, Pieter,
thank you for getting back to me regarding this.
The “rush”, if you want to call it that way, has two main reasons: 1/ we have energy to focus on this right now and I see this very likely to diminish over the course of several months as other paid projects kick in. And, more importantly, 2/ right now we have recent verified data and the longer it takes us to add them to the map, the more likely it is they will become obsolete. At this moment I am not sure when we will do another update and on what scale it would be.
I’ve simply asked you as, well, I have your email and also as you are a skilled member of the community so your opinion is valid and important.
However as you suggest, I will discuss doing this with the community.
Thank you,
Petr