Thank you @Casey_boy for this questions/thoughts.
- Is
emergency=*the correct key? Police and fire stations are not under this tag. (I’d probably agree it is and really those two examples should be too but you might need to justify this to other mappers.)
I understand what you mean. Firefighters respond to disasters too but there is already a tagging scheme. As you sayed excluding such organisations would be possible.
- Exactly what tags would be approved if a proposal was approved (
amenity=emergency,emergency_service=*andsquad=*are all listed in the proposal as well)? I suggest keeping as high level as possible right now and remove those that aren’t part of this proposal.
I think I overshot with what I added to the proposal. I think amenity=emergency should be removed from the proposal. squad=* is currently in use in Germany. It may be something for another proposal at a later point but now I think we schould remove it from the proposal.
- Is this limited to government (national/state/regional) agencies, if not, should it be?
I am not sure about this. The german THW is federal. From my understanding it is the same for the australian SES. Is there a tag already in use to say something like type_of_object=federal/private/...? Would it be confusing to add something like this?
- Should organisations that the public couldn’t call in an emergency be included (for example niche agencies that only get involved after the police, fire etc call them in)? I.e. do they need to be reachable by the public in an emergency?
I think it should be included. For the german THW there is no public emergency phone number. It is alarmed from other organisations like the police, the firefighters or other governmental organisations. So even though you can’t direcly call it, it is still indirectly reachable via i.e. the firefighters.
- Are charities included?
Do you have an example that may fit here?
- Make it clear what organisations are excluded, for example “excludes any agency that deals with disaster response as part of their larger duties” (e.g. police, fire, coastguard etc).
I like this idea but I am not sure where exactly the border should be.
- Are the Australian and German communities on board with these changes - seeing as they are the two seemingly most affected.
I don’t think that these are the most affectet regions. The proposal includes a list with organisations from different countrys that may be mapped as emergency=disaster_response.
I think the biggest problem right now is that people from al around the world are writing here and everybody has it’s own perspective to what a “disaster-response”-organisation is. Maybe we should make a table with one line for every possible organisation and one column for different propertys. I am thinking about something like this:
+----------------+---------+----------+---------+---------------+--------------+-------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| organisation | country | wikidata | type | has equipment | has personal | mainly volunteers | typical tasks |
+----------------+---------+----------+---------+---------------+--------------+-------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Organisation A | X | Q... | federal | yes | yes | yes | set up mobile power generators in big black-out, ... |
+----------------+---------+----------+---------+---------------+--------------+-------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Organisation B | Y | Q... | federal | no | no | no | manage units like firefigthters after big natural catastrophy |
+----------------+---------+----------+---------+---------------+--------------+-------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Organisation C | Z | Q... | public | no | yes | no | pump away flood water with pumps supplied by someone else |
+----------------+---------+----------+---------+---------------+--------------+-------------------+---------------------------------------------------------------+
Would a table like this be helpfull? The headlines of the columns don’t need to be exactly like this. That are just some ideas. The “typlical task”-column could contain a list with what the organisation can do.
With a table like this we would maybe see which organisations schould be grouped as emergency=disaster_response and which not.