Sure. Usually those tags are just in use or de facto though. They rarely (if ever) get approved, which is kind of the point in proposals. Also, there’s no point in discussing a tag in the first place if that’s going to be the response. The fact that this is being asked about in a general, global discussion forum kind of insinuates that the opinions and use cases outside of South Korea matters. Otherwise just ask your local board and be done with it. I’d like to see a tag for these types of things that can be applied more generally though. Otherwise this whole thing is kind of an exercise in wasting everyone’s time. One that will possibly come at the expense of finding something better to use. Again, not to say your doing that, but it is how your comment comes across and if a tag like this ever goes through the voting process it should at least work outside of more then a couple of countries.
To be fair, that point is clearly covered in the proposal:
and I would tend to agree with that. Since there are multiple of these types of agencies across the world, it seems to make sense to group them together and not have different tagging schemes and values for these organisations.
That said, I do think the proposal needs to be clearer/improve on several things:
- 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.) - 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. - Is this limited to government (national/state/regional) agencies, if not, should it be?
- 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?
- Are charities included?
- 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).
- Are the Australian and German communities on board with these changes - seeing as they are the two seemingly most affected.
I think we have a consens that this should be removed. So for me its fine if you change that.
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.
To be fair I asked Fizzie41 what their issue with the tag is and they didn’t write the proposal. Also, I think I already covered what the proposal says is the issue with emergency=ses_station when I pointed out that emergency=disaster_response has the exact same problem. Both tags are problematic for worldwide use. So I’d like to know what Fizzie41 thinks the actual difference is and why emergency=ses_station doesn’t work for tagging State Emergency Service’s in Australia specifically since that’s what they originally asked me about. Maybe you, them, and a couple of other people who think emergency=disaster_response is somehow better, but it would probably be worth fleshing out exactly why for when there’s vote and you have to justify re-tagging the 500 places that are already mapped with emergency=ses_station.
I mostly agree with the rest of what you said about how the proposal needs to be improved. The first point is particularly important IMO because we don’t want people either re-tagging police or fire stations with this one or just using this as the go to tag for mapping those things to begin with when it clearly isn’t correct. The same goes for points 5 and 6. Although making it to specific kind of defeats the purpose, but that’s kind of the line that needs to be towed here.
At least IMO that’s probably not going to be a good way to go since it just way over complicates things. Plus people tend to ignore lists and just use the tag in whatever random way they think fits their vague definition in the meantime. Which just makes the tag essentially worthless. If you want a good example of that look into boundary=protected_area and the protect_class key. A tag needs to be well defined, the usage has to be clear, and it needs to be universally usable from the beginning. Otherwise you should just come up with something else.
Being Australian, I don’t have an issue with them at all!
However, previous discussions e.g, [Tagging] What values of 'emergency=' should be on the main Map features page?; Proposal talk:Rescue Stations - OpenStreetMap Wiki; Talk:Tag:emergency=ses station - OpenStreetMap Wiki; & Casey_boy here ^, have, quite correctly, pointed out that a (not clear) term used in a single country shouldn’t be used for all similar places worldwide
Adding a comment from the AU Discord channel:
" I think what the discussion needs is more input from other countries. We know Australia has this volunteer based disaster response unit that work somehow (but not entirely) away from government but we are trying to find a suitable way to better represent them generally. Maybe the proposal can put some limits to what constitutes a “disaster response”, so we can distinguish that with general charity that offer disaster relief service (usually after the disaster settles)."
I tidied the proposal page by removing some of the features that have been agreed were not going to be used, & also moving the German & Australian suggestions to the discussion page
I’m not in disagreement about that, but as I’ve also quite correctly (at least IMO) pointed out emeergency=disaster_response has the same issue and as I think I’ve also already said before there’s no point in adopting a new tagging scheme somewhere if it doesn’t even fix the
problem with the original tag that it’s suppose to be replacing 
That would be an improvement. Although it’s worth noting that there isn’t really a bright line there between “disaster response” and “post disaster relief.” Like with the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the United States states they both respond to disasters and continue to provide services afterwards. The same goes for national organizations like World Health Organization. In that case they will send doctors to do disaster response. Then do post emergency care and training. So there isn’t really a difference in most cases, at least not one that can be or is worth distinguishing.
A more useful distinction if your interested might be government versus private organizations. It’s to bad there isn’t better tagging for government infrastructure. Otherwise it could be worth exploring coming up with a tagging scheme outside of the emergency tag that maps the different organizational levels of places that do disaster response. I don’t think emergency is a good tag for that though. Really it isn’t for this either if I’m being honest.
Would a tag along the lines of “civil_defence” or “civil_protection” capture the distinction between other “emergency organisations” while capturing the different types of organisations?
What would you suggest as an alternative then?
Maybe not a bright line, but there is a line! This tag is intended to make the base locations of those groups who fill sandbags, tie tarpaulins down over roofs & similar, not the groups, either Governmental or charity, who operate soup kitchens & hand out blankets in the days / weeks after an event.
By my understanding, FEMA is just a Government department though, that works from an office=government? They don’t actually physically go out in the field to provide assistance?
Who will work from hospitals, or an emergency medical facility of some kind.
Maybe not in all countries, but in at least some, yes, there is!
That would be even more difficult to split? In the case of the SES, they are a volunteer organisation, whose members are not paid, that is partially funded by the various State Governments, but also rely on their own fundraising efforts, together with private donations & support from businesses.
In the case of the Queensland SES, they operate under the overall control of the Queensland Police Service, who’s budget also covers the SES, but SES members are in no way regarded as Police officers, & have absolutely no jurisdictional authority of their own.
Yes, maybe?
But to quote Jim Hacker, civil defence means bomb shelters! 
It’s not really my job to come up with a tagging scheme for something that’s going to be used globally. Especially since this discussion isn’t about what tag we should use for X, but to get feedback on emergency=disaster_response. If you want to start another discussion having specifically about brainstorming ideas for ways to tag disaster response centers I’d be more then happy to participate, but it’s off-topic of this conversation.
I’m aware that’s what it is “intended” to do. I just don’t think that’s what it “actually” does since at least from what I can tell there’s nothing inherent to how the tag is worded or it’s description in the proposal that confines it to “groups who fill sandbags” or whatever. What the proposal days say is that the tag is for “stations” of State Emergency Services or non-governmental organizations. Which could literally be anything. Including soup kitchens and places that handout blankets after an event. Otherwise the proposal should make it clear that the tag should only be used on temporary facilities. Although then you’d run into the problem that you can’t map temporary features. Regardless though, there’s nothing in the proposal how the tag is worded that makes it not usable for post disaster response facilities. And again, there isn’t a bright line there anyway.
Calling them just a government department is kind of an oversimplification. And yes they do actually go out in the field to provide people with assistance after a disaster. If you want one example there’s this story about how they provided temporary housing for people who were effected by forest fires in California a few years ago. Of course they didn’t just do that from some random government office in Washington. It involved FEMA employees on the ground doing planning, interviewing people, Etc. Etc. One of the major issues with this tag is that it isn’t clear what constitutes “disaster” response and what doesn’t.
Both temporary and more long-term ones for post disaster care and disease mitigation that are setup by the WHO in conjunction with local governments. Most of the time the infrastructure isn’t there to begin with though, which is one of the reasons why disease outbreaks tend to happen in the first place. It’s not like they just go to pre-exiting hospitals though. In a lot of cases they separate facilities in remote villages that were built by the WHO specifically for the outbreak and post disaster care. So what’s your point?
Which is why I said “most of the time” 
The question is, how are you going to stop people from using the tag in cases where the distinction isn’t worth tagging and/or it would otherwise negatively effect the map? Create a spread sheet with the small amount of countries and organizations where the tag is useful and force everyone to look it through it before they use the tag? Those are exactly the kinds of things that need to be worked out. Otherwise, like I’ve said multiple times now, the tag isn’t going to be worth using over the alternatives.
It seems like we have done a similar thing perfectly fine with the tagging scheme for social facilities. No one cares about the specifics of where an organization gets their funding from and I wasn’t suggesting there be a tagging scheme based on it. The difference between a public organization versus a government agency is pretty simple. To the point that I’m sure you can come up with a way tag them if you put a miniscule amount of thought into it instead of knee jerk reacting to everything I say line by line the second I post the message. This isn’t something that can or should just be figured out in a single 5 minute forum discussion.
Good for them. Again, no one cares about where the SES’s budget comes from and it has nothing to do with the conversation.
Thanks all for your recent interest in the proposal, os-emmer and Fizzie41 in particular. It seems lots of the discussion above is about heterogeneity between various countries. We should focus however on what relevant organisations have in common.
OSM is an international project, so if two features are similarly organised in different countries for the same purpose, they should share the same tagging. National differences can be solved by sub-tagging.
Whether the organisation is governmental or charity, paid or volunteer-based, can be expressed by the operator=* and/or sub-tagging.
When a country does not have an organisation with permanent stations and collects resources from other services in the particular case, fine, so we don’t need to map it.
The proposal targets organisations that have permanent stations where they store equipment, vehicles etc, and meet for training.
Just to clarify, I don’t necessarily have an issue with using sub-tagging. I don’t think it should be used as a replacement for or substitute to a well thought out proposal that integrates feedback from people in the community though. Cool if people can use the operator tag, but the existence of sub-tags isn’t an excuse for people like Fizzie41 to be dismissive of feedback. It’s not like sub-tagging and creating a tag that can be used globally are mutually exclusive either.
Like said in another post I think it would be helpfull if we had a general understanding of how disaster-response is organised in different countrys. I just added a new section to the discussion of the proposal. It contains a table with different organisations and their propertys. It mainly consists of the organisations meantioned in the Rationale of the proposal.
If you know an organisation that is missing in the table or if you can add information to one of the organisations already listed feel free to do so.
Australian data updated.
As I mentioned there though, there is no Australia-wide organisation, so I deleted that reference, but the associated Wikidata tag should also be deleted as invalid. Does anybody know how to do that?
Messages sent to local Community forums in Austria, Brazil, Croatia, LatAm, Germany, Greece, Mexico, Portugal & Ukraine, pointing out proposal, & asking for input from locals. Not sent to Czechia as apparently no local list?
I am not sure if it applies, but in the US we have:
- Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
- The National Guard that, unless Federalized, reports to the governor of each state and can be deployed for emergencies.
- State Emergency Management Offices
- Many counties, and perhaps major cities as well, have an Emergency Management Office
- Local, often volunteer, Search and Rescue (SAR) organizations. The one in our area reports to the County Sheriff.
- Civil Air Patrol
- Probably others