@dzertanoj Your comment really caught my eye. gatekeeper is nowhere near that negative of a term in American English.

I just got done writing at length of a reply, but I just made it a diary post here: “OSM needs gateopeners too” instead.

Thank you for writing Zverik.

I agree with much of what you wrote.

To those who feel criticized in this post: I got very little of that. What I read in it was just a view of where the amazing work of so many individual has gotten us, which is to a high successful #OpenData project.

Gate keepers, self appointed police of OSM, folks who are grumpy from years of thankless stewardship, with views hardened by long time, real world experience with this project, and everyone else who has contributed in any way, have made this project a success.

It is quite natural to do everything right, for years, and end up at a place where new ways of doing things are needed. No one need to have made a mistake for there to be a need for change or evolution of a project and community.

I think “control” is a negative word, I see a need for more empowerment of the board to make decisions and move forward and develop the funding resources to make things happen. That will have all sorts of benefits.

I think we have seen the board move in that direction and I support it. The draft “Directed Editing Policy” is one of the most controlling documents I have ever seen and it seems to be supported by the majority of the most involved folks. So it is not control itself that is the issue, it is about the subject of the control.

Many of us feel their is a need to extend that same sort of leadership on other topics as well.

As often happens, I think we all agree on a lot more than what we disagree on!

I will say I feel fundraising for the OSMF so it has some resources to support the community to implement its leadership vision and leadership priorities is the number one priority of OSM.

Much of the big moves we want to see for OSM will only happen with funded efforts that can be community driven, but ultimately implemented by folks from the community with time dedicated and supported for the duration of the development and implementation.

Respectfully, Blake (Disclosure: HOT Member)

Thank you for writing this up John!

It has been really impressive to see the folks at Statistics Canada engage with both the local OSM community in Ottawa and the larger OSM community. It has had its ups and downs, but StatCan really shows forward thinking and leadership in how they have engaged with everyone and approached OpenStreetMap.

Hi @Warin61, thank you for the comment. To some extent that is how I classify them now, as unclassified, but it just does not quite fit the description in the standard osm highway key or the highway tag africa guidance that has worked quite well.

But I think @palolo has this right. As someone who has classified many km of roads using Highway Tag Africa, which basically mirrors https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway there is a functional, meaningful, recognizable and understandable missing classification.

There needs to be something between Track and Unclassified and that is what palolo is suggesting, that the community of OSM Africa and individual OSM groups can discuss this topic. Is this a thing? Is it important? Is this a needed and agreed upon classification from their view on the ground?

Those are some of the questions I have.

With some luck I hope to sit in, looking forward to it!

“Working on Missing Maps projects.” is quite an understatement!

You are by far the largest contributor to Swaziland building mapping, almost half of all the buildings, just an amazing amount of volunteer mapping!

Your mapping will have a huge impact on the delivery of health care in Swaziland. While this dataset is being generated to help them eliminate malaria, a seriously important impact all by itself, it will be used for additional public health projects in the future as well.

http://www.missingmaps.org/leaderboards/#/swaziland

There is no way to thank you enough for all your contributions!

If you are going to SoTM in Brussels, let us know, we will make sure to thank you in person and take you out to dinner.

Cheers, Blake

I whole heartedly endorse this idea Pete!

iD is about to turn awesome with its own building tool and switching imagery if you read the iD github issues.

But JOSM is not that much more difficult and it is mainly a training issue in its use because the UI is just slightly more complicated than iD’s

Thank you for working with your well established group of humanitarian mappers to explore the best practices for teaching new OSM mappers to use JOSM, this will be invaluable.

Please pass on my thanks to the MM London mappers for their help with this, it is really important to help OSM in this way and their contributions to helping determine best practices for training are a great contribution.

Hope to see you there!

Thank you very much! Very helpful.

This is really helpful, thank you very much.