OpenStreetMap
How can we tag worker-owned shops or cooperatives?
Posted by pizzaiolo on 19 February 2017 in English.Case in point: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1955249541
It’s a bakery set up by anarchists and it is self-managed. There are also examples of self-managed coops, for which I can’t find documentation on the wiki. It’s also worth debating whether it would be useful to differentiate between coops and more generally worked-owned establishments.
What are you views on it?
Discussion
Comment from BushmanK on 19 February 2017 at 15:51
A form of ownership or management is often an unknown information that can’t be easily obtained and supported (verified periodically). Therefore, even if there would be a good tagging scheme for it, only a few places would be properly tagged. In addition to that, forms of ownership/management are different in different countries. That makes having a consistent scheme quite problematic.
However, nobody can stop you from adding (and documenting, otherwise it becomes completely unusable) an own tag.
Comment from Warin61 on 19 February 2017 at 21:04
There is the present ‘operator’ tag … .the text Coop in there would be a good indication of a cooperative.
Comment from dikkeknodel on 20 February 2017 at 03:11
‘Coop’ is also a chain for supermarkets in at least two countries: Switzerland Netherlands
So I think you should reconsider what you put in there.
However, I do also agree with BushmanK’s comment that it is probably outdated before you know it. So the value of putting in this information may be rather limited, unless you have an automated method to verify and keep the info up to date.
Comment from BushmanK on 20 February 2017 at 04:53
Yes, Coop brand also exists in Norway. https://coop.no and Denmark https://coop.dk
And in general, if we have a tag that is supposed to have a text value (as an opposite to predefined reserved values), it is a bad idea to mix value types and to have something predefined because you never know (exactly like in the case of “coop”) what free text value could you meet in a real-world case.
So, if I’d want to add a feature for cooperatives, I’d use something like
cooperative=yesor similar.