The part of “becoming a Local Chapter” in the board meeting minutes might have been a bit misleading. The idea here was to handle FPOSM’s trademark request similar to a local chapter application, not make them a local chapter. The intention was to address precisely some of the concerns raised here. We have a formal process of becoming a local chapter. There is list of criteria that they need to fulfil in order to be recognized by the OSMF. They sign a contract that contains rights and obligations and when local chapters do not behave they can loose the status.

Purely speaking for myself here, I think it would be really nice if we had a similar set of rules and contracts for ‘special interest groups’ so that they can become a different kind of chapter of the OSMF. They would work in the interests of OSM but not targeted at a local area but at their interest. We’d have to give them a different name, of course.

The romantic notion of the heroic programmer that develops essential open source software in their spare time is nice but doesn’t really hold in reality. Lets just take the example projects that you have listed above: Vespucchi is being developed by somebody who can afford an early retirement. OSMAnd is a company that sells an app. Nominatim has switched to a full-time paid-for development model last year after years of stagnation. Osmium is pretty much 100% paid for by Mapbox.

The gist of if is that programmers work better when they eat and sleep and can feed their kids. So you’ll find that behind every successful passionate programmer there is an organisation that pays the bills. How much that organisation interferes with the long time goals of the project depends on the actual arrangements.

I’d further like to add that it is not healthy for any of the named projects (including Overpass) that they depend on a single person for survival. It introduces a dangerous bus factor for projects that are essential for our infrastructure and severely limits the amount of progress you will see in the project.

The problem with the open source software around OSM is not one of large organizations against small time programmers. The problem is that we need to find an operation mode that is sustainable for all involved, individuals and large companies alike. I hope the newly founded EWG can help with that.

Nominatim recognises any of the tags ‘addr:postcode’, ‘postcode’ and ‘postal_code’. And in the US it is also able to process the ‘tiger:zip_left’ and ‘tiger:zip_right’ tags.

Glen, yes they are still used. If there is a postcode boundary, it will be treated exactly like and administrative boundary and it will be preferred over any guessed postcode.

@NunoCaldeira Indeed, same problem with bridges actually. I have opened a ticket for this: https://github.com/waymarkedtrails/waymarked-trails-site/issues/282

For the Q-shaped route: add the tail twice, once at the beginning of the relation and once at the end. Then it boils down to a linear route.

Side trips and similar should be marked with a special role. The situation there is a bit messy at the moment because there is no agreed schema yet. Looking into that is on my todo list.

Hallo,

es ist zwar richtig, dass die offizielle romanische Umschrift für ん das 'n' ist, jedoch kommt die Verwendung von 'm' in Japan gelegentlich vor. Die offizielle Umschrift der Bahnhöfe ist tatsächlich 'Shimbashi' und 'Shin-Nihombashi'. So steht es an den Stationsschildern und so findest du es auch z.B. im Hyperdia-Online-Fahrplan. Bei Namen kann man eben nicht immer stur die aktuellen Rechtschreibregeln anwenden, weil sie oftmals historisch gewachsen sind. Solche Fälle kennt man im Deutschen ja auch. Insofern würde ich die ursprüngliche Schreibweise mit 'm' vorziehen und auch bei der Anpassung von Strassennamen vorsichtig sein. Die Daten für die Bahnhöfe stammen im übrigen nicht von einem Mapper, sondern aus einem Import.

As a matter of fact, changing the case does have an effect, as you already seem to have discovered by now. If the relation does not have a ref-Tag, the map tries to be clever and makes a reference up by using the capitalized letters. However, this is only done as a last resort. As John said, using the ref-Tag is much better. The map also shows osmc:symbol-Tags ( http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:osmc:symbol ), but I'm not sure that this system is very useful outside Europe.

One way to solve the orientation problem is to simply rotate the camera: landscape pictures for what's ahead, portrait-size for infos about the way you just came from and a rotation of +/- 45° for what is on the right/left of the road. Pretty low-tech, but sufficient most of the time.