Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap? • Hacker News Board

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#121

Post by skadge » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

phh wrote: post #6

At this point, I don't really consider OSM an OSS project, but an infrastructure. It has small value for everyone, but all combined usage, it has immense economical value for the society. All alone, it's not really useful to end-users, but it can help a lot of businesses that couldn't exist before it. Maps are already considered infrastructure, since they are already made by governments! The only missing part to say…

Some governments already do, and sometimes at a massive scale. See for instance the mass import of French cadastre in OSM in 2008. We are talking about millions of georeferenced entities.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#122

Post by hirsin » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

techsupporter wrote: post #106

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #87

This article is just factually wrong. It alleges repeatedly that Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc “employ nobody in the OSM community”. They do. Microsoft even employed the founder of OSM, Steve Coast, for a while. If your criterion is ‘involved in OSM prior to current employment’, I could name a bunch of people currently working for Facebook, Amazon, Snap etc of whom that’s true. (One such person even stood for electi…

I sent this article to a friend of mine who works for Microsoft and they came back with an interesting anecdote: several groups inside Microsoft, including theirs, have recurring "hack for good" gatherings, especially during the pandemic when regular get-togethers aren't happening. One of the things they do for this is to log into a community team (I'm not sure of the exact term, I don't contribute to OSM) and spend…

Can confirm, this is popular on my team. Additionally, this should also direct actual dollars to OSM - volunteering for an organization is matched in cash by Microsoft, to the tune of 20-something an hour.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#123

Post by thrwn_frthr_awy » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 6:03 PM UTC

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #87

This article is just factually wrong. It alleges repeatedly that Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc “employ nobody in the OSM community”. They do. Microsoft even employed the founder of OSM, Steve Coast, for a while. If your criterion is ‘involved in OSM prior to current employment’, I could name a bunch of people currently working for Facebook, Amazon, Snap etc of whom that’s true. (One such person even stood for electi…

Apple had full time OSM mappers as well as sponsored weekly mapping meetups where employees could volunteer to help with mapping. I’m not sure if they still do this. The OSM and cartographers I worked with at Apple were all very passionate about helping map remote parts of the world and the benefits mapping brings during disasters.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#124

Post by tapiok » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 6:04 PM UTC

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #73

Yes we should definitely kill off the only mapping solution accessible to bootstrapping startups because big players are semi-freeloading.

there are other options. For example https://n8n.io/blog/fair-code-for-sustainable-open-source-al...

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#125

Post by spockz » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

alufers wrote: post #112

juliansimioni wrote: post #51

Here is why you should contribute to OSM even though there are major players profiting from it: OSM is big enough and good enough that all the tech giants (except Google) would do better to start with OSM and improve it to meet their needs than to start a new, completely proprietary map from scratch. That means that we are in an amazing place where in addition to the substantial volunteer OSM community, there are con…

OSM is so good that even the fire fighters use it in Poland for navigation and finding fire hydrants. The funny thing is that if you modify or add a fire hydrant a guy from the emergency services asks to send a picture of it before he approves the change.

How does that work? Does OSM verify who emergency services employees are? Or is the item owned by an account of an employee of the emergency services?

It seems like this data should be coming directly from some government database.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#126

Post by frosted-flakes » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

delusional wrote: post #81

cbozeman wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well we have SpaceX now... and Microsoft is a trillion dollar company. Launch some satellites.

The highest quality aerial photography of my country (Denmark) is taken from planes, not satellites.

"Satellite" imagery on Google Maps is a misnomer, and when it launched there was a big disagreement on the name that got brought all the way to Larry and Sergey. At the end of the meeting one of them said "call it Bird Mode", but the devs ignored that and stuck with "satellite" because they though bird mode was silly.

More details in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/btaylor/status/1099370126678253569

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#127

Post by tapiok » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 6:13 PM UTC

burkaman wrote: post #13

cheeaun wrote: post #10

I’m curious to know if the companies that use OSM actually contribute back? Like fixing all the wrong/malicious data.

Yes: https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/ > nearly 17% of the global road network was last edited by a corporate data-team member.

...and their share of edits is growing. Maybe one day OSM mappers will wake up and realize they provide free labor to corporate giants that sucks economic value from community. Hopefully it will be not too late.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#128

Post by bee_rider » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 6:16 PM UTC

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #87

This article is just factually wrong. It alleges repeatedly that Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc “employ nobody in the OSM community”. They do. Microsoft even employed the founder of OSM, Steve Coast, for a while. If your criterion is ‘involved in OSM prior to current employment’, I could name a bunch of people currently working for Facebook, Amazon, Snap etc of whom that’s true. (One such person even stood for electi…

Yeah, that struck me as a bit of an odd repeated phrase. I think they mean that these companies don't have anyone employed specifically to contribute to the project. But that's only one of many ways a company might contribute to a project...

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#129

Post by tapiok » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

burkaman wrote: post #40

yosito wrote: post #21

This article is a bit scattered. But it makes one good point: Big Tech companies are profiting off of the OSM data set, while employing no one working on OSM. How do we change that?

We don't need to change that because it isn't true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29714360 The author is using very specific phrasing ("in the OSM community") that apparently excludes corporate employees that contribute to OSM.

of course it is true OSM mappers provide free labor (also) to corporate giants. They have vested (economic) interest to not fork the OSM project exactly for this reason. Maybe they will do it one day though.

Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?

#130

Post by timeon » Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

kranke155 wrote: post #97

Seems like a great use case for web3 and DAOs later on when they become a bit less anarchic. You could tokenise contributions to OpenStreetMap.

If someone does not want to contribute for free it is his decision. But many people like volunteering. OSM has already massive contribution from hobby users (and from corporations as well). What will "web3" solve here? Not everything needs to be monetized.