131–140 of 224 posts
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I second Julian here, as the founder of another company (in profile) that profits heavily from OSM's data set. It's amazing how good OSM is today, and the rate at which it's expanding and improving means it will only get much better over time.
Thanks for Stadia maps! Happy paying customer here and it substantially lowered my map hosting bill compared to mapbox.
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The highest quality aerial photography of my country (Denmark) is taken from planes, not satellites.
Same for Australia. NearMap is mostly plane (and hot air balloon) images for the high quality stuff.
Meanwhile nobody has a good 3D map of Brisbane - Apple has none, Google’s is labeled (c) 2021 but is inexplicably actually from 2010 or so.
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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.
I've never heard of a policy like this before, but I like it a lot (admittedly I've been mostly in academia). Is this unique to Microsoft or more common?
I have tried providing a correction to OSM, they never got moderated or integrated. But there is a local club because they used the email address I provided to invite me. I don’t think I want to spend time doing it again.
Do you remember your account name?
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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.
> volunteering for an organization is matched in cash by Microsoft, to the tune of 20-something an hour. I've never heard of a policy like this before, but I like it a lot (admittedly I've been mostly in academia). Is this unique to Microsoft or more common?
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.
Any edits in OSM go live immediately without review.
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 think it's a much more interesting question WHY we are being asked to contribute to OSM for free. Why isn't it possible/feasible to gain compensation relative to the amount of value contributed? And what does that mean for our "free market" in general. If you can't compensate this kind of project, are they being repressed by the inherent incentive structures?
I don't think that's a failure of the OSM project, but rather a failure of our economic system.
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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.
Any edits in OSM go live immediately without review.
And Poland has no government database of hydrants or AED.
In fact Polish community is right now working on making decent AED database - with https://aed.openstreetmap.org.pl/ created recently that shows already collected data
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> volunteering for an organization is matched in cash by Microsoft, to the tune of 20-something an hour. I've never heard of a policy like this before, but I like it a lot (admittedly I've been mostly in academia). Is this unique to Microsoft or more common?
Google does this at 10/hour as well. Unsure of others. Both Google and Microsoft match cash donations too up to 15k/year - it's a wonderful perk to have after you've basically covered all your living expenses and savings etc. I can eg fund a minor scholarship at half cost, or direct serious money to a cause I care about.
Thanks!