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OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

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Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#181
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Largest by market cap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...

a) biggest company does not equal company with highest market cap b) having the biggest market cap is something thats good for their shareholder, and terrible for anyone else. But yeah, do continue to praise your beloved highness.

Not to be rude, but do you even know what you're talking about? What does "biggest" company mean? Most employees? Largest land area covered? Or market capitalization?

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#182
post #145
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an occasional OSM editor, I wouldn't really feel good about moderation. My edits are limited basically to my home town (10.000 inhabitants, about 10 sq km) where I am adding unmapped roads (usually agricultural, sometimes new construction) that I "discover" while running. I started doing that simply because Runkeeper's website uses OSM and it was showing me running in the middle of nowhere, while there was actuall…

I used to work on user generated content in maps. Business vandalism is a big problem once you reach a certain scale. It's possible that OSM doesn't have this problem yet because it's not as valuable a target as Google/Apple/Bing. I'm not super familiar with what's available on OSM these days, but an unscrupulous locksmith might try to make competing locksmiths unreachable by moving their address to a distant locatio…

Business vandalism is certainly a plausible threat for OSM. Something we've also had to deal with are political issues escalating into edit wars, i.e. where the border between countries is supposed to be, which language the labels on a contested part of the map should be in and so on.

I think it's good to keep in mind that OSM already has moderation, though, just not in the shape of a formalized approval process. Instead, edits go live instantly – but are inspected, discussed and possibly undone afterwards. So while vandalism does get through at first, it will hopefully be short-lived enough that it does not pay off for the vandal.

Ultimately, I believe it comes down to weighing priorities based on the project's current needs. OSM's current approach lowers the bar for contributors and rewards them with instant gratification when the change is visible on the map right away. Because of that, I believe it makes sense when your focus is on growing the community. Stricter moderation makes sense once the primary focus switches from growth to preserving the valuable database you've already built.

Looking at Wikipedia, for example, they started out with a setup resembling OSM's current model, and switched to a more strict moderation process only once they had grown large enough to become the world's default encyclopedia.

Based on my personal experiences in OSM, vandalism is not yet a big enough problem to justify stricter moderation practices. But of course that is a matter of opinion to some degree.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#183
One thing that made me a bit nervous to start editing is the lack of an easy way to roll back changes, at least I couldn't find one using the iD editor. If I make a mistake and save it I need to do new edits to try and fix it, possibly making things worse, instead of just removing the entire changeset. I had some issues with multipolygons and had to edit the same things maybe four or five times before I got it right.

And why isn't the Strava heatmap easier to use? They allow OpenStreetMap to use the heatmap for tracing [1], but doing so in the iD editor requires you to copy a long url from the wiki and use a custom layer. This only shows the heatmap, no aerial photos or other mapping data, and it disappears when zoomed in too much.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/V4Tn96F.png

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Strava#Data_Permission_-...

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#184

He's not wrong. OSM is too complex for the majority of businesses. I know two that chose to pay Google for their mapping needs rather than jump through OSM's hoops. Imagine if the only way to get Linux on your computer was to download and compile the whole thing from source yourself, instead of buying or downloading a distro. If OSM had a mapping solution like Google's, it would thrive. And just for fun, it should un…

> If OSM had a mapping solution like Google's, it would thrive. It does, it’s called Mapbox. Plus a number of excellent smaller providers - Thunderforest, Geofabrik, Graphhopper etc.

And kind of like Linux, you have a patchwork of unsatisfying solutions.

Mapbox isn't always cheaper than Google. They have not lowered their tile prices in years, for example. And on geocoding and some other APIs they give out poor results compared to Google. Do they have competition? Cloudmade went in some car-related direction. Mapzen never managed to have a real business plan.

And your "excellent small providers"? Yeah, Andy may be able to create some bespoke solution for you if he has time, and Geofabrik can wrangle some host-it-yourself setup onto AWS, but it's still very true that OSM themselves don't have a good story on a lot of mapping needs. You can either browse their web map with unusable search or download the 38GB database, and that's about it. No wonder many businesses just pay Google rather than dive into the rabbit hole of OSM.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#186
post #121
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All I can find is "Dietary Reference Intake" Not useful in this case, but acronymfinder.com gives 60 possible meanings. Also the intented meaning as 54th down the list. https://www.acronymfinder.com/DRI.html

Yeah that's why I don't go for those websites, there are hundreds of meanings for each TLA and you'll rarely know which one was meant (both because you don't feel like scrolling through that many, and because more than one usually fits). I made that mistake once or twice before.

Best one is "Disco Related Injury"

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#187
This is an extremely thoughtful and constructive post. Thanks to Serge for making it.

I looked closely at getting deeply involved with OSM a few years back. And bounced off hard because the community is infested with assholes. There's a lot of very rude people who are active on the mailing lists that set the culture. It made me uninterested in trying to work through those cultural problems to improve the technical project. I'm not alone in this feeling.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#188
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The post calls for OSM to essentially become Mapbox The problem is that most companies using OSM are using Mapbox. This leads to a few problems, including attribution, which I decided not to touch on, but is a serious problem that Mapbox doesn't address sufficiently. If they could use OSM directly, they'd be engaged with OSM directly. They'd care about OSM. Right now OSM shoves these users away and makes them into…

I mean, I realize hosting a service is expensive, but can't there be an open source set of service APIs that's self hosted? That way you can chose to get a full copy of the data (and be responsible for pulling updates) and the API, or just pay someone else for access to their hosted version of the API?

  can't there be an open source set of service
  APIs that's self hosted
OSM does have open source self-hosted options.

Unfortunately, the developer experience is much more painful than using Google Maps.

With Google Maps, if you can add Javascript to a web page you're basically good to go. Data updates, software updates, server redundancy, server support and security, all taken care of. Even if you're exclusively a front-end dev, you're making a static site, and you've never heard of Linux.

Compared to that, self-hosting OSM tile generation requires a bunch of extra knowledge, equipment and maintenance.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#189
post #15

I remember just a few years ago, I got a new phone and was interested in replacing as many Google apps with OSS maps that I could. (K9 instead of Google's mail app, etc.) Naturally I turned to OSM instead of Google Maps. But I was really surprised by how strange and difficult it was to install and use. As the author mentioned, OSM itself doesn't have any apps, which is very confusing. After some research I figured ou…

Maps.me is pretty killer, though. The only issue I see with OSM is lack of traffic data. Generally when I drive with Google Maps, I already know the route but want Google to step in when there's traffic.

Mapbox's routing API applies traffic data to an OSM base.

Re: OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

#190
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I am stating that OSM has no setup for, or desire to, accept useful but incomplete data. And unless they do, they will not have data available that other services have. I know where Google, Bing, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, etc get phone numbers and current business hours for our clients. They are straightforward for us to work with, and we are happy to give it to them. OSM is not easy to work with us, so don't g…

alltheplaces is almost what you are looking for. https://github.com/alltheplaces/alltheplaces I guess you'd be looking to bypass the hard part.

No, that's the opposite of what we are looking for. We're not looking for data that other people have uploaded. We've got that data straight from the companies before it is publicly announced. We're publishing it to everywhere the companies want it published to.

OSM is not one of the places that we want to deal with providing that data to.

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