
Arriving in Berlin – A map made by refugees - chippy
http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/arriving-in-berlin-a-map-made-by-refugees-english-_42855#12/52.4991/13.4926
======
distances
This is a bit offtopic, but Berlin is really beautifully mapped in OSM. In
places the details are more than what I would have ever thought of, for
example the individual pillars of the Holocaust Memorial:
[http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/arriving-in-berlin-a-
map...](http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/arriving-in-berlin-a-map-made-by-
refugees-english-_42855#18/52.51381/13.37946)

~~~
zo1
Adding details to OSM is actually very relaxing. I do it to unwind and kill
time sometimes. The job is never done, however, and there is always room for
_more_ detail.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Can OSM accept 3D laser scanner/cloud point data?

~~~
maxerickson
Not really. You could jam it into the data model, but it isn't meant to be a
clearinghouse for arbitrary data sets where an update is making another sensor
pass.

A simple rubric is whether someone standing in the street can reasonably
improve the data there, another is to what extent each individual piece of
data is interesting in isolation.

That doesn't mean you can't do interesting things with such data:

[http://chris-osm.blogspot.com/2015/09/extracting-building-
he...](http://chris-osm.blogspot.com/2015/09/extracting-building-heights-from-
lidar.html)

(I realize that someone could reasonably fix some error in some lidar data,
but I think the most likely outcome of storing such data in the OSM database
is that the cumulative edits would frustrate anyone looking to use the data,
to the extent that they would go to the source)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Thank you for the reply. I'm always excited to contribute whatever data I can
to OSM.

------
chippy
The project about page is here: [http://arriving-in-
berlin.de/](http://arriving-in-berlin.de/)

~~~
comrh
This has the arabic and persian(I think?) versions. It confused me why it
would be in english at first.

~~~
detaro
English is probably the best "common source" that things are translated
from/to

------
gloves
I love this idea, and hope the refugees settling have a happier life in
Germany.

------
dudul
Here is what people in Germany say about immigration in a recent survey:

[http://www.atlantico.fr/sites/atlantico.fr/files/u9698/2015/...](http://www.atlantico.fr/sites/atlantico.fr/files/u9698/2015/10/screen_shot_2015-10-23_at_2.18.20_pm.png)

[http://www.atlantico.fr/sites/atlantico.fr/files/u9698/2015/...](http://www.atlantico.fr/sites/atlantico.fr/files/u9698/2015/10/screen_shot_2015-10-23_at_2.40.59_pm.png)

------
Fluid_Mechanics
[Sigh] Before parts of the comment section turn into a flame war, I'd like to
ask that those with inflammatory opinions at least attempt to stay politically
neutral here. I'd rather not know about the contentious political positions
some of my technical peers have.

Please save any sweeping generalizations for Twitter/Facebook/Reddit :).

------
mtw
Nice! Was this done during the Berline refugee hackathon?

~~~
detaro
I don't think so, at least it seems to be completely managed by the two
organisations running it & I didn't see it mentioned in context of the
hackathon. It also doesn't use a custom-made interface, but is using the uMap
service: [http://umap.openstreetmap.fr](http://umap.openstreetmap.fr) (So the
biggest need probably is data, not code)

------
sccxy
I'm living in one of poor EU countries.

I earn less money than they pay for refugees.

Our pensioners get less money than these 'refugees' with Armani clothing...

~~~
pjc50
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis)

This is what happened last time refugees were turned away en masse with no
option but to return to their home country: they were exterminated. The EU was
formed with a "never again" attitude to this kind of catastrophe. There are
already over 4 million refugees plus an estimated 6 million displaced within
Syria. People have finally noticed that they're already dying trying to
escape, often in the Mediterranean. The options are to take them in or send
them to their deaths.

This is probably going to happen again when Yemen goes up; it doesn't help
that the country is running out of groundwater while a Saudi/Iranian proxy war
is being fought in it.

~~~
sccxy
Poor jews. I guess they have learned from history and help others now.

How many refugee camps for Syrian people are in Israel?

~~~
theworstshill
They learned from history alright, just not in the way you think. Israel is
one of the best defended states with some of the best social welfare for its
citizens. They work six days a week to make it happen, and their public-
private partnerships are top notch and generate a massive amount of real
innovation (as in - life saving medical technology instead of boredom apps).
If every state in the world was as self-sufficient and productive, humanity
would be colonizing space by now.

~~~
tdkl
They sure are good in colonizing the land of Palestine with moral and monetary
support of a western country that sadly forgot how to use their resources for
space exploration and are colonizing third world countries since the WWII with
government coups.

~~~
theworstshill
I am not denying that, but you're beating up the wrong bush.

Colonization and exploitation are more than buzzwords, but in the real world
they work the other way around. Look at the yearly trade balance between say
Chile and South Korea. Chile is basically an enormous copper ore mine, it
accounts for 50% of their exports. South Korea exports back finished goods. So
who is really exploiting who, and what country is more important to the world?
I'd say the imagination of South Koreans and the ability to make high quality
products trump the Chileans. That doesn't mean the Chilean people are in any
way lesser than the Koreans, but that they need to invest in what produces
real value in 21st century - brains.

There is really not much to be gained for Israel by colonizing areas of
Palestine, except better security (which is an economic bonus in itself). What
I do wonder though - if Israel is magically relocated to an island nation, say
in the middle of a trade route like Singapore, what would they be really
capable of, unhindered by defensive considerations.

------
chaghan
What about the millions of eastern / central europeans that have lower wages
and worse quality of life and have been denied to work in german markets when
the countries have been allowed to join the EU ?

I guess nobody cares. Oh nobody cares either about people that are educated
and can't get working visa because EU bureaucracy.

Thanks Germany.

~~~
__m
worse than getting killed by a bomb?

~~~
jonesb6
I'd be curious to see the percentage of migrants/refugees that are coming from
war-torn regions such as Syria. My understanding is that many come from North
Africa or elsewhere. Granted violence is also very high in these areas and the
economic situation can be nearly as detrimental to quality of life.

~~~
matt4077
I volunteer in a refugee center. Right now about 70% of the people arriving
are from Syria. Most others are from Iraq and Afghanistan. If you look at
statistics, remember that they often lag behind and currently show a large
percentage of refugees from Albania, although that wave happened early in the
year and has largely passed.

------
dudul
The only good thing about this "refugees crisis" is that it could finally
cause the implosion and the end of the EU.

This corrupted blob in which representatives are barely elected has to go
away.

~~~
TeMPOraL
And replaced by what? A more divided Europe? I know UE is not the United
Federation of Planets, but at least it is a step towards it.

~~~
dudul
What was wrong with sovereign nations?

A step towards what? This is the big scam of the 21st century. People think
that big blobs are stronger than smaller, more focused and cohesive entities.
Smaller countries all over the world are doing just fine.

~~~
TeMPOraL
A step towards unified global government, one day, hopefully. You don't need
sovereign nations to reap benefits of distribution, and some things are really
better centralized (I'd agree that centralization may be the big scam of the
_20th_ century - decentralization is the scam of 21st. People somehow forget
that decentralized usually means very wasteful.).

UE is an example of a "blob" that is not much more focused or cohesive than
individual nations were, but it seems at least like a step in the right
direction.

~~~
hugh4
Is that your best argument for the end of national sovereignty? Economies of
scale?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Economies of scale, eventual ending of some unnecessary zero-sum games (a
single government doesn't need to maintain much military, nor it will end up
in an arms race), getting rid of nationalism, tying people's identity to the
whole planet as opposed to an arbitrary subset of it. I don't really see the
benefits of keeping national sovereignty. One could think that we should've
grown past it already.

~~~
cousin_it
If a world government decides to spy on its own citizens, the whistleblower
will have nowhere to run.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'm assuming at this point we'll grow past the privacy thing as well, but I'm
going to upgrade your argument to "if a world government decides to do
something evil, the whistleblower will have nowhere to run", which is indeed a
concern.

I'm just not sure if having a safe haven for whistleblower is worth keeping
around pockets of people pointing guns at each other like we do today. Also,
the "safe haven" is something a whistleblower gets for giving a gun to one
side to point at another, not at the goodness of any government's collective
heart.

~~~
hugh4
You're right, that's a relatively minor concern.

How about the concern that the existence of a single government doesn't stop
people shooting at each other, as indicated by, oh, say, the Syrian Civil War?
Even in the optimal case where you somehow did achieve a one-world government
that was democratic and benign (rather than resembling the average government)
you would inevitably have groups of people thinking that this is a non-ideal
government whose authority should be challenged. In the end you'd just wind up
replacing all ordinary wars with civil wars. And the civil wars, instead of
being confined to one country at a time, would rage simultaneously in all
countries, always.

------
briandear
Interesting. Farsi is not a major language in Syria; more people speak Kurdish
than Farsi. Perhaps, and this is just a theory, that some of the refugees
aren't actually coming from the Syrian civil war, but are instead attempting
to simply take advantage of the largesse of the EU? If these refugees were
actual refugees, they'd be in camps along the Turkish border and not applying
for (and receiving) long term residency. The concept of refugee is that they
go home after the hostilities. In this case, almost zero chance of that
happening. It's shameful when adult men flee while many leave behind their
wife and children. The women and kids ought to be the ones treated as
refugees. The rest of them are simply cowards unwilling to fight for their own
country.

~~~
programmernews3
Have a look at the pictures - it is full of chancers from all over the world.

Even the "children" often turn out to be adults. In this study, 260 of the 309
people investigated were over 18:

[http://www.iofos.eu/Journals/JFOS%20sup1_Nov12/IDEALS%209-12...](http://www.iofos.eu/Journals/JFOS%20sup1_Nov12/IDEALS%209-123.pdf)

