
OSM: Mapping Power to the People? - edward
http://groundtruth.in/2015/06/05/osm-mapping-power-to-the-people/
======
thomasfoster96
I'm not entirely sure this article ever makes some sort of conclusion, but I
think it mistakenly projects problems that often occur within open online
community projects in general onto open street map. For example, osm still
values information from people on the ground over information aggregated from
tertiary sources - while a community like Wikipedia would instead value the
latter greatly over the former. Those sorts of distinctions make osm perhaps
not more engaging but certainly a nicer thing to contribute to.

Otherwise, I think some of the issues raised in the article regarding ease of
contributing for locals is very much an issues of technology access that is
outside the scope of the osm community.

Aside: I'm amazed at how good the coverage on osm of some third world cities
(particularly slums) is - far better than any other online mapping service
I've seen.

~~~
danpat
I work for Mapbox. We have some teams dedicated to improving OSM. A lot of our
product stack is built on the OSM data set, so we have a vested interest in
improving it wherever we can. We do a whole bunch of analysis to try to
identify areas with errors and shortcomings.

We built and use this tool:

    
    
        http://osmlab.github.io/to-fix/
    

to queue up stuff that needs fixing, and we have people churning through it
all the time.

There are some really cool things in mapping tech. For example, Strava has
made available a whole dump of point data that can be used to look for un-
labelled trails and roads (see the "Strava" layer in to-fix).

~~~
thomasfoster96
Sorry if my comment ignored the contributions many companies make to OSM - but
I think the article expresses concern that OSM's potential as something that
can be contributed to within a local community is threatened by people from
first world cities mapping swathes of area from satellite images. I disagree
with that idea of course - I think the nature of contributing to OSM already
favours in the field volunteers.

~~~
dublinben
In my experience, local ground-level contributors are often reverted by well-
meaning remote mappers who rely on outdated satellite imagery. In areas
without a strong community of local mappers, most of the contributions will be
coming in from users who've never been anywhere near your actual location.

~~~
josinalvo
That comment made the problem much more clear to me -- more clear than the
entire article

