Hi Paul,

Thanks for your email. This is reminding me of a discussion that happened a few years ago about WMF supporting other technology organizations and projects which see heavy use in the Wikimedia world. One of these is Freenode, and I believe that another is Phabricator. I don't know who in WMF is in charge of coordinating these kinds of partnerships - perhaps Victoria or Quim - but if you can identify that person then I would encourage you to have a conversation with them about putting OSM in the same group of projects that WMF supports as Freenode and Phabricator.

I have encouraged people at WMF to think about approaching Google and others to ask them for donations of engineering time. I am glad to hear that this practice already happens with OSM, and would encourage WMF to try to emulate OSM's successes in this area.

Thanks again,

Pine


On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 6:10 PM, Paul Norman <penorman@mac.com> wrote:
On 2/6/2017 7:51 PM, Pine W wrote:
Hi Erika,

Just wondering, has there been any uptake by OSM of WMF improvements or adaptations to OSM products and services? I'd like to encourage OSM-WMF collaboration wherever possible.


 What follows are my thoughts, not those of the Wikimedia Foundation or OpenStreetMap Foundation.

Yes and no. Four ways that collaboration can happen are with data, software, people, and other resources.

Data

The biggest impact on data has been WM linking to www.openstreetmap.org/fixthemap. I don't have any data on how effective it has been, and the effect has probably been swamped by the recent boost to OSM from Pokemon Go, but if someone sees improvements that can be made at directing people from WM to OSM to edit the map, a ticket would be useful.

A secondary impact on data has been some work on wikidata tags in OSM. This has been of mixed success, and the main user of wikidata tags is Wikimedia itself.

A possible improvement here would be to do some research if someone on a Wikimedia page who wants to edit the map makes it through to www.openstreetmap.org/fixthemap.

Software

There were hopes that Kartotherian would become the standard for generating and serving raster and vector tiles with node-mapnik. This hasn't happened and until the uncertainty over the interactive team is resolved, it probably won't. There are also technology reasons why I would prefer not to generate vector tiles in node-mapnik.

With what I have been working on, there has been more success on writing and improving software of use to the broader OSM community. My work on OSMBorder should see wider use, and I've fixed some osm2pgsql bugs.

An improvement would to build a community around Kartotherian. For this to happen there needs to be certainty over its future as well as architectural changes to make it easier for third parties to use it.

People

The biggest impact here is that I am under a three month contract with WMF, and am also a developer on many OSM components. I am obviously in favour of this ;) Working on OSM-only stuff isn't part of my job description, but I try to improve existing software instead of starting new stuff from scratch, so I've gotten to do some OSM work.

An improvement would to get more people involved in OSM. Some companies have donated employee time, where an employee spends up to 20% of their time working on OSM stuff. This doesn't have to be software development, other fields like graphics design, communications, and others are also important.

Other resources

WMF or local groups have worked with the OSM community on some events.

It's hard to make specific recommendations for improvement, since this can encompass so many things. Some things companies have done include

- Donated old hardware

- Donated mirroring capacity for data downloads

- Donated rack space

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