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