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OpenStreetMap May be in Serious Trouble

posted by martyb on Wednesday February 21 2018, @01:17PM   
from the uncharted-territory dept.

islisis writes:

Serge Wroclawski, a long-time contributor to OpenStreetMap, has posted a criticism of the management choices he believes are preventing the OpenStreetMap Foundation from fulfilling its mission (much like the Wikimedia Foundation):

I feel the OpenStreetMap project is currently unable to fulfill that mission due to poor technical decisions, poor political decisions, and a general malaise in the project. I'm going to outline in this article what I think OpenStreetMap has gotten wrong. It's entirely possible that OSM will reform and address the impediments to its success- and I hope it does. We need a Free as in Freedom geographic dataset.

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Original Submission

• Re:Oh well (Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Wednesday February 21 2018, @06:36PM

  by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday February 21 2018, @06:36PM (#641305) Journal

  I honestly don't see how you'd do this with an open-source thing, unless you set up a foundation with a big endowment like Wikimedia so that it could run a large datacenter and basically be just like Google Maps.

  You realise, I hope, that OpenStreetMap does already have a web UI for browsing the maps and getting routing information, and that this lets you leave comments reporting errors? The only change that they'd need would be to extend the comments box to allow more structured input, and streamline the approvals process (i.e. rather than having a trusted contributor read the comment and translate it into OSM internal data, you provide them with accept / reject buttons).

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  sudo mod me up

  Parent

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