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(a)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
<http://paulnorman.ca/blog/2016/11/serving-vector-tiles/>.
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 <https://github.com/pnorman/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
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T148605>.
*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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