[just posted this on the wiki discussion page]

Thumbs Up from me. I would really like to share my models I used to donate to Google.

I would prefer the 'external database' approach, as these models have nothing to do with the map data, neither technically nor logically. OSM is not a 3D representations of the world. It doesn't even include terrain height so far.

I would furthermore propose the collada file format for the 3D models, as it is an open, xml based format. It's machine- and human readable and would even allow osm specific extensions. (It would also allow easy sharing of models already created for google, as the sketchup-tool supports it.)

All we would need in the osm database is an anchor point. Mapping the local coordinate system of the model to the global system of the map would fall in the reign of the renderer.

Looking forward to this

Ok, bei mir sind es Daten aus 2003, da gab es schon einige Aenderungen. Auch auf dem Land.

Bei Strassen und Haeusern sehe ich das uebrigens genauso, besser alte Daten als gar keine Daten

Ich ueberleg immer noch:
Hat das detailierte Eintragen von landuse bei mehrere Jahre alten Sat-Bildern ueberhaupt Sinn?
Kleinere Waldfleckchen wie an Fluessen ist bei mir schon oft nichtmehr vorhanden oder inzwischen viel groesser.

[Aus versehen als Mail geschickt. hier noch mal fuer alle:]

Auf deiner Userseite (@trisquirrelon) solltest du einige Mapper aus deiner naechsten Umgebung sehen. Die kannst du dann kontaktieren.

Bei allgemeinen Fragen hilft die Mailingliste oder auch gerne die ganze Gemeinschaft die hier die User Diarys verfolgt.

Bei speziellen Fragen ist natuerlich die Mailingliste auch keine schlechte Idee.
Gibt es eine Wiki-Seite zu deinem Problem (die dir aber noch nicht weiterhilft) kannst du auch mal auf deren Diskussionsseite oder in deren History nach Experten schauen.

Geht es um Probleme mit speziellen Tools (wie z.B. JOSM), finden sich auf deren Wiki- oder Webseiten Links zu eigenen Mailinglisten.

Du kannst auch im Editor deiner Wahl mal direkt in die Daten in deiner Umgebung schauen, wer die angelegt hat.

Hier: http://www.itoworld.com/static/osm_mapper.html findest du ein tool, mit dem du eine Umgebung als RSS Feed abonnieren kannst. Dann siehst du wann und wer in deiner Nachbarschaft herumeditiert.

Und vielliecht hilf es auch, auf deiner Profilseite ein paar Worte zu dir zu schreiben. Das hilft bei der Kontaktaufnahme. Z.B. WO du denn herkommst.

Wenn das kein persoenlicher Merkzettel war, dann waere so etwas bei openstreetbugs.org oder bei mapdust.com besser aufgehoben. Dort wird sich fix um die Fehlerbehebung gekuemmert. Hier waere es eher Zufall.

Ups, Entschuldigung. Ich haette auf Deutsch antworten sollen. Gehts auch so oder bedarf es noch einer Uebersetzung?

As more general answer:

There are much more OSM tags and keywords (remember that there is no official list, you are allowed to make up your own) than are recognized by the renderers
(there also is more than one renderer).

Please remember that we don't tag for the renderers (or the routers or whatever) but for the database itself. The renderers will adapt to the keywords as they seem fit.

So if you find a carpenter, just tag it as such. It may not show on the renderers yet, but they will evolve and show it at some point. Also some POIs may be not iteresting to the general public, but just to some special interest group. A bike repair shop may not show on the standard map, but certainly on a cycling map. (The standard map would suffer from massive cluttering if all POIs in the database were shown.)

I know it's quite satisfying to see one selfs edits nicely rendered on the map. Somehow the edit is not *done* until it shows on the website. But please keep mapping those not-yet-drawable POIs as they nevertheless help evolve the map further.

Just a simple use case:

A collected_ways relation includes a number of streets. The type on the collection is "unclassified". The type tag of the ways was removed when creating the collection, just some ways have type "tertiary" which overwrites the "unclassified" tag from the relation.

Fine this far.

No someone, not aware of the relation, edits one of the ways and re-adds the "unclassified" tag.

Still everything is fine.

Now someone has new survey info and wants to change the type of the whole way from 'unclassified' to 'residential'. He wants to use the new relation to do this, as it promises a simpler way of altering all the sub-ways, keeping the few 'tertiary' roads untouched.

But wait, although he changed the type of the relation, some ways kept the 'unclassified' tag. Why? Because they have per-way attributes that now overwrite the relation. he still has to check every single way.

If the answer to this is: Well the editor has to check all the sub-ways and remove those unnecessary tags, than you could also implement the whole edit-helper aspect of the relation into the editor.

Just my 2cents

Yes, I think a non profit organization could do better than 10%.

But in case of flattr (which isn't non-profit) I don't think 10% is very much.
Especially if you keep in mind that they needed to take their starting capital from that and intent to share half of it with community sites (see my first comment.)

I think doing transactions in larger chunks to save costs doesn't work all to well with the intentions behind flattr. You need to do pre-pay, as you have to get over that 'decide how much you want to give' as soon as possible. At the same time you need to keep the entry barrier as low as possible by allowing to start with a minimal amount of money (2 Euro at the moment). Also you need able to pay out the content creators as soon as possible to keep them happy.

Btw: I was wrong on blaming the fees on the bank interfaces. The fee is only for running flattr itself. You need to pay any bank/payment service fees for yourself. :(

As I see it its like pushing the flattr button of flattr itself every tenth time I push it for another site. At least until now thats fine for me. Your milage may wary.

@olejorgenb

Yes, it does. (It's charged on the receiver, not the sender, but that's not really relevant.)

Paypal take 0.35Euro + 1.9% . Thats 36.9% on an 1 Euro donation.
Apple takes 30% off your income.
What's google charging?

I don't think anyone can do a free payment service right now, not even the FSF. As long as it has to interface with the old banking system it will cost money.

@Michael Schulze

Yeah, great. Just received another click from me.

Although I regularly read the newsletters (and like them a lot), the flattr thing went completely past me.

Probably because the flattr button isn't included in the feed-version of the newsletter.

@TomH Thanks for the comment.
Yes, it's an inherent problem to the system that it is people-centric.

But actually there is no technical 'need' to flattr anything each month. If you don't push any button at all, your monthly amount simply goes to a (flattr chosen) charity. I agree that this is no ideal solution though.

As far as I've heard the next iteration of flattr will allow community-sites to hand through flattr clicks to their users. The donated money goes to the individual users (that would be mappers and coders represented with their wiki-sites here at OSM) while the hosting site gets a share of the 10% fee that flattr normally keeps for itself. But that's a thought on the future for now.

It's probably hard for a heterogeneous organization like OSM to decide on anything, especially something as trivial as what things to flattr. But surely there are things that would deserve flattring imho, like all the tool and map style creators who make the maps accessible for more users. Or those users promoting OSM actively and who are talking to the administration offices.
(I'm by the way none of the above expect a mapper.)

Its hard to be 'fair' when giving, but it's easy to be 'nice'. It's a lot about the gesture imho.

Ups, der letzte Halbsatz gehört da natürlich nicht mehr hin.

Kurzer, unverbindlicher Kommentar:
Ich würde wann immer möglich die natürlichen Eigenschaften eines Weges in die Karte übertragen und virtuelle Eigenschaften (wie rechtliche Einschränkungen) nur zusätzlich taggen.

Das die sac_sale auf das Elbsandsteingebirge nur wenig passt ist leider richtig.

Also nur weil der weg nicht

A very simplistic solution to the same problem is: Just copy a tagged building (I additionally use source = Bing sat map) and past the tagges to all new buildingd. Thats just one key combo when the created way is still selected.

But your solution has more style, granted.

@Sandered17 Encrypted GPX? You mean writing an own logging application for every smartphone OS + ruling out any Garmin or other dedicated GPSr? Don't think so. Sorry.

But I see we can agree on a seperate website. And forcing someone to participate was never my intention. The crux lies in the way the game data/goal needs to be decoupled from the real OSM data. I have to do more thinking on that.

@Niels Another good idea. Some kind of 'task of the day'. The hidden list is also a nice game aspect. I just think it doesn't scale well with global players, as you are by definition very local if you put specific street names in your list. If you go broader (i.e. map 15 post offices) you are loosing the 'hidden list' aspect and therefore the fraud protection that comes along with it.

Just to be more clear of what I aimed at with my proposal (which by the way doesn't claim to be perfect or even finished): I was looking for a way to motivate existing mappers to do more. I was proposing a reward system with doesn't need a change in behavior by the mappers, but rewards them for their normal work. But yes, I see the danger in attracting fraudsters without mapping, but only gaming interest.

But please keep the ideas comming. It just can get better.

Hm, I see a conceptual problem here. If you build your system on the assumption that all gamers are evil and will try to fraud, then don't bother creating a game at all. There is no way to build a tamper-proof game system that is still fun.
GPX files can be manipulated just as easy as any other file, so there are worthless as verification device. If players are likely to give false initial tag data to achieve more points, it's just as likely they will just waive through any already present data if they get points for that too. So thats no verification device either.

My assumption is that
1. Gamers and mappers are not two distinct groups. They overlap by at least 90%.
2. Gamers are good and responsible people, with just the same amount of vandals as in any other group.

What about that: Achievments are rewarded with the current database status in mind. So the "Most different amenities in one day" award may be gotten by cheating and entering false data. But as soon as someone recognizes the 'mistake' and corrects it, the award vanishes again. So the evil cheating gamer has just a very short win from his behavior. Maybe his award actually provoked a good mapper (or jealous other gamer) to go out and check the data. Well, thats win-win then. Of course this could lead to edit wars, but chances are slim (with my assumption that vandals are rare) that two nutcases find each other.

I don't think your game idea is bad by the way. I just don't think it serves the purpose I had in mind (motivate existing mappers to do more). It's more of a OSM-based game for other people not currently involved. Also I see that implementing your idea is waaaayyyy more comlicated, which mostly means that it won't be realized soon unless your are a very skilled coder yourself. (Well I'm not.)

To keep track of vandals and users who try to fraud the system, maybe the awards should not be generated by the users themselfes, but by a website where you have to log in with your osm credentials. So if someone goes a bit crazy on the whole thing, it's more easy to stop him or even the whole project from doing more damage.

Woah, I didn't know there's a word for that. Thanks for that link.

The competition (even if it is just between you and yourself) is exactly what causes the inceased motivation. So it is not a by-product, but the target.

I don't deny that this can cause damage. Even if implemented with most caution.
The question then remains: does it do more good than bad? Can this be balanced? How much 'bad' is acceptable? If it motivates 10 people to contibute more, and one of them overdoes it and starts shifting nodes to get last_edit_by status, is this still good? Let's discuss this.

@Sanderd17 How do you think the 'layer between' will help here? And isn't human review the only layer that would be affective? Love to hear your thoughts.

@Vclaw Didn't know they existed. Thanks for that. But they are way to rare to be useful for motivating the masses (like me).

@Sanderd17 Nice idea too, but not quite what I meant. It's not about creating a game and then using its data as a byproduct. (Game design is a very very hard job.) But just to give some gamey aspects to the OSM activity itself.
I especially see the problem in the need to postprocess the data of your game proposal and the problems you face in sparsely populated (by gamers) places, where you don't have enough data to validate inputs.

@Richard I'm with you on that point. Any point- or reward system has to be carefully balanced so that it doesn't encourage behavior destructive to the map. This won't be easy, especially to enforce this on the technical side.

I'm currently looking into what data is available for this purpose.

But as with any purely artificial point system, it's all about the social component. If it is not recognized by others, it's not attractive to the single user. I think OSM contributors are a quite fair and responsible group of people. I think geocachers are worse for that matter ;)