Ok! I’m on board, let’s use some data for OSM!! Wooo Yeah!!! Where’s the data?…

I spent a little over a year trying to get access to data, once I decided that was what I wanted to do. I now have permission from the local county where I live, some other county’s and some state data. And WoW! We now have more data to work with than we have time and mappers to processes it. It’s a good problem to have. So how did this happen?

This was my struggle and why it was worth it.

First a little back story. I’m relatively new to OSM, I started mapping in 2016 after a series of events led me to get fed up with Google Maps and I said to myself “I’m just going to figure out how to make OSM work for me”. I’ve been proponent of open source for much longer than that, but maps was one of my last hold outs where I said it’s just too hard to switch. After Mapping on my own in my home town for a while I met Mike who had commented on a few of my change sets and I had been talking to via the OSM pm system. When we first met, I asked “Can we use government data in OSM? That seems like a logical thing” and he told me in his nine years of working with OSM he has tried over and over to get permission to use the data but has mostly been ignored. Well me being a new mapper I said “Ok I’ll just let it go”, but it was like an itch that would not go away. Why can’t we use that data? It’s up on the county website and I can download it right now, if they go through the trouble of making it public facing why ignore us when we ask to use it? So I said “Mike I’m going to try and get the permission to use county data” Mike said OK go for it, and showed me some template letters that he had sent to county officials. So I took the same template letters and customized them to my liking, and sent them in!! aaaannnnndddd nothing… Not one response. I waited and said the wheels of bureaucracy turn slow so I will have to be patient. Just FYI I’m not super patient, it’s part of my personality I’m working to improve. After all, I’m trying to make OSM the best it can be so I can use it in my everyday life, I got no time for standing around! So I called my county GIS office and after talking to a bunch of people who did not know what to do with my request I finally got a hold of an official who said “I would like to help you but that has to go through the attorneys”. Great! That was the direction I was looking for. I took my letters and sent them into the attorney’s office aaaannnnddddd!!!, nothing, nada, more getting ignored. I called in, left messages. Once I got a secretary who happened to be standing beside the attorney when she picked up the phone, and asked him while on the phone with me then told me that “He has seen my request and will reply soon” That got me pretty excited, finally some communication from someone who was in charge, Great! Thhheennnn nothing, more weeks and months of waiting for nothing. I called back in to GIS a few times and asked for advice or if they could ask the attorney in my behalf. They were starting to get to know me at this point since I kept calling in and they liked that someone thought their data was really important and wanted to use it, a lot of people are apathetic to this kind of “boring” government data collection. Then after over a year of this I got a break. The GIS head was retiring and said “I’m going to write a letter giving you permission because I think you should have it”. Now you might think this is just coincidence (Ok, great but my GIS head is not about to retire) and you would be right. However! I had been building that relationship for over a year. Walking the line between being consistent and being a pest. And after that the next county over with whom I had been going through the same ordeal (but getting even more silence from) with gave me permission to use there data as well. It took over a year of emails, calls, civic websites, Facebook messages, learning more about legal processes than I ever thought I would. But I only needed to get the permission once. Also during this process, Microsoft open sourced their first batch of building data and I will never forgot adding 40,000 buildings in Greenville SC to OSM in a night. After hand tracing my entire town I was like “WOW that was easy!” They even had height tags!

Microsoft has since released building foot prints for a lot of other places and if you are waiting to get other data I highly recommend starting with this data as is available for many places and a lot of people are also doing it so there is lots of information on how to do it. (shout out to Microsoft, they started MapRoulette challenges and found some data we could use so we did not have to)

So, was a year of spending time beating my head against the wall, trying to get a response and not be ignored, time that I could have just gone out and collected data myself, worth it? Oh Yeah! We went through and edited every road in the first county in less than two months and I can tell you that would not have happened otherwise. There are people who keep up with the interstates and major highways in the US but small roads in our area have changed a lot since the Tiger import. I can tell you in our area right now we have the best roads map. That took us in Spartanburg County roads from worst to best in less than two months. And we are working on a rolling update and review process to keep it that way.

Other nice things about this approach

1. we look at our area as a whole not just the places we go a lot or like, so we map more evenly. Places where we live and go are mapped really well but that town “over there”, you know the one no mapper lives and I’ve never been to. Those kinds of places have not received much attention. But if it’s in decent shape, it might pique someone’s interest and, Boom! We now have a mapper in that town. Now I am not saying we need to map every little town to get new mappers? No. I started Mapping my town on my own with very little to start with. Like I’m sure many of us mappers have. But, what I will reiterate from earlier is that there are a lot more people who are willing to improve a map that basically meets their needs than people who are willing to make a map meet their needs.

2. We can define a road map(pun intended), measure progress, and iterate to improve how we do things.

3. When places donate data and see that it is used, they are more likely to contribute more.