Not just an import, a destructive one at that. You overwrote existing building that had metadata with bare outlines, e.g.: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/559909735/history

I would very much like to know of any locations of discussion about this.

If you plan an import, it’s you that starts the discussion before you do it

You must follow the import guidelines or your edits risk being removed.

You must use a dedicated import account for this, not your regular one.

Problem changesets include:

• 124511174
• 124548274
• 124548232
• 124547787
• 124547785
• 124547783
• 124547780
• 124539815
• 124539603
• 124532267
• 124531521
• 124513368
• 124512676

would love to vote on this, but it seems I rejoined too late in the year to be able to do so. Do I get to vote next year? If not, this is undemocratic. There was no warning on the OSMF website saying YOU CAN’T VOTE THIS YEAR when I signed back up.

Heather, @migurski - yes we definitely need active community management on the lists: see the current bourach of a thread on legal for so much of this.

One difference about Metafilter moderators, though: they’re paid to manage the community

… and wouldn’t you know: after lots of pressure from the Office of the Information Commissioner, Canada Post caved and sent me the information!

Now, it’s not particularly useful as they don’t hold geodata. It’s also printed: so yay, 80 pages of OCR. But getting anything out of Canada Post is apparently very difficult. I hugely appreciate the efforts of the investigator at the OIC who kept pushing this request through.

Nope, not even remotely going there. This is not about free cake.

So maybe the proposed copyright directive is crappy: I wouldn’t know from this action. There are no links on the map. No way to find out more. It must’ve taken some of that donated time and money to come up with this protest scheme. With no background, this just seems like randomness on OSM’s* part rather than an effective protest. Don’t alienate the people you’re trying to reach.

*: understanding that this wasn’t the OSMF or any of the volunteer admins.

A simple message like “Query is provided by an external service, Overpass Turbo” would make the map look more useful today. The fact that Query is returning random way links in infuriating.

Ambassadors exist for trade and diplomatic purposes. One concern from a private individual won’t get passed along. If this action were meant to be useful, there would be links to position papers, people to contact, canned letters to use — not bloody random links to likely deleted ways.

Good work on the distribution and modification!

They require Inkscape to be effective (which is kind of in complete opposition to the premise of the open-source movement).

Hey, at least it requires open-source software to edit, not like open-source projects that require expensive commercial software. If it had been produced in InDesign, you couldn’t even think of opening it on Linux.

Inkscape’s got its quirks. I live in it, so those quirks seem natural to me in the same way that some people believe JOSM to be usable software. Using Inkscape for this flyer was a slightly odd choice for a DTP job, as Inkscape’s an illustration package.

• It looks like these files were saved as Inkscape’s own dialect of SVG. It has never pretended to be web-friendly, and XML namespaces are used to keep the weird stuff separate. To make it standard, you need to save a copy as Plain SVG. Doing so loses some useful metadata that may affect your layout, so don’t work in plain SVG or any file format but Inkscape SVG.

• Inkscape’s Save a copy … is really the Save As … that you were looking for. You need to save a lot in Inkscape, as it’ll sometimes throw you a crash. I still save reflexively after pretty much every action even though the package is infinitely more stable than it used to be.

• These files pre-date the 90 dpi to 96 dpi shift in SVG standards. Consequently, dimensions may end up wonky. There may be nothing you can do about this.

• The project is also likely too old to have colour management baked in. This could make the flyers appear unexpectedly garish or flat without careful proofing. Current Inkscape has colour management, but you have to enable it per project. It’s pretty much futile enabling colour management unless you’ve calibrated your display, though.

• Inkscape makes the best PDF from Inkscape SVG as it understands the metadata that other parsers ignore. It’s not PDF/X compliant, though. For that, you’ll need Artifex’s GSView and the correct ICC profile for your particular print supplier’s setup. For a project like this without elaborate colour and stock needs, however, saving as a generic archival PDF/A will allow OSM volunteers anywhere¹ to print decent copies without all the rework you’ve had to do.

–

¹: anywhere except North America, that is. We use archaic paper sizes here that are incompatible with the rest of the world.

I’m a (sometime) ham radio operator. Hams have been writing “Ham radio is dying!!!!1!!” screeds for the last 70 years or more. It’s still here. It’s changed a bit, but it’s still here. It’s survived total shutdowns due to world wars, but come back. It’s expensive, time-consuming, semi-futile and the community can sometimes be entirely toxic, yet it persists. In between the noisy gatekeepers and public nuisances there are good, innovative and kind operators.

OSM is much the same. It’ll only die when there aren’t enough contributors to write “OSM is dying!!!!1!!”

Maybe it’s your interest in OSM that’s dying. If so, that’s okay. You contributed for a while, and now it’s not fun any more. These things happen. OSM can’t compete with commercial web mappers. That’s okay too. Maybe you’ll come back when it seems like fun again. I hope so.

Nope, Warin61 - these are real roads, as logged in the national roads database.

Thanks, Heather! The mailing lists get extra-special fighty and aren’t a great way of finding a welcoming community.

MeFi weighed in on why Cartography is democratizing but not equitable.

Not looking for feuds at all, James — just surprised that there’s nothing codified for OSM in Canada.

… and I finally hear their decision: they refused.

The gist of it is that they feel that disclosing mailbox locations would:

1. provide commercial advantage to Canada Post’s competitors; and
2. be a disclosure of Canada Post’s confidential information.

I’m frankly O_o about these reasons. I mean: mailboxes are bright red things left out in the street in highly visible locations so that you can find them to use Canada Post’s delivery service. How could they be confidential? Not even the Underpants Gnomes could come up a business plan to drive Canada Post out of business by mailing things. Sheesh.

I can appeal, and I will. I suspect the real reason is that Canada Post just doesn’t want to go to the bother of opening data.

True, but we have the data, and it’s readily available. So for app providers not to provide it could be classed as negligence — oh wait, what was I thinking? Software developers taking responsibility for anything? Sheesh!

This is great. There’s a lot we can all do locally - even in huge countries with tiny communities like Canada

Some are commercial, others are municipally-owned. landuse=commercial is too broad.

Had a call from the Manager, Access to Information and Privacy at Canada Post this morning. It seems that most rural mailboxes are documented as human-friendly addresses, and not geocoded. I’ve agreed that my request should be limited to:

Please provide all current geographic locations in the region of GTA for public (outgoing) mailboxes. Canada Post does not provide this information on its website. Please use a suitable computer-readable format, as I intend to add these locations to OpenStreetMap.

I’d refer you to this discussion: [Talk-ca] City of Ottawa imported buildings & addresses

(further update: I’ve just sent an ATI request to Canada Post. I’ll keep you all, um, posted …)

That might be the sensible thing to do, but they do have a cost recovery mandate, so anything that incurs costs will likely need an internal business plan.