Mark Gray – you referred to the “craftspeople” as a “small club”, but if you look at it in terms of OSM then there are around 5,500 people in the craftsman way of doing things all around the world, and approximately 200 people fixing up the bulk imports. So make sure you understand the scales involved and don’t get them the wrong way round.

Such a small group might create a gem of a detailed village map every now and then and be very proud of how every street is perfect and every cafe has the current URL and every bench and speed bump is represented. If the social aspect of the group is the most important thing, then there is certainly no need to change anything. Increasing productivity or adding members to the group would not be important.

For me, the beauty of OSM is that there is plenty of room for any level of craftsman detail of an area someone cares a lot about *and* there is room for bulk imports to fill in the large lonely areas in between. I would argue that the bulk imports are (at least in areas I have edited) a much better starting point than a blank map and serve a vital connecting role between areas where mappers are active. If I arrived at the project and saw that there were no roads in my city, I would have thought “oh, this project is just a hobby of a few folks in England and Germany” and I never would have started creating my own city from scratch. Thankfully, when I arrived there was already a pretty good road coverage for my area which closely matches the Yahoo imagery and already has correct names for thousands of roads. I am very happy adding details like “this road is actually one way” and “this is a bridge, not an intersection” and here is a restaurant and there is a gas station (I don’t remember the name, I or someone else can fill that in later,) and that church just has a point from GNIS but I can sketch the building to add some detail and find the URL. The imports may not have been what everyone in the smaller original craft group wished for, but I believe they have brought in a much larger new group of people who care about the map in more different ways than before. You don’t *have to be* a craftsperson with a dream to join any more. New arrivals can appreciate the map as much closer to actually being useful now that it is so much more complete rather than as the utopian dream it once was.

There is nobody stopping the craftspeople from making their own separate map with only craftsperson contributions, all the software is free and indeed there are several examples of college campuses with their own separate OSM-technology map. On the other hand, there is nothing stopping the craftspeople from contributing to the main map, making the areas they love as perfect and beautiful as they like, meeting together as they have in the past, expanding the boundaries of their beautiful part of the map if they want to. The only difference now is that the frontier is not completely empty because it has been sketched by other hands before. As with any area in OSM, if you can do better than the existing work already done in an area, you are encouraged to improve the map. Now I am going to go and add the businesses I took pictures of earlier today when I was out shopping.

Excuse me? Who are you calling an outsider? If I want to import data for my area, and my neighbors like it, what makes that your concern? OSM is bigger than your little club.

“No, sorry, you and your 300 million neighbors aren’t allowed any vases until you make them yourselves. Yes, there are 10000 unfinished ones outside your back door. But you can’t have them because my branch of the club made our own from scratch and didn’t do it that way, so you can’t do it either.” Hmm, who’s the outsider here?