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Hi good people. I want our customers to contribute to OSM, but if I make them create an account for iD, they will complain. We want to embed iD into our own apps, can we use a generic company account for contributions? Background I work at scribe.ac, we build apps to help clerks administer parish and town councils (local government) in the UK. We are building an app to help them manage allotments and cemeteries, which includes mapping their plots. I really want to contribute this data directly back to OSM, since we have over 750 customers (growing 100% YoY). Any help is appreciated! John Fagan |
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This is asking for trouble. There is a precedent - we have "wheelmap" who use an account called "wheelmap visitor" to make changes, and that is shared across all their users. However, the "wheelmap visitor" is unable to create new objects, unable to delete existing objects, it can only change a small, defined number of tags and it cannot add free text or free tags of any kind. Therefore, the danger of "wheelmap visitor" adding copyrighted data, or vandalism, or accidentally breaking existing data, is low - which led to this exception being made. If you want your users to contribute more freely, then it is vital that your contributors are identifiable to the community (we don't have to know the real name of someone, but we want to know that the person who edited X also edited Y three days later); they must be reachable for the community (i.e. if someone writes a comment on one of their changes, your contributors are expected to read that and respond), and it must be possible for us to block an account if it misbehaves. Finally, from a legal POV, your contributors must agree to the OpenStreetMap contributor terms, and we would also like them to be aware that they are actually contributing to OSM (rather than believing they upload data to scribe.ac). |
