Thoughts on imagery license reviewing process

[rbuffat]

There are around 200 countries in the world and even more languages. No single person can possibly assess fully the legal situation for every source added to the index. However, I assume there are many persons with local knowledge and experience. But it seems that only a handful of people actively review new sources. Ideally, it should be ensured that the local knowledge of people is used. The question is, how a suitable process can be established so that this can be achieved.

One option could be to maintain a list of countries and reviewers. If a source is added for one of the countries with a known reviewer, a reviewer is assigned to the PR. PRs are then only merged if the assigned reviewer has given feedback.

A challenge is probably to find reviewers willing to participate. Maybe local OSM organizations can actively be invited to look for suitable persons.

What are your thoughts? @grischard @Klumbumbus @Marc-marc-marc @simonpoole @andrewharvey @ included simply based on recent commit activity.

[simonpoole]

IMHO while a nice idea, the challenge as you say is that we are not remotely going to have enough people with the know how and experience this (not to mention the cultural issues this may run in to), and those that we have are unlikely to take on extra work.

Maybe if this was actually the definitive source for all of OSM it would be easier to convince people.

[Asteliks]

I think that it is always going to be extra work for someone. What if we could convince the local city offices that already work with us to keep us updated. At least in Poland we have dedicated city mapping offices, I've talked with they guys responsible for it here in Poznan and the only problem they see is that it is not as straightforward as they would like to find how to do stuff like suggest a new layer or how to share their data with us. Who to contact etc.

[andrewharvey]

Great suggestion @rbuffat.

I've been trying to help out with the maintenance of this project and try to review PRs. Personally I'm more familiar with the Australia and New Zealand sources which are mostly CC BY licensed and we just use the official OSMF LWG CC BY waiver form, so they are straight forward to review.

Other regions like the US usually it's about knowing if copyright applies to the source or not, and in Europe there seems to be a lot of custom license text in the native language.

Any help in reviewing PRs here is welcome. Anyone can review a PR on GitHub and provide further comments on a license. If there are people here that want to help with reviewing only a particular region, you can drop a note here and I can try to ping you for new sources in that region, but end of the day it's easier if you just subscribe to all PRs and just ignore ones you're not comfortable with.

[rbuffat]

As a more or less outsider, it seems that it is the OSM way to have multiple ways to do more or less the same. I would argue that "in an ideal world" it would make sense to have somebody with experience reviewing licenses. Regardless of which imagery index. As this has the potential to reduce the risk of wasted hours and legal troubles. However, I understand that everybody has limited resources and there are limitations to what extent a license (respectively if an organization is able to offer the data under that license..) can be reviewed anyway.

I assume it is easier to find people only looking at familiar sources than for the whole world. But I could be wrong. Maybe it's worth a shot to test it for the regions where people are available and the local culture would accept such a review process. Maintaining such a list and assigning reviewers should not be that much of an overhead (This step might even be automated by implementing a github action). If it doesn't work out, it could be stopped at any point.