[OAM-talk] OAM Wiki

[Christopher Schmidt]

Currently, the OAM wiki has a couple of problems which make it rather 
confusing to me as a newcomer.

The wiki seems to be entirely concentrated on drone/diy plane style
image capture and processing. I think that many of the imagery sources
for OAM may well be government agencies who are willing or able to share
their imagery with the project, and indeed, much of the imagery thus far
available is public domain datasets.

I think that the wiki should be organized to take this into account,
with the information that the DIY aerial photograph people are needing
being one subsection of a larger effort. 

However, the homepage of the project itself says something slightly
counter to this: 

"""
[OpenAerialMap] exists to provide a freely available image map of the
world created solely by community contribution.
"""

I'd like to confirm that it is the understanding of this gruop that
government collected data which is free for reuse without restriction
should be allowed to play a role in the OpenAerialMap vision. (I'm
almost positive that the general consensus on this is "Yes", but wanted
to confirm.) 

If that is the case, and the vision I have put forward -- using widely
available government collected data where it makes sense -- is
acceptable, then I'd then like to know if there's any obvious problems
with the wiki being rearranged to be slightly more conducive to this --
especially so as to not scare off new contributors.

I think that the best thing in the world for everyone would be if OAM
could be seen as a place where governments and other organizations can
share their imagery with the world without the need to worry about
hosting or setting up a web service. They simply create datarecords,
upload the imagery, and are done. There's clearly some way to go yet
before that vision is reached, but I want to make sure that
OpenAerialMap is an acceptable place to pursue this vision.  

I'm going to start cleaning up the wiki: some of the pages that are
stubs on there seem like they're more 'leading the answer' than actually
being useful, so cleaning up empty sections and the like seems important
to me. Since it's a wiki, I'm sure that if my changes are seen as being
negative, people will be willing to revert them :)

Looking forward to hearing everyone's opinions,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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