Hello, I’m Jinal, a Program Manager at Grab since 2019 and an OpenStreetMap contributor since 2015. After reading all the comments and responses from everyone who participated in this thread, here are a few things that I would like to share with you all on behalf of myself and the team:
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OpenStreetMap was new to us when we started mapping in 2018, we acknowledge that there were a lot of things that we did not know back then.
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But in the last few years, all we have tried to do is work closely with all of you and find better ways to collaborate.
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We have appreciated and valued your feedback and together, found ways we can improve the overall communication. Here are a few outcomes of the conversations:
- After a brief pause on the edits from our end, we kickstarted the conversation with some of the active community members on ways we can make our mapping better and re-review the data that was previously contributed, that’s when we came up with the [github master ticket](https://github.com/GRABOSM/Grab-Data/issues/49#issuecomment-691025559), where we shared about our objective of mapping and if we had any doubts we would open them up for discussion- This was prior to making OSM Forum the go-to place for sharing new campaigns
- This helped us get resolution and contribute to good quality data
- This has been something that has helped us collaborate with other community members across South East Asia too
- These were all the issues that we sought help from the community and the community members gave us advice and the best approach to handle the issues
I’m sharing this to let folks know that we have always tried our best to communicate with you all and find ways to do better. We have the same objective of contributing quality data, and while not yet perfect, I do believe things have significantly improved over the past few years.
We do acknowledge that there was an oversight on our end when it came to transitioning from Github to OSM Forum and this was because the individual who was handling these communications moved out and this was lost in transition. But once aware of the issues, we immediately modified our processes to ensure we are following the proposed guidelines. Specifically:
- Following up on the thread, we had open conversations and communication with everyone involved to understand and act on the feedback
- The result of this discussion was that we came up with a tag - ‘import=grabremote’ to enable people to differentiate between the edits made by our team and others
- We are still finalizing some nuances around when to use the tag and so on
I also want to address concerns raised about inactive accounts. Please allow me to share some context on how we’ve addressed this:
- We do ensure once the user is inactive, their accounts are updated with a message stating that this user account is not active and one can reach out to the email address in case there’s a query (example)
- Through the post, we realized that it’s not the best solution, as folks might want to just comment on the changeset without looking into the user profile. So we were trying to find a technical solution to ensure that we receive changeset comments from accounts of users who are no more a part of the team
- It was only recently we found that some firewall setting prevented these comment emails from reaching out to us, we have rectified this at our end, and going forward we should be able to respond to all the comments and messages
- One solution was to delete the account (which is an option available on OSM), but that would make it harder for anyone to communicate with us, so that was not the best solution
- One thing to note is that an OSM user name can be tagged only to a unique email address
But after some back and forth, we found the solution and now anyone can comment on the changeset and we will ensure that we respond to it
That’s why we have continued to collaborate with Mishari - to help us better understand and contribute to OSM in this region.
I want to reiterate what I said above that we know we aren’t perfect and we don’t get things right all the time. Every region is different from the other, some things work well and some things need to be tweaked. But the value of a community like OSM is the collaboration that helps us all do better. That’s why we have continued to collaborate with Mishari - to help us better understand and contribute to OSM in this region.
We do believe we have made and intend to continue to make important contributions to OSM in Thailand, and you have our commitment that we will continue being receptive to your feedback and acting on it as quickly as we can. I’m also happy to work with you all on setting up policies that are stricter for corporations like us as I’m an OSM contributor myself.
Just wanted to share this side of the story where it’s not our intention to create bad data. We are using this data on our platform to help provide livelihoods to millions of driver and merchant partners, and this is impacted if there’s bad data. Therefore, it’s in all our best interests to have good quality data in this region.
May I also ask if you would all be open to meeting in person? We would like to hear more from you and would appreciate also the opportunity to share about what we are working on and discuss with you the issues that we all are facing. This would help us all align on our common goals and find ways to communicate better going forward. Please do share the best time to do so and also the preferred location where we can meet most of the folks.
Best,
Jinal Foflia