Thanks for your diary post.

However, I completely disagree with your reasoning on not awarding imports. I kindly offer these

10 reasons why you are wrong:

1. The Los Angeles County Building Import has been a local effort right from the start.
2. The import is adding invaluable metadata one wouldn’t get by tracing aerial imagery alone.
3. It’s a powerful collaboration between volunteers and paid mappers.
4. It has been transparent from the start. See Github.
5. One of the import sponsors is the fourth most distributed newspaper in the Untied states. (and it uses OSM to do most of its maps!)
6. There were very few buildings before the import - Jan. 2016 vs. July 2016
7. The building data lays the groundwork for responders/journalists/government officials/insurance companies/others before the next major earthquake. It’s gonna happen any day now.
8. The import has inspired and emboldened MaptimeLA (500 members and counting) and a local Github organization.
9. The import catches Los Angeles up with other major U.S. cities in terms of building coverage data.
10. Building outlines will inspire and encourage more edits. It’s way easier to add the donut shop to the corner of the strip mall if you know where the strip mall starts.

For even more check out this presentation about the import at the State of the Map US.

Thanks gang. And yes @BushmanK someone on Twitter said it was for training too. And yeah, the worm things look like little structures don’t they?

@Glassman

Thanks! I do have a breakdown somewhere. Let em see if I can dig it up.

@redsteakraw I’ll look at it. And I should probably make a post describing how to do it.

Thanks all!