User talk:Steve/AlternativeStrategicPlan
Motivations and resources
OSM will only render roads with a new tag “addr:complete", where mappers manually will have to mark roads as address complete. This will immediately make the map go very blank and create a large global project to finish addressing, which is the main thing missing in OSM.
I appreciate the concerns and the focus on improving the map. However, in a collaborative project, everyone has different motivations. I know people that only map cycling infrastructure, others are interested in hiking trails, some companies are focused on road infrastructure, etc. I like to trace roads and mapping POIs, but I find it extremely boring to trace buildings. Nevertheless, I like to use RapiD to map buildings, and I do it often, as it makes the work much easier and faster.
Instead of focusing on the map rendering, I would suggest creating resources that make it easier to map addresses. For example, some years ago, the Brazilian community created a TMS layer that renders the street names from a governmental source and made it available to the mappers in the OSM editors. Some companies, like Mapbox and MapTiler, sponsored the hosting over the years. It helped the community to add the names to the streets all over the country, and now we have an excellent completeness level.
Extracting the house numbers from open street level imagery and making it available to the mappers in an easier way would be a good improvement, for example.