This is pretty cool. A lot of manual work on OSM, back when I was with some OSM nerds in DC, faced the problem of manual imports and a tool like this would have been very, very useful.
Thank you NYPL!
Thank you NYPL!
We, however are far more lenient (mostly because we can't afford to build a time machine to map the past ourselves).
On the other hand, Mike Migurski's Green Means Go [1] project is fantastic for figuring out where batch imports into OSM will be greeted with confetti and parades for filling out parts of the US without enough coverage to warrant anti-import protectionism.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import
But most of that's importing already digitised info. Relevant to this topic, vectorising from images, there seems to be renewed work on autotracing from satellite imagery coming to the iD editor:
http://www.mapbox.com/blog/user-friendly-guided-feature-extr...
edit: just noticed you linked to that elsewhere in this thread.
That being said, thank you for throwing this up for the uninitiated. Some of the emails to the OSM-main and OSM-US list were hilarious, like people populating entire country-worth datasets. Boy, did people yell at them.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Washington_DC/DCGIS_impor...