Asking users to accept the ODbL

We have changed the license. Please help with remapping to fill in areas of redacted data

During an earlier stage of the license change process we were having a concerted push asking users to accept the ODbL, by signing in and ticking a box on the OpenStreetMap.org site.

Now that the automated redactions process is complete, there is no longer any urgent imperative to contact users asking them to do this.

This page originally carried information on processes and example messages for asking users to accept the ODbL, and a list of users who had been contacted. This information is no longer of any great value, but can still be viewed in the wiki page history ([1])

Can we still ask users to accept?

You can, but it's not a priority. While it's always good to contact old mappers who have stopped mapping, to to try to welcome them back to OpenStreetMap, we don't need to go out of our way to do this, and we have made attempts to contact all of these users already with their registered email address. Outreach efforts are better concentrated on attracting new contributors.

What about users who do accept at this stage?

There are currently no plans to unredact or otherwise rescue information from mappers who accept the licence change at this stage. In theory it would be possible to rescue such data (most likely as a careful user-driven data layer merging operation), but we don't anticipate that significant numbers of users or significant amounts of data would benefit from this, and it would involve considerable technical effort.