Many South African charge locations missing - can I help as an editor?

OCM
1

Hi,

I want to plan some drives using a route planner that takes into from Openchargemap.

But many or most of the charging locations in South Africa that have been installed in the last couple of years are missing.

I have created some near me but I see that they are awaiting approval and I saw on another thread that you are short of editors and I wonder if you even have one for South Africa.

So - can I assist to edit for South Africa or let me know if there is another way I can help get the stations loaded?

Most of the chargers are being installed by a business called Gridcars. I can probably get a full list from the CEO which would faciltate getting it all up to date.

Thanks,
Steve

2

Hi, thanks for helping. I can make you an editor for South Africa so that your edits go through immediately and you can review/approve edits by others. I have also added GridCars as a network operator.

If there network is quite large then the first thing to do is ask if they will allow us to import the data into our database and either re-license it under our Creative Commons license or if they can grant the data to us as public domain information, or if they have another open data license we can use. We can’t just copy the information with express permission to redistribute it freely (that would be too easy!).

If there is a good amount of data to import and there is an API available then we can set up a regular import, that way their data becomes the ‘master’ for the information until such a time as it get’s edited on OCM.

3

Hello Christopher,

Thanks for that. I’d be happy to be made editor for South Africa.

Will I receive an email or similar when there is something to review?

Is there a place I can point Gridcars to that helps them understand how their data will be used. From where I sit it seems in their interest since more publicity will drive more EV owners to their sites.

Thanks,

4

Hello again @Christopher,

Thanks, I see my new locations are live.

I see you added Gridcars as a network but its not on the list if I try to edit a location and set the operator correctly.

Thanks
Steve

5

Thanks, depending on which editor page you’re using (we have two currently) you can choose Gridcars, the app /map editor currently has an Other… option that’s supposed to expand and let you select operators that haven’t been used in the current country before but that function is incomplete, will be added shortly.

6

Currently we don’t send an email when new edits are awaiting approval. We did previously have a subscriptions feature but at the time we didn’t have the infrastructure necessary to constantly run reports (every subscription needs to be checked for every edit to see if there’s a match), we may/will probably re-introduce this feature in the future.

So unfortunately it’s currently necessary to just periodically check if there are any edits or new locations awaiting approval that you can help with, it’s not ideal I know.

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