I’m not sure that I even want to reply to this, given the (presumably deliberately) outrageous title. Perhaps by responding I’m just encouraging more posts like this in the future? I hope not.

“Destroying” or OWG makes no sense, since it’s there to solve a legitimate purpose. If everyone on it disappeared tomorrow, OSMF would still need those purposes taken care of. The server budgets needs writing. The resource usage (like database disk space) needs forecasting and hardware needs planning. If you really want to “destroy” OWG, then you would need to explain what that stuff is no longer necessary, or suggest which working group should be doing that stuff instead.

You’ve also glossed over whether you want to destroy the sysadmin group, or OWG, or both, but no matter.

So let’s focus on the (slightly) more sensible suggestion, which is to “disband” the group and start again from scratch. Would that really work? Would the incoming people have any idea what needs to be done? Perhaps. Over the last few years we made the hardware site, and wrote a lot of monthly reports, and the chef-repo exists, so perhaps the new people could read all of them and try to get started. But it’s a high-risk strategy to kick everyone off first, instead of adding new people in and keeping those with experience still around to answer questions. I guess the sensible approach wouldn’t generate the dramatic headlines though.

But in any case, diary entries like this can become a damaging self-fulfilling prophecy. What member of the community wants to get involved, if the only public attention you get is posts like this? Why would any sensible person join any working group, if prominent and well-respected former OSMF Board members write posts like this? Try to imagine what being on the receiving end of this would be like. Try to realise what you are doing here, and why there will be even fewer working group members (or even board candidates) in future. You’re creating an environment where even paid contractors won’t want to get involved.

There’s definitely problems in this working group, and they definitely need fixing. But this kind of post does more harm than good.

For anyone who is reading this and wants a more practical set of suggestions from a former OWG member, feel free to read https://gravitystorm.github.io/osmf-infra-plans/ for some ideas, or if you want any other suggestions for improving OWG feel free to ask me any of your questions directly.

It’s great to see discussion like this, and I share a lot of your feelings about the site. To say there’s room for improvement would be an understatement! I particularly note the lack of user search, and the rest of the underdeveloped ‘community’ parts of the site. I think it is illustrative that we have the ability to “browse relations” and “node history” but no way to find other community members. (I prefer thinking in terms of ‘community support features’ rather than ‘social networking’ since that term has a lot of negative connotations).

However, there’s no shortage of idea or wishes to improve what we have. What we are really missing are the people who are willing and able to do the coding, design, and other development work. Whether those people are volunteers or paid for doesn’t matter to me, but at the moment we just don’t have enough people involved. So progress is slow.

I’ve spent the last three years relentlessly working on making it easier to contribute to the development. You can read more on my personal blog if you are interested. My own todo list will keep me busy for at least the next 5 years, never mind all the big ideas that are out there.

So I encourage you to get involved in the issue tracker to get more familiar with what’s going on, and get familiar with what will be needed to make a impact on our progress. And again, I think it’s the lack of contributors, not the lack of ideas, that is the most important thing here.

You mentioned a Community Map of ‘channels’ which i am not aware of - could you provide a link?

I suspect the map is https://openstreetmap.community/ , which is built using https://github.com/osmlab/osm-community-index

All OSM data is in WGS84. There are no local datums in OSM.

You might not like it, but EU laws do affect OpenStreetMap. It would be nice to think that you are unaffected since you aren’t from the EU, but the servers are in the EU, the OSMF is based in the EU, the license is based on EU laws and so on. So if you like OpenStreetMap, then you have an interest in these EU laws, whether you’d like to or not.

Of course, no users of OSM, whether in the EU or not, can directly change these proposed laws. But they can contact their representatives, and this is what this action is designed to encourage. As a Canadian you also have a representative to the EU - you could contact them to explain the problem too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ambassadors_of_Canada_to_the_European_Union

The iD editor uses locale information from your OSM account settings. It treats ‘en’ as ‘en-US’ by default, so you need to specify ‘en-GB’ to get the British translations.

If you have anything set in the Preferred Languages setting in your OpenStreetMap account, then check that carefully to make sure that ‘en-GB’ appears, and that it’s before ‘en’ or ‘en-US’. If you remove everything from that field, it will be re-populated with the language preferences that your browser sends (and the same rules apply about putting ‘en-GB’ first).

You mention ‘en-UK’ - I’m not sure if that’s a mistake or not, but it’s not the right thing - you need ‘en-GB’.

I’d never noticed until now, but my browser was sending ‘Accept-Language: en-GB,en;q=0.8,fr;q=0.5,de;q=0.3’ (which is approximately correct) but I had just ‘en’ in my OSM account settings from goodness knows how long ago. So I blanked that setting out, pressed save, and now my settings are ‘en-GB en fr de’ and iD now shows the British translations. Which is great!

@Warin61 I think you are being too strict on your definitions, and as @althio says, you seem to be a bit selective in your reading.

However, I’d like to hear your opinion on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Tube since there is no earth on either side, or on top, and it was not built by boring or mining through the ground. I think many people would consider this to be a tunnel, do you?

Personally, I think it’s reasonable to tag these as four parallel tunnels. From what I see, I would have mapped them as tunnels because each of the lower sections are much, much longer than they are wide, and that’s one of my rules of thumb for ambiguous situations. The first and fourth tunnels indeed have dirt beside them. Having a tunnel wall between two tunnels doesn’t stop them from being a tunnel, so the central pair could be considered tunnels too, even without dirt beside them.

It doesn’t really matter how they were built. Think about all the subway tunnels in London (and elsewhere) that have been constructed by digging a trench and building a platform (or really extensive ‘bridge’) over the top to take roads, parks, buildings etc. The construction methods don’t really matter, they are still considered tunnels.

But most importantly, it’s better to discuss the situation with other mappers, and come to an agreement! Perhaps this is one situation where it’s fine to have both tags? You could talk through it on one of the mailing lists or at a local meetup and see what other people think.

Thanks mavl for posting these statistics! It’s great to see that the system is being well used - it certainly took a lot of development work, by a lot of different people, in order to get it fully working and deployed.

Rob - there’s already spam detection and filtering in the website, but there’s always room for improvement. Perhaps these reports and issues can be used to help improve the filters? If anyone is interested in doing this, then they could contact the DWG, who currently handle most of the moderation tasks.

@Andy Allan: as you’re mentioning this point: the pull request to remove those remaining slow parts in the map call is already out there, waiting to be reviewed, merged and deployed: https://github.com/zerebubuth/openstreetmap-cgimap/pull/142

That PR is unrelated to what I’ve described above. Sure, it speeds the map call up, but it doesn’t make it any more cacheable that now.

@Komяpa Of course it would be great if we could support unlimited requests on the /map call. But since that’s not the case today then I think it’s nicer to give an early warning rather than a potential bigger problem later on!

As I’m sure you’re aware, but for the benefit of others who might be interested, the /map API call is hard to scale for two reasons. Firstly, it works like a WMS service with arbitrary extents, rather than like tiles with fixed extents. Secondly, it’s crucial for all editing software that it provides read-after-write consistency, so that when a changeset is saved, the next /map request is guaranteed to contain that fresh data. So both these reasons make it hard to cache responses and without any caching it’s hard to scale.

There have been proposals to fix both of these over the last few years. This would be by making map calls tiled, and by providing a “not-before-changeset” parameter or similar for the consistency issue. Then we could cache responses without breaking the editing workflow, and support more use of the /map call. But like many things, we need more people coding, and more community support for those who are already coding. Suggesting that we should deliberately violate the policy, and “break OSM” so that “someone pays attention” would not be the best approach! :-)

Good luck with your project! We also provide development versions of the main OpenStreetMap website, so if you’d like to add loads of notes without cluttering up the real OSM database, then please use one of them. For example, the “master” option is the same code as on openstreetmap.org but with a test database.

Nice project! However, it violates the API Usage Policy. The API is only provided for editing OpenStreetMap data. If you want to display OSM data then you need to get that data via planet.openstreetmap.org or a service that is built on top of the planet feeds.

The second part of my response is focussed on two projects mentioned here that I’m closely involved in. Perhaps unlike other core contributors, almost all of the work I do is not as a means to the end, but instead as a means to get more people involved, to lower barriers to entry, and to speed up future development.

The first is the cartography.

Then it was converted to CartoCSS, made prettier, and contributors started flocking in.

I think I did the right thing here, do you agree? That the conversion was the correct thing to do? I deliberately added 6 more maintainers and gave them all the same power and authority as I had. But you go on to say that it’s become bleak, that nobody knows what to do, and in your eyes the project is a failure. So I would like to hear from anyone what I did wrong, and what I should have done differently? Should I have stayed as the only maintainer? Or something different? Clearly some mistakes must have been made, and I’d like to hear about them.

The second is the website:

Two guardians do not let through any unconventional change: it’s like amidst a crumbling world we must hold on to what we already have. They don’t see that the power of their grip is what crumbles their world.

Well, I’m one of those unnamed “guardians” I guess. But I’ve never considered what I do there as clinging to power, or preventing changes, or anything of the sort - but obviously you think differently. I’d like to hear more about your point of view. I’ve worked hard to refactor the code for the last two years, I’ve put in hundreds of hours on getting the moderation branch ready, and I’ve reviewed and dealt with lots of issues and pull requests, many of which have been outstanding for years. All of this is focussed on getting more people involved, not fewer.

I haven’t made many big user-facing changes since that’s not what I think is the most pressing problem that I can solve. Like with the stylesheets - I didn’t redesign the map from scratch, I took the moribund project, made some technical changes to make it easier for others to get involved, and opened it up to the community. I’m trying to do the same thing for the website, taking the existing project, making technical changes to make it easier for others to get involved. I hope someday soon to add another half dozen maintainers to that project, and move on to the next most pressing project in OSM.

That’s my point of view. But it’s clear that you disagree fundamentally with two of the largest projects that I’m involved in - there’s no harm in that, everyone has their own views. I’d like to know more details on what you believe I’m doing wrong, and what I should be doing instead, to reinvigorate OpenStreetMap, since what I’ve been doing for the last few years apparently isn’t working.

I’m going to divide my response into two parts, in separate comments.

First, my response to the general theme. I agree it often feels like OSM is missing a certain spark that existed years ago - a willingness to bump API versions, or reconfigure everything, or rewrite code or prose from scratch - but that’s not my point. My point is to ask the rhetorical question - what could be done to snuff out these sparks? What could be done to make sure nothing ever changes again? What could be done to drive out the passion, the creativity, the resourcefulness and the enthusiasm from everyone involved?

Posts like yours, that’s what. Posts like Serge’s. Posts that do nothing other than berate everyone for being shit, that provide no solutions, and that just bring everyone down.

This isn’t a 1500 word essay that encourages contributors. This isn’t a 1500 word essay that makes anyone think “you know what, I’m going to help with this”. This isn’t a 1500 word essay that highlights something good that has been done and encourages more good things to happen.

If there’s any grand problem in OpenStreetMap, it’s that the loudest talkers are the ones who are bemoaning the lack of work that everyone else is doing. It’s a great shame. It’s so discouraging.

But it feeds into the wider point. The sort of people who put up with this environment are rare, so we have few core contributors. Those who are here are generally thick-skinned, battle-hardened, stubborn - or all of the above. So it should come as no surprise that change is infrequent, risks are not taken, the status quo is maintained. The irony is that the very act of complaining about the status quo drives more people away, and reinforces the status quo further.

So if you want to see change, don’t moan about the lack of it. That approach has been done repeatedly, and we can all see the damage that it does.

Focus instead on what you like. Celebrate the successes. Cheer on the progress, however little you might find. You have a rare gift for writing and communicating ideas in OpenStreetMap, so use it to encourage the bright future that we all want to see.

I’d much prefer option 2, since it more accurately represents what exists on the ground. Options 1 and 3 start introducing angles and corners (“Warning! Sharp bend ahead!”) that don’t exist.

Option 2 is the best approximation of the route that a fully informed driver will take, namely a straight line from the point of lane departure to the exit. Imagine instead that drivers follow option 3 - 45 degree turns just before the gore? I don’t think that would be right.

not after stalled pull requests to the OSM website

I know this is off-topic, but I’m trying to work through all the pull requests for the OpenStreetMap website code, and deal with them one way or another - and hopefully deal with them all more quickly in the future. Any help is welcome. Last week I tackled three of the oldest, but there’s still some that are 5 years old!

This particular thing actually was a previous GSoC task, but one that hasn’t yet been polished off ready to be merged. But I’m happy to slowly work away at reviewing and improving it, albeit a long, long time after the GSoC student and mentor involved have moved on to other things.

GSoC isn’t the best solution when the problem is a lack of regular contributors. We can easily end up with a big feature and nobody to merge it or maintain it. We need some people who are willing to help (and that might involve learning to code, many developers like me are self-taught) with all the routine tasks, big and small, that would improve OSM for everyone.

If EWG want to help encourage more contributors then I’m all for that. Making improvements - however small - to the website has a huge impact on OSM since it’s used by literally every single contributor. So I hope that there’s someone who is reading this diary who will realise that they can play their part too. That’s why I mentioned it!

Yes, there’s work in progress to allow users to flag diary entries (and other things, like changeset comments) for moderators and admins to look at.

I’ll just say here that there’s very few people actually writing code to improve the website - surprisingly few, given the thousands of people who use the website and the API each day, and the hundreds of developers in the OSM ecosystem. So if anyone can help us out, help is definitely appreciated!

Just a minor point, but the OpenCycleMap and Transport layers both have the same rendering stack, so I’m not sure why there’s a separate “Transport Renderer” on there. Both layers are an osm2pgsql -> PostGIS -> vector tiles -> raster tiles type of stack.