osm.wiki/Data_working_group is the next potentially useful link - it is a good idea to report destructive accounts to DWG.

They may block accounts ( osm.org/user_blocks ), warn user and help with revering damaging edits.

And not following organised editing guidelines is one of ways how someone may be destructive.

“is completely overwritten by paid contractors from thousands of miles away.”

Is it “completely overwritten” as in “improved” or “damaged”?

Thank you for this very interesting entry! I will try to map flags once I spot them, though it is quite rare in Poland.

Among probably obvious ideas - translating helps. See osm.wiki/Translation#Editors_and_other_contributing_tools

I very much like the idea of mentorship on how to get more involved in the Foundation. It’s an offer I personally plan to make, and will also ask other Board members to make the offer as well.

For start - is it somewhere described what board members are actually doing? What is among top time/energy consuming things? What kind of decisions they make?

It is something that I was looking for and failed to find (maybe I would find it after more diligent search).

I’m not familiar with what happened on StackExchange.

They attempted to do something diversity related. And did it by introducing poorly formulated rules.

And reacting to feedback by libeling one of moderators in a press, pushing with poorly designed rules and generally ignoring feedback by volunteers.

In the end they improved rules a bit. But at least among more involved community members many are quite unhappy. See https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper

They managed to make their apology so insulting and misleading that it become post with lowest rating in history of the site. And later they deleted it, but it is preserved at https://web.archive.org/web/20191211020403/https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334248/an-update-to-our-community-and-an-apology (I needed to use toggle “use desktop mode” to see it on a mobile).

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-and-forced-relicensing-is-stack-exchange-still-interested-in-cooper has summary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange#Declining_relationship_between_users_and_company has quite good summary, starting from

On September 27, 2019, a moderator of multiple Stack Exchange sites was dismissed from her moderator position, allegedly connected to behavior associated with upcoming changes to the Code of Conduct (CoC) relating to gender pronouns.

you can just know about OpenStreetMap when you search for free geodata on the internet

Enforcing attribution requirement of ODBL may help to get OSM known by people outside group that was looking for something like that.

For reference, attribution requirements are currently violated for example by MAPS.ME, Facebook, Snapchat, Mapbox, Moovit and other major players (see https://github.com/matkoniecz/illegal-use-of-OpenStreetMap )

It may be useful to have a list of TODO things. So people interested in fixing this specific issue can work on something specific.

In one of recent diversity-related discussion topic of west-european/USA centric image examples at OMS Wiki. One of mentioned solutions was going through osm.wiki/Category:Feature_pages_with_missing_images and adding images - trying to use something from Asia/Africa/South America/Eastern Europe.

I think that it would be a good idea to have index with what was already written (and add new entries as they appear). This may help to avoid repeating the same things and build on what was said/collected/proposed/discussed.

What open communities are successfully addressing diversity and how can we learn from them?

I would look not only at open communities, some useful (though less likely to be applicable) lessons may be also learned elsewhere.

I would also look at cases where attempts to address diversity failed and caused harm. For a recent example see StackExchange that was harmed by focusing on very specific kind of diversity and ignored other kinds of diversity (they also made many other mistakes).

a good way to do so is to ask them. As opposed to asking them to prove it.

To clarify: I just attempted to do that. Sorry if my English was poor and I failed to communicate it properly.

I asked for more specific examples / clarification, as “toxic environment” is something so generic that it is not actionable at all.

If you think that I could formulate it easier - please tell me how it would be better to phrase it.

These qualified women aren’t being removed, they are self-deporting from this community

In such case it seems to me that quota system is not going to help at all, and it would be necessary to do something else.

A lot of people, rather than investing in this, will simply find another place to put their energy where they are not required to endure hostility or prove its existence in the face of skepticism.

That is why I am not PMing random users asking about this but ask it in comments under post that describes problem and where people interested in discussing the problem posted.

it’s more of a challenge, implicitly saying “prove it,” putting the onus on the person experiencing the hostility to demonstrate that they are not imagining it

To say it explicitly: yes, I request examples of problem described here.

The top post makes serious claims, and includes significant demands

• quota system
• hiring people
• making sign-up form even more bloated (one of main blockers for potential contributors is that sign-up form is dysfunctional on mobile due to huge number of fields - at least according to my small scale mobile-focused test - see https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete/issues/1470 )

The post even mentions that common response is “Prove that there are issues. I don’t see any issues.” and still fails to providence any evidence or specific examples that problem exists.

I’m not sure how you interpret this comment, but to me it’s an unvarnished example of dismissing someone’s argument by suggesting they have not earned the right to speak.

After thinking about it I agree that it is not a relevant argument and is an ad hominem argument, as this post is not among diversity among mappers but among OSMF board members.

You could, for example, join the few of us who specifically called out the above comment, or post a comment along the lines of “thanks for bringing this up, I welcome your contribution, and let’s work on this together.”

Maybe I made a mistake, but I treated this comment as irrelevant noise, not crossing into “should be called out as hurtful”. Looking at it - it is not adding anything to the discussion and I agree that it should not be made.

Community Management is a job field description and Community Managers are job roles. I’ve stated this in multiple posts for years. To aid, I always cited resources in all my diary entries.

That part is quite clear. But you need to convince others that

(1) Adding this kind of enforcement/rulers/moderators is useful and helpful

(2) It seems that you advocate hiring people to perform this roles. It means that you need also to convince people that it is better to spend money on this rather than on

• hiring developers to improve critical parts of infrastructure
• OSM events
• maintaining hardware
• grants supporting grassroot activities.

If you have some idea how it is supposed to work. And how it would differ from DWG - that already bans vandals, trolls and other people who insult or refuse to communicate.

Overall, I agree with

criteria such as gender, skin color, origin are discussed. Why is not religion, age, parentage, migration background, hair color, job of father and mother, latitude and longitude also discussed. The reduction of people to a single criterion - be it gender - is silly

I would add also culture, profession, age, economical status, disabilities, language, political opinions, ethnicity, health status, education etc. I believe that this criteria that are often far more important for a real diversity than criteria like a skin color or gender (at least in my region of world).

Women would not do so due to toxic environment, power imbalances, reputation targeting, and emotionally draining conversations.

It sounds scary, but it is not actionable without making it more specific.

For example, can you describe what you actually mean by “toxic environment”? Maybe I can do something to improve situation (or at least stop making it worse).

Codify it - The Working Groups need to have women and global regional members

Are there any working groups where people interested in participating outnumber available slots? Are there any working groups where qualified woman interested in participating was removed due to lack of space?

we definitely need active community management on the lists: see the current bourach of a thread on legal for so much of this

What is wrong with thread on legal mailing list (I am one of participants and I have failed to notice any outrageous problems)?

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.

Not sure what is the best way to encourage more people.

(1) Reducing technical debt is certainly part of that and thanks for that!

(2) Are there people that are unsure whatever their work has chance to be accepted and matches vision? Maybe mentioning something specific in https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website#development would be a good idea - something like

Pull requests improving mobile support are especially welcomed link-to-issue-1 link-to-issue-2 link-to-issue-3”

or

We need a good design for $THING, ideas from designers are welcomed

(3) Are there maybe people that would be happy to spend far more time on developing something OSM related in case of getting even small grants, far smaller than standard salary for a programmer? (I am mentioning this as I am doing exactly this with StreetComplete)

(4) openstreetmap-website repo has open PRs from 2012 are probably quite discouraging, https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aopen+sort%3Acreated-asc

Er, yikes no. A bad use of “ok boomer” isn’t comparable to racial based insults.

Note that widely varies across people what kind of ad hominem attacks are hurtful.

Age based insults can be very hurtful. 15 years ago it would be for me one of the most offensive ones. It is likely to be true again in the future once I am hit by various old-age related issues.

I would not dismiss it so easily that something for you personally is not problematic would hurt others. It varies wildly based on personal, historic, social and other contexts.

“a developer should be a servant of the community” is an absurd demand, for multiple reasons. Though obviously attempts to become “autocratic dictator” also are absurd and not acceptable.

“A developer is a part of the community.”

+1

@title

Yesterday I complained a bit about a poor title. But I think that it is actually a major issue.

Big part of this problem is that some groups are irritated/frustrated. Such strong pejorative terms are really damaging and are not making situation better. This is really not the best moment to go for a hyperbole.

– signed, someone who dislikes that iD attempts to redefine highway=track

only one main dev for the main site

It is not changing this part of your comment, but we are lucky to have two - see https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/graphs/contributors

Repeat of previous one, hopefully without eaten newlines.

I think that title is poorly chosen, situation is NOT so bad. And in this topic clickbait is not needed to generate discussion and views. And it makes situation worse.

Though:

• iD developers are not obligated to follow OSM Wiki, tagging mailing list, OSM community etc and so on.
• iD developers on some occasions decided to use that, in ways and cases that went beyond what JOSM authors do
• OSM community is not obligated to deploy unmodified iD editor as the default editor

In case of switching from iD to iD-with-community-changes I would strongly suggest to

• at start decide how it is going to be managed - how it is going to differ from iD? What is considered as a problem that people want to avoid?
• at start give it as one of possible choices in dropdown to look for bugs and other unexpected issues

There are many other things here, but for specific

switch to the community version of iD maintained by Frédéric Rodrigo

linking to https://github.com/frodrigo/iD/tree/compliance

It is completely missing * info in README how this fork differs from iD * info in README is it going to incorporate future iD changes * issue tracker (Github one is disabled)

Without fixing this it is too early to even think about deploying it as the main editor or even one of editors on the OSM website.

Also, I would advise pushing it as a separate repo, sharing commit history. Github status “ forked from openstreetmap/iD” has some consequences that may be problematic in future.

I think that title is poorly chosen, situation is NOT so bad. And in this topic clickbait is not needed to generate discussion and views. And it makes situation worse.

Though:

(1) iD developers are not obligated to follow OSM Wiki, tagging mailing list, OSM community etc and so on. (2) iD developers on some occasions decided to use that, in ways and cases that went beyond what JOSM authors do (3) OSM community is not obligated to deploy unmodified iD editor as the default editor

In case of switching from iD to iD-with-community-changes I would strongly suggest to

(0) at start decide how it is going to be managed - how it is going to differ from iD? What is considered as a problem that people want to avoid? (1) at start give it as one of possible choices in dropdown to look for bugs and other unexpected issues

There are many other things here, but for specific

switch to the community version of iD maintained by Frédéric Rodrigo

linking to https://github.com/frodrigo/iD/tree/compliance

It is completely missing - info in README how this fork differs from iD - info in README is it going to incorporate future iD changes - issue tracker (Github one is disabled)

Without fixing this it is too early to even think about deploying it as the main editor or even one of editors on the OSM website.

Also, I would advise pushing it as a separate repo, sharing commit history. Github status “ forked from openstreetmap/iD” has some consequences that may be problematic in future.

Also: contributions on Wikimedia Commons (mostly related to max weight and needle-leaved plants).