يومية OpenBrian

Microcosms Ready for Feedback

نُشِر بواسطة OpenBrian في 7 يونيو 2020 باللغة English

What’s Microcosms

Microcosms is a upcoming feature in the OpenStreetMap website to support local communities of mappers. Each microcosm is focused on a city and has a team of mappers working on improving OpenStreetMap in that city. The microcosm can organize their upcoming events and track RSVPs.

microcosm
noun
mi·cro·cosm | \ ˈmī-krə-ˌkä-zəm \
Definition
1. : a little world
2. : a community or other unity that is an epitome of a larger unity
source: Merriam-Webster

Development

Work started last year and is picking up lately. During development, microcosms is a fork of OSM called osm-microcosms. There’s a PR for early feedback from the website team.

The website team has a high standard for quality and I appreciate that. I continue to write automated tests for all the new code I create.

A design document is available to get an idea of what’s done and what’s to come.

Community

The Local Chapters and Communities Working Group has taken an interest in Microcosms and I’m glad to provide something to support them. Check them out on Matrix.

I’ll be giving a talk in the OSM US series of Mappy Hours. I’m scheduled for June 9th. And I’m talking to Austin about being on his podcast Nodes and Ways.

User Feedback

Thanks to Tom on the OSMF Operations Working Group we have a beta website for user feedback.

I’d love to hear what you want in Microcosms. What’s working well? What’s working poorly? What features are missing? Please file your issues and I’ll work on them.

OSM Testing Site: Microcosms

Brian DeRocher is the organizer of MappingDC.

مناقشة

تعليق من Minh Nguyen في 7 يونيو 2020 في 23:53

Looking forward to your talk!

(I had no idea you could style a link like a button inside kramdown, neat!)

تعليق من OpenBrian في 8 يونيو 2020 في 01:33

Since we’re using Bootstrap, it’s pretty easy. Here’s the source:

[OSM Testing Site: Microcosms](https://microcosms.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/microcosms){: class="button"}

تعليق من imagico في 8 يونيو 2020 في 11:18

I have not looked at the actual functionality of the feature yet but none the less two general comments:

i would strongly suggest reconsidering the naming - see also this comment. This would be the first feature on the OSM website that has a non-descriptive, non-translatable name which would have massive practical and political implications. I can explain this in more detail in case it is not clear.
if integrated into the OSM website it seems this would be by far the most complex feature and as such would for many not be usable without comprehensive user oriented documentation. Some serious thought should IMO therefore go into how to produce and maintain such documentation in the languages the OSM website is generally available in.

For better understanding of the goals here - do you develop this on your personal time or does this get financed by anyone else?

تعليق من OpenBrian في 8 يونيو 2020 في 14:35

imagico,

The word microcosm is quite descriptive. If you break it down “micro” is Greek for small, and “cosm” is Greek for kósmos or world. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/microcosm It literally means small word. This feature is built to support the small communities that exist all around our large world.

I tried translating it in https://translate.google.com/. Among the most popular indo-european languages, here are the results. I can’t speak to non-indo-european, but I’m sure “small” and “world” would translate just fine into any language.

rank	language	translation
2	Spanish	microcosmo
3	English	microcosm
4	Hindi	मनुष्य का सूक्ष्म दर्शन
5	Bengali	ক্ষুদ্র বিশ্ব
6	Portuguese	microcosmo
7	Russian	микрокосм
9	Western Punjabi	ਸੂਖਮ
10	Marathi	सूक्ष्मदर्शक
13	Turkish	küçük evren
15	French	microcosme
16	German	Mikrokosmos
22	Italian	microcosmo
24	Gujarati	માઇક્રોકોઝમ
25	Iranian Persian	جهان کوچک
33	Polish	mikrokosmos

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

Is there a language where it doesn’t translate? Yes, please explain more, because I don’t understand your non-translatable argument.

I also don’t agree with your point on documentation. This new feature is an alternative to Meetup. Meetup has about 140,000 organizers (over 25 million users). I doubt these people needed documentation. Ideally the feature is so easy it doesn’t need documentation.

I ask that you head over to https://microcosms.apis.dev.openstreetmap.org/microcosms . Register an account, join a microcosm, RSVP for an event. After that, let me know if you think documentation is needed.

While the dev site is only in English, OSM uses https://translatewiki.net to crowd source the translation into other languages. See https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:OpenStreetMap

تعليق من OpenBrian في 8 يونيو 2020 في 14:42

imagico,

I forgot to answer your last question.

I’ve been developing this feature for the past year on my own personal time. I do not get paid for this. I’m not a professional mapper, and don’t generally work in the GIS/mapping industry aside from placing a map on a website i developed 10 years ago.

I don’t ask for money, though it was offered by OSM US. I didn’t apply for a Microgrant.

I built this because I’m a community organizer and I need better tools in OSM for that.

Brian

تعليق من imagico في 8 يونيو 2020 في 20:31

Ok, i will try to explain the naming problem in more detail.

Most - if not all - of the features of the OSM website have descriptive names that are translatable (and are practically translated) into other languages. Think of things like the user diaries (Benutzer-Blogs in German) or changeset discussions (Änderungssatz-Diskussion in German) are named in each language in a purely descriptive fashion. Although these features might have first been named in English there names in different languages are on equal level descriptions of these features in these languages.

The name ‘microcosms’ for your feature OTOH is an English language metaphor and wordplay with the abbreviation OSM that is derived from the philosophical concept of macrocosm and microcosm which originates from ancient Greece. This metaphorical use is non-descriptive. Translating the philosophial concept of macrocosm and microcosm into a different language (which at least in many European languages ins not a translation but a transliteration of the Greek name) does not result in a descriptive name for the feature in general. This is further aggravated by the use of the plural of the word which in its original meaning is not typically used in the plural form. So someone tasked with labeling the feature in a different language is confronted with the non-satisfying choice of either

translating the name without the word play and without consideration of its metaphorical use - which is not very intuitive and likely often misleading, especially in languages from cultural context very different from the European one.
inventing a different, non-metaphorical and purely descriptive name or
using the original non-translated name as a foreign language artefact.

Any of these choices make the non-English versions of the website fundamentally different to the English language. This would be a novelty on the website and as such a political statement.

Not to mention that the use of such a wordplay metaphor based on a philosophical concept that is a fairly poor metaphor for the feature in question is not likely to be very intuitive to English language users either.

تعليق من Minh Nguyen في 8 يونيو 2020 في 21:16

I also don’t agree with your point on documentation. This new feature is an alternative to Meetup. Meetup has about 140,000 organizers (over 25 million users). I doubt these people needed documentation. Ideally the feature is so easy it doesn’t need documentation.

Also, if you’re worried about commercial interests, then Microcosm should be a welcome alternative to Meetup, which charges organizers a monthly fee and has also begun charging many organizers per RSVP. I’m subscribed to one local OSM-themed Meetup that has been on the verge of disbanding for a couple years because of these fees.

Any of these choices make the non-English versions of the website fundamentally different to the English language. This would be a novelty on the website and as such a political statement.

Just to add one data point: as a translator in Vietnamese, a very different language, I’ve taken all three approaches you’ve mentioned at various times:

“Node” is normally “nút”, but I translate it as “nốt” (as in music note) because “nút” also means “button”, which would be more likely to create ambiguity. I’ve replaced one metaphor for another.
There is no good translation for “feature” or “element” that still sounds like it could refer to a part of the map, so I translate both as “đối tượng” (object).
I leave “OpenStreetMap” alone instead of translating it to the unwieldy “BảnĐồĐườngSáMở”, even if the latter is more pronounceable. Even if I knew why “iD” is called that, I’m not sure I’d translate it either.

None of these choices is perfect, but translation is always a tradeoff among competing concerns, one of which is memorability. I don’t think it would be a huge barrier for users to discover what “Microcosm” means or how “Thế giới Vi mô” (micro-world) works in practice versus juggling a descriptive moniker like “Bộ quản lý Cộng đồng Địa phương” (local community manager) in prose and still having to figure out how it works in practice. Sometimes a term of art is the best solution to a feature that defies succinct explanation. That said, there’s always the possibility of distinguishing between a code name and a UI name. After all, the UI here labels a “Standard” style instead of “Mapnik” or “openstreetmap-carto”.

It looks like the project’s issue tracker is taking off. If you have naming ideas, perhaps they could be explored in more detail there.

تعليق من Geonick في 2 أبريل 2023 في 12:57

I’d be very interested in this feature implemented as part of OSM.org website.

Seem’s that it’s Microcosms was renamed to communities https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/3717 .

But the project name really only is about the functionality in osm.org . So the project name will vanish one day when it is merged.

@OpenBrian : Can you give an estimate when the pull request will be ready to be merged?

تعليق من OpenBrian في 5 أبريل 2023 في 00:20

4 PRs have been submitted. Sadly they have too many commits, making them difficult to review before merging.

I have shortened and pushed 2 of the 4 PRs. 100 to 10 commits on the first and about 50 to 6 on the second.

Unext is stage 3. Every commit of every stage has 100% automated tests code coverage.

The first stage was the hardest as my first attempt was not organized by layers. All the commits were scattered and unordered. Getting that down to 10 was brutal. The second PR was about half the effort. 3rd and 4th should be quicker.