So Heather - does your statement mean that you think proportional representation of the OSM community in the OSMF membership is not important?

That’s not the impression I got from Heather’s response. I took here comment to mean, let’s not just look at the proportionality across USA versus Europe but let’s discuss also how we lift membership in Asia and Africa.

Heather: Do you have any ideas how best to achieve this? Countries that are well represented have strong communities so maybe some push on community building in these places is the first step. How can other OSMers and the OSMF help?

Lots of spam then. I wonder if there is value in having some autodetect steps in place. Maybe just for OSM diaries.

Thanks. At first glance this is looking good. Compromise was always going to be needed and this seems to strike a good balance. We can always tighten bits if the desired effect is not seen.

One question though. Here in the UK we run quarterly projects. In these we pick an area for the community to work on (e.g. footpaths) but leave the details to the community. A tracker tool is often built but nobody if forced to work in a particular way. So how does the new policy apply to these projects, if at all?

Cheers, Rob

Hi Michael, Are you thinking of pushing an update now the error has been identified? If not, then I can help search for alternate maintainer.

Yeah I never understood the two node public_transport scheme. It always felt like “tagging for the routing engine” to me. Map what is there - i.e. a bus stop sign or shelter by the side of the road. If you want to mark that it is associated with other stops nearby then do this via a relation.

Anyway, I barely have time to map bus stops with one node. Let alone two!

The OSMfocus app has stopped working on my phone. I now says “Could not download area!”. Great shame as this was a wonderful app.

@MichaelVL: Do you still have the source code for this? Any chance of a fix/open sourcing it?

Hi Martijn. Do you have any idea what the level of completeness is for the United Kingdom? We are looking towards our next quarterly project (starting July) and one idea is to focus on major road network by adding lanes and exit information. Step 1 is to assess the amount of work required. Lanes don’t look too bad (but could probably do with turn info and finishing touches). No idea about our level of exit/destination data. Cheers.

Awesome. I’ve never thought of exporting a Overpass Query to PNG to allow me to print it for on the ground mapping.

By the way: For opening hours there is the (Android only) StreetComplete app that may interest you.

A different angle is: Look at how much time this is taking. Assuming 5 mins work per block that’s 150 hours of work per year, and increasing. I’d guess that the real number is much higher.

Can we look at some other solutions that would prevent blocks ever having to be implemented. Preferably without simply shifting the time from DWG to a group of people. Perhaps being more supportive of people who want to make edits that are more controversial (e.g. helping people get good quality imports with simple documentation and useful tools). Perhaps automated changeset comments when no text added by the user. Perhaps a simpler wiki. Perhaps…

What are the main reasons for blocks this year?

Sounds good. I know a few local authorities that provide WFS [1] links to their data. Have wished that the OSM editors could display these so getting MVT vector tiles is a great step forward for ID.

I assume MVT vector tiles are a more logical approach than WFS, so I may have to try and persuade these data providers to switch to MVT tiles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Feature_Service

Hi Ikiya,

I am sorry that we were unable to provide a scholarship this year. It makes me feel very sad each time I send an email to those who have not been awarded a scholarship.

This year we had 202 entries. This included 12 duplicate entries, so the real number was 190. Some 36% of applicants were women.

We accepted 17, and recommended an extra 3 (local to Milan) attend as volunteers. Of those selected 47% are women.

Where possible we would like applicants to seek support from other organisations as well. We will never be able to support all 190 people so applying for other grants if possible increases the chance of being able to attend.

Wow big change! Please pass on my thanks to all those involved with this. It looks really exciting with lots of new features added based on feedback. Can’t wait to give the virtual challenges a go at our next mapping party.

Hi alan_gr:

Do you think that might be an example of the kind of accidental forms of exclusion we are (at least partly) talking about here?

OSM communication is fragmented. At some point you will have to join something whether an email mailing list (not my preference), IRC (too technical for me) or something else. GitHub is where the developers are because that is the tool they need to get their job done effectively so that’s the best place to go.

Note: this is the same in the real world too. If you want to get your voice heard you have to go find the people to speak too. There are occasional consultations (as there are in OSM too - albeit on the mailing list and the blog) but the easiest way to be heard is to go direct.

But yes, the fewer barriers the better and that is why I pushed for months for the visual editor plugin to be added to the wiki. This was done when the plug-in hit stable release :-)

P.S. Non-developers like myself can engage with GitHub just as a web based platform with chat features similar to this / similar to social media.

P.P.S I’d love for OSM communication to be less fragmented. I’d love for the osm.org site to become more of a social platform. hence my original plea here to use the diary section more and in your mother tongue.

To nominate somebody - http://awards.osmz.ru/ To get involved in selection committee - message Ilya (osm.wiki/User:Zverik)

No - cray33’s was. Should be blocked. Sorry for the confusion :-)

Here is an existing request for one-click embedded translations: https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/1441

A few extra +1’s on the top post in the thread to show support would be good.

That response was exceptionally poor but I totally agree that the environment is not great. One of the pieces of research highlighted this and it is in my view the root cause of our diversity challenge. By the way it puts men off too - this is a universal problem that should be tackled to improve our entire community.

Regarding language. I see no reason to assume that the diary feature is an English portal. I encourage you to post in whatever language you feel happiest with. I read (via Google translate) many posts written in Russian, Japanese, German, Spanish, French and thoroughly enjoy it. Some social media tools now have a quick button to translate a post. The more non-English posts we get here the more likely that feature will be added to OSM.

So yeah, please keep posting here - make sure your voice is heard :-)

Thanks Selene,

I’d go a step further and say that the global comms channels (such as this diary system) are a thermometer on diversity.

A few reflections:

• The awards are intended as a way to celebrate success and promote more people to share their stories. It should be seen as something fun rather than scientific.
• There are huge numbers of amazing people (both women and men) who’s voices are never heard. I’m lucky to find out about these by reading the SotM scholarship applications.
• A great step would be to encourage more people to share their stories more widely. The diary feature is a great place to do this and more people should use it.

So my question is, why are people happy to share their experience to a (private) google form and on platforms such as WhatsApp, but not here? Is it a UI issue - e.g. lack of app / hard to upload photos? Are there other issues?

It’s very easy to give examples that demonstrate either side. What you’re missing is therefore the consistency and “bitrot” debate (to use a term from coding). How we solve these is up for debate but simply pretending all is well is misleading. Similarly suggestions that “we’re doomed” are also wrong. We have some super talented people and can easily solve them - as soon as we agree how…!

“We” is Mapbox right? Anyway good stuff. Anything planned for outside of the US?