I’m sure that some people are aware of the controversy on the diversity-talk list. I have not had the opportunity to give my side, so I will do so here.

I have a long history in the OpenStreetMap project. It may be difficult to understand that from an outside perspective, but going to an OSM event can feel like a family reunion to me. I see the same people that I’ve met before. Some people I speak with nearly daily online, others I rarely get the chance to catch up with. I know people’s significant others, and sometimes their children. These are people I collaborate with on a project where we share a passion and dedication. We’re all working together to make the world a better place.

On December 1st, Alyssa Wright sent an email where she explained that she’d been in an accident and had suffered brain injuries, and that because of this, she was now “neuro-diverse”.

This statement was very triggering for me, but before I go there, I want to explain what I know about brain injuries.

I have a university degree in psychology. At some point in my sophomore year, I was trying to decide if I was going to pursue it as a career or not. One of the factors that pushed me away from psychology as a career was brain injuries.

I’d studied them in several college courses. As our understanding of the brain increases, the line between psychology and neuro-physiology is increasingly thin. Reading about patients who lost their ability to speak, or people whose personalities changed overnight, or people who became unable to recognize their friends and family, or worse, might be stuck reliving the same ten minutes for the rest of their lives- these cases were extremely disturbing to me. I couldn’t stand the thought of that on a person, and I couldn’t bear the idea of inducing these phenomenon on animals. This effectively ended my potential career as a researcher in psychology.

… See full entry

I did a little writeup on what the NYC OSM community it up to.

http://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2014/12/01/nyc-blooms-with-openstreetmap/

A great deal has been said about the OpenStreetMap Foundation and its issues with effectiveness and interpersonal relationships. In this post, I will outline a proposal which I believe will address both the effectiveness and the interpersonal issues of the board, and result in better results for the Foundation and therefore project as a whole.

One area of commonality in OpenStreetMap is that of favoring doing rather than talking. We’re a project that exists because individuals take on tasks themselves, whether that’s mapping, software development, project management, documentation, etc. Each OSM contributor knows and understand the value in individual contribution.

But this is not how the OSMF governs itself. Instead, the OSMF uses a committee model. This is despite the fact that we know how generally ineffective committees are. We collectively laugh at jokes about committees and meetings, and yet we have asked our Foundation to use the committee model for its decision-making.

The mechanics of why we have the committee model is that the OSMF board members are also its officers. In other words, when selecting a treasurer or secretary, the board must select one of the seven board members. This has two effects.

Firstly, it means that the board’s candidates for who best to fill a given position are limited to a candidate pool of seven, or less, depending on which positions are already filled, or which candidates self-select for a position.

Secondly, it creates a situation within the board that the officer positions are somewhat symbolic. The OSMF Chairman is Chairman, but has no more authority than any other board members.

I propose that we separate the officer positions from the board and instead have the board appoint officer positions such as an Executive Officer and a Financial Officer. These appointed officers would have relative freedom to run the OSMF, and they would report to the OSMF board.

… See full entry

http://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2014/06/22/why-sotm-eu-was-awesome/

Today has been an incredibly frustrating day in OSM for me.

I started off the morning dealing with DWG stuff. There’s so much negativity in some people, but when communicating on behalf of the DWG, one must try to rise above the petty insults and most past it. Then I had to deal with some domestic mapping issues before they rose to the level of DWG intervention.

Then I ran a mapping party, where for the second time in a row, only one other OSM NYC member showed up, despite us getting 6-7 RSVPs. I spent a lot of time prepping for the meeting, finding the right place to have it, finding the right place to meet, etc., and when people don’t show up, it’s very disheartening.

Then I find that NYC has had dozens, maybe hundreds of POIs messed up by an automated edit, by a user who was clearly told to stop his automated edits.

And then I get an email complaining about bot-mode’s TIGER expansion project, a project which I spent months working on.

Then, finally, MapRoulette had a new contributor submit a patch, a very long patch, which clearly took them a long time to write, but I had to reject it because it didn’t fit in with the bug that it was supposed to solve, nor did it fit generally in with our programming style/the way we organize the code in the project. It just would not have fit. I tried my best to give honest, supportive feedback, but I know that rejection always stings, no matter how it’s presented.

Days like today put me in a bit of an OSM funk

Last night I was working on the statistics display system for MapRoulette and realized that I don’t know what to display.

In the rewrite of MapRoulette, we knew that me trics would play a large role in the project, so we added in lots of statistic capturing capability, as well as piwik support for even more metrics.

We could track what challenge a user has worked on, where those challenge are, where specific tasks are, how difficult the challenges are, how a user classifies tasks, how long they spend on maproulette, even how long they spend (generally) on each task.

Similarly, we could collect a ton of metrics for challenges. How many users work on it, are there a few “super-users” or is it widely distributed? Are people saying the tasks are fixed, skipped or false positive, etc. We can even find out how long users spend in aggregate on the challenge, or even drill down to the tasks and find out when people walk away from them.

But amongst all the possibilities- what do MapRoulette users really want to see? What intouerests them? Stats about themselves? Stats about other users? Stats about challenges?

Tell me what kind of stats (if any) you’d like to see in MapRoulette?

I’ve written a new blog post, The Maintenence of Imported Data in OpenStreetMap: http://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2014/03/13/the-maintenence-of-imported-data-in-openstreetmap/

http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/01/29/2128206/why-we-need-openstreetmap-video

New blog post: Why Imports in OpenStreetMap Are Controversial

New blog post: Edit Wars in OpenStreetMap

I wrote a post on my blog entitled Why the world needs OpenStreetMap

The issue of motivation of mappers has come up a lot lately in different contexts, be it commercial interests and imports, adding specific POIs because they share a common payment form, adding notes that advertise a business, etc.

Ideally, we wouldn’t care about why someone is motivated to contribute to OSM- if the data is good, we accept it, and if the data is not good, we don’t. Unfortunately the reality is more nuanced than this. The reason that someone wants to add data to OSM can significantly influence the way that they enter the data.

Let’s take the extreme example first about notes that are meant to advertise a product, this note here: osm.org/note/78163

That note simply says:

We are proud to present our new Search engine http://www.1search.info

Now, I don’t think the motivation of this person is very good, and in the meantime the account has been deleted for spam.

But we have more subtle examples of adding businesses to OSM, as shown by our discussion about addresses of offices vs mailboxes.

In regards to imports, there have been concerns that importers may be responding to commercial pressure to get a certain dataset into OSM. So far those concerns have not been validated by facts, but the concerns are real.

I think this question of motivation is at the heart of many of the recent disagreements. Two mappers may have a disupute and that’s acceptable. It’s also acceptable for a new mapper to come in and make mistakes (I certainly made plenty in my first few months in OSM). But where our community is less tolerant of error is where they feel the motivation of the mapper is poor.

… See full entry