Once again i have the pleasure to announce that we, the OpenStreetMap Carto maintainers, have prepared a new release of the OpenStreetMap Carto stylesheet (the default stylesheet on the OSM website). Once changes are deployed on openstreetmap.org it will take a couple of days before all tiles show the new rendering.

Here are some details on the visible changes this release brings to the style.

Adding rendering of shop=hearing_aids with a dedicated symbol

shop=hearing_aids is now rendered with a dedicated symbol rather than just a generic dot. The tag has shown a steady increase in use over the years and is used consistently in many parts of the world now with a total of nearly 10k uses.

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/4909

Thanks to contributor sommerbe for implementing this and working on a suitable symbol.

Restoring rendering of name labels for natural=reef

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I am happy to announce that after a long time we, the OpenStreetMap Carto maintainers, have prepared a new release of the OpenStreetMap Carto stylesheet (the default stylesheet on the OSM website). Once changes are deployed on openstreetmap.org it will take couple of days before all tiles show the new rendering.

Here are some details on the visible changes this release brings to the style.

Changing color of leisure=pitch to be more distinct and less similar to the water color

The color of leisure=pitch had a long time ago be adjusted to be less strong. But this change had resulted in pitches often being hard to distinguish in the map from water areas and other green areas even though pitches are a highly distinctive feature that is typically small in size - which calls for a strong color in principle. This modification changes the color of leisure=pitch to be more distinct and recognizable again and at the same time to harmonically integrate with the other colors used.

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Today the OSMF board made the expected decision to formally roll out the behavior control regime that has been in the making for quite some time on the talk and osmf-talk mailing lists. Nothing surprising here - i have commented on the larger topic before.

As i have written in my previous commentary, creating communication channels where participants are protected from being exposed to cultural and personal communication style diversity beyond what they are able and willing to deal with is fine - and actually desirable. That for this purpose existing communication channels are repurposed is a bit rude, but that is something we can deal with.

The news is that the board in their decision also includes the intention to extend the behavior control regime to all international communication channels hosted by the OSM Foundation. While this has been the expressed desire of those pushing for community management and behavior control in OSM all along, this is the first time the OSMF board has actually indicated they intend to adopt this idea of a totalitarian behavior control system - not only creating spaces for those who are unwilling or unable to tolerate behavior diversity outside their personal and cultural standards, but projecting these standards on everyone and declaring them to be binding for everyone, everywhere within the domain controlled by the OSMF. This is not unexpected, given past articulations and actions from the board, but it is still sobering to see that becoming definitive - in the form of a formal decision - without any critical discussion or reflection on what that means.

For me it has been clear from the beginning that i will not subordinate myself to the behavior standards of someone else when contributing to what is an endeavor of egalitarian cross cultural cooperation like OpenStreetMap. Especially not if the codifications of those standards are written down in a way that is as vague as what has been adopted by the OSMF board now.

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When the current OSMF board some time ago spoke (during a board meeting) of the upcoming OSMF board election season as silly season i interpreted that as a indication of highly problematic collective and undifferentiated disrespect and loathing for the constituency (what we in German call Wählerbeschimpfung). I failed to consider that this would be prophetic regarding board members’ own actions during this time.

Compare:

osm.wiki/Foundation/AGM21/Election_to_Board#List

and last paragraph of:

osm.org/user/mikelmaron/diary/391498

(in the not unlikely case of retroactive censorship here is the permanent record).

OTOH of course the saying is: In a democracy people (collectively) always get the government they deserve…

Machine translation in English by deepl.com can be found below, should not be read under the assumption of semantic equivalence though.

Die OpenStreetMap Foundation OSMF hat vor kurzem angefangen, Ihre Pläne und Ideen zur Verhaltensregulierung auf Kommunikationskanälen unter Kontrolle der OSMF öffentlich vorzustellen. Und ich habe von mehreren Seiten die Erwartung kommuniziert bekommen, dass ich dazu Stellung nehme - vor dem Hintergrund, dass ich zu dem Thema Verhaltensregeln in OpenStreetMap sowohl ganz grundsätzlich als auch zu konkreten Ideen und den diesen zugrunde liegenden philosophischen Konzepten und Wertvorstellungen schon einiges geschrieben habe.

Ich tue dies hier wie bereits zuvor in meiner Muttersprache, insbesondere um klarzustellen, dass englischen Muttersprachlern zu diesem Thema keine Deutungshoheit über die Begriffe und Argumente zusteht. Eine maschinelle Übersetzung auf Englisch ist unten der Einfachheit halber angefügt, diese ist aber ausdrücklich nicht dafür gedacht, unter der Annahme der Bedeutungsgleichheit gelesen zu werden.

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The OSMF board has finally published the draft for the OSMF attribution guideline they have been working on - together with the firm intention to approve that in the next public board meeting without changes. This is unfortunately reminiscent of previous cases of the OSMF board developing policy and documents internally among themselves without public scrutiny and presenting them to the public as a done deal, ultimately with often very sub-optimal results.

So these comments are less in the hope that the board will revise their work style and discuss policy openly and publicly with the community from the start because they realize that this yields objectively better results and more to help the community understand the (in large parts somewhat confusing and difficult to understand) text and its provenance and implications.

The background of the attribution guidelines

I will not present a full history here - largely because it would make this text too long to read in a reasonable amount of time but also because much of that history has not been open to direct public observation and can only be reconstructed from minutes of LWG and board meetings which inevitably only show a selective record of history.

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There is going to be an OSM-Carto map reading workshop run by me at this year’s virtual State of the Map conference on July 11 at 12:15 UTC. This is going to be a new, experimental format i would like to try where i will explain the cartography and the reasoning behind styling decisions of the standard style shown on openstreetmap.org based on case examples you can submit beforehand.

For that purpose i have created a wiki page as well as an Etherpad where you can submit such examples. In the simplest form such an example is just a link with the URL pointing to a certain place on the map you would like to see discussed and explained. Ideally you should add a few words on what specifically you would like to see discussed because often there will be other things visible in the map as well.

I plan to make this an interactive workshop allowing those who submit an example to participate in the discussion if they would like to (though this is strictly optional of course). But to allow me to prepare for the case examples it would still be desirable to submit those in advance.

You can submit your case examples on any topic and any place on the map but of course i reserve the right to pick those examples from the submissions i consider most interesting for a wider audience (and you can also indicate if you are interested in examples submitted by others on the wiki/pad). If there are more examples submitted than can be covered in the workshop i will try to discuss them on the wiki after the conference.

Feel also free to add any comments and thoughts on the workshop idea and format here or on the wiki talk page.

When the OSMF board started their survey i posted here some critical commentary on the design of the survey. Now that the results have been published (and the board should be commended for doing so in a fairly comprehensive fashion) there has been analysis and interpretations presented from various sides. I also already made a few comments as part of my report from the advisory board and although i don’t want to do any more elaborate numbers processing i wanted to share my overall impressions of the survey taking into account the responses as well. As before with my comments on the questions and also in contrast to most of the other analysis that has been presented so far this is focusing less on technical analysis and more of overall qualitative considerations and methodological critique.

Retrospective questions (F1-F5)

The first five questions of the survey were asking for retrospective approval or disapproval on some specific decisions of the OSMF board. I already commented on the issues of these questions in detail while the survey was running. My primary impression from the results on these is that the approval in the resposes is actually weaker than i anticipated considering the leading character and selection of the questions. In other words: Despite the questions specifically not being of a nature that is likely to evoke strong negative reactions the answers show a remarkably broad spectrum of views.

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Heute hat der OSMF-Vorstand ein Treffen mit dem Advisory-Board abgehalten. Anwesend waren Vertreter der Local Chapters (so weit ich mich erinnere Italien, Irland, Belgien, Tschechien, Kozovo, Slovakei, Schweiz, UK, US und Deutschland), ein Firmenverterter (Andrew Turner, ESRI) sowie der OSMF-Vorstand (alle anwesend außer Tobias). Im Grunde war es also ein zweites Treffen zwischen dem Vorstand und dem local-chapter-Teil des AB (nach dem ersten Treffen am 5 October 2020) - wenngleich ich es ausdrücklich würdigen möchte, dass Andrew Turner teilgenommen hat, während die übrigen Firmenvertreter durch Abwesendheit glänzten (und vermutlich ihre Separat-Treffen mit dem Vorstand bevorzugen). Ich will das heutige Treffen hier noch mal detailliert kommentieren, da es mein letztes Treffen dieser Art sein wird (ich trete auf der Mitgliederversammlung des FOSSGIS im März wie bereits erwähnt nicht mehr für diese Funktion an) - in der Hoffnung, dass die geschilderten Erfahrungen für andere in der Zukunft von Nutzen sind.

Es gab eine Tagesordnung mit fünf Punkten und einem engen Zeitplan, der - durchaus erwartbar - am Ende um 50 Prozent überschritten wurde. Abgesehen von der Runde zu den Plänen 2021 der Local Chapters (wo jeder was gesagt hat) war das Treffen von den Gesprächsanteilen vom Vorstand dominiert, gefolgt von den englischen Mutterprachlern aus den LCs (insbesondere Rob und Dermot). Ich hab von den nicht englischen Mutterprachlern vermutlich am meisten geredet, aber insgesamt wohl nicht mehr als etwa 3 Prozent der Zeit.

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The OSMF board started a survey of the OSM community and in tradition from previous surveys i wanted to publish my answers here. However as the title indicates already i did not actually participate in the survey this time because in most of the eight main questions i did not feel like the form of the survey gave me the ability to accurately answer the question. And answering the questions is mandatory, i could not participate in the survey without answering them. Therefore i decided to refrain from submitting answers which would in the majority of the question not have correctly represented my view on the question.

I will explain why that is the case and what my answers actually are in the following.

Just to avoid any misunderstandings - just because i did not submit the survey does not mean i suggest to anyone else to not do so either. On the contrary, if you feel like you can articulate your view on the questions in the survey in a meaningful manner then you should do so.

For reference - the full survey in English can be read without registration on https://imagico.de/files/survey_osmfboard_2021.png

Question F1:

I already commented at length on the so called Diversity Statement issued by the OSMF board and the Committee created in that context. But the question is not about the Diversity Statement (which is not even mentioned in the notes for the question) but about the creation of the committee and about tasking the LCCWG with recommending a response to a recently published pamphlet critical of the OSM community.

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Der FOSSGIS wird voraussichtlich im März seine Mitgliederversammlung veranstalten - dieses Jahr natürlich virtuell - was ich ungeachtet der oft durchaus netten Atmosphäre, die auf FOSSGIS-Versammlungen traditionell herrscht, für eine gute Entwicklung halte, da sie deutlich mehr Leuten, insbesondere auch aus der OSM-Community, die Chance gibt, daran teilzunehmen.

Für die Mitgliederversammlung möchte ich hiermit, diesmal aus Gründen, die ich erläutern werde, schon deutlich im voraus, meinen traditionellen Bericht als Vertreter des FOSSGIS im Advisory-Board der OSMF geben.

Dieser Bericht fällt dieses Jahr sehr knapp aus, denn wie schon im letzten Jahr erwähnt, ist das Advisory-Board der OSMF als Ganzes so gut wie tot. Der Vorstand konnte sich bis jetzt nicht dazu aufraffen, das Gremium tatsächlich offiziell zu schließen, aber seit der OSMF-Vorstand mit den Firmenvertretern im Advisory-Board regelmäßig nicht öffentliche Gespräche führt, hat im Advisory-Board als Ganzem nichts mehr von Substanz stattgefunden.

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In the last board meeting the OSMF board has revealed specifics of their plans for paying people for software development work. These plans have apparently been in the making for some time - but so far the board had in public been very quiet about the details - it was first publicly mentioned in the June board meeting but just vaguely and without any specifics. That was the same meeting in which the microgrants selection has been approved.

The details were now made available just minutes before the meeting started (deja vue) - the plans amount to about half the volume of the microgrants program - but there are apparently further plans to also get financially involved in iD development - this has been hinted at in the meeting but details of this have not been revealed.

I want to share a few thoughts on the plans that came to light now - both on the procedural/policy side of them based on the perspective of for many years having critically followed OSMF work and also on the practical side and the likely implications this has on volunteer work and volunteer projects in the OpenStreetMap world based on more than five years of volunteer work on one of OpenStreetMap’s core projects - the OSM-Carto map style - and on more than 10 years experience as an entrepeneur in the cartography and geodata world.

On the procedural aspects

My critical view of the OSMF board moving more and more to making and deliberating decisions outside public scrutiny is well known and obviously applies here as well. But even if i accept this as a given and as how the OSMF works these days no matter how sharply this contrasts with OSM community values there is still significant peculiarity in the whole thing. This centers on how the three projects the board has selected now were chosen. There is no substantial communication about this but from context and from what has been communicated i see mainly the following options:

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The application period for the OSMF microgrants program finished a few days ago and i thought i’d share some interesting results from looking over the applications in terms of the raw numbers:

• The 49 applications listed are asking for a total of about 182k Euro in funding.
• 9 are asking for less than 2000 Euro
• 9 are asking for between 2000 and 4000 Euro
• 9 are asking for between 4000 and 4800 Euro
• 22 are asking for between 4800 and 5000 Euro

Regarding what the applicants want to use the money for i made a rough classification. There are often border cases of course so don’t take these as exact numbers. Alltogether the applications are asking for

• ~60k Euro for paid work (directly paying people for work on the project)
• ~47k Euro for hardware of some sort (from phones to motorcycles)
• ~29k Euro for commercial services of some sort that are not separately specified in the following - most of this is internet access.
• ~14k Euro for various sorts of allowances for people
• ~11k Euro for all kinds of merchandise, gifts and presents other than hardware
• ~6900 Euro for social media advertisements
• ~5000 Euro for renting workplaces and rooms
• ~5000 Euro for administrative costs
• ~3800 Euro for hosting
• ~2700 Euro for licensing non Open Source software and services

Not all applications asking for financing paid work specify exact rates but where this is done the hourly rate varies between 7 Euro and 80 Euro. This range does not appear to be much related to differences in living costs, there is one application from the US asking for just slightly more than 8 Euro per hour for example while another from the US is asking for EUR 80 per hour.

Discussion on insufficient attribution of OpenStreetMap, in particular by large data users, has been a hot topic in the OSM community for quite some time and the OSMF has not only been fairly slow in taking substantial actions on this (to some extent understandable because of other urgent matters but overall this has been dragging on way too long) - most of their work on that has so far been centered around policy drafts largely influenced and even written by corporate lobbyists of exactly those data users that often fail to provide appropriate attribution.

As an attempt to provide a counterweight to that i have tried to summarize what seem to be the basic expectations of the hobby craft mapper community regarding attribution as they have manifested in discussions over the past few years. It is my hope that this will either help bringing the OSMF back on the ground of the interests and expectations of the hobby craft mapper community that forms the backbone of OpenStreetMap or - in case that fails - provides a starting point for alternative guidance on attribution that is not dominated by short term corporate interests.

The document is also available on the wiki.

Community attribution advice

This document is an attempt to summarize the expectations the OpenStreetMap hobby craft mapper community has for OSM data users regarding the attribution required by the OpenStreetMap license.

In line with the general culture of OpenStreetMap it does not try to provide firm and inflexible corset of step by step instructions how to attribute but instead gives advise on how the community views attribution and allows data users to meet these expectation under their own responsibility.

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Today was the first public OSMF board meeting with video and i thought i’d share a few observations on it.

As background - i had made some general comments on what things would deserve consideration regarding the form of board meetings as well as some more specific concerns regarding the form of hosting for the communication platform. It seems there were some difficulties in understanding that for the board due to differences in the timeframe we looked at the matter on - my considerations were largely long term (read: several years) while the board members seemed to look at it more short term in terms of the next few months.

Anyway - here i am going to share my practical observations, which is probably more strait away to understand.

The newly introduced platform seems to work fairly well - i have not measured the bandwidth requirements so i can’t really tell about that quantitatively but obviously having videos from seven participants being available to you is going to be quite demanding.

As a website running on the web browser this platform has the advantage of not requiring you to install a specific software. OTOH the usability on devices with small screens, in particular phones, is probably severely limited. I also could not find a way to select the microphone to use from within the app. If anyone knows how this can be done please let me know. But obviously this is a minor issue.

If i compare it in terms of audio quality with Mumble i would say it was somewhat worse - but not bad. This assessment is slightly difficult because the use of a video based system has led all participants to set up in a room with a desktop computer or laptop and most with a headset while on Mumble many participants often used a mobile phone. This has a positive effect on the audio quality but that is independent of the platform of course.

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Morgen ist FOSSGIS Jahreshauptversammlung und ich habe heute festgestellt, dass ich dafür noch nicht wie letztes Jahr einen Bericht für meine Tätigkeit im Advisory Board verfasst habe. Das möchte ich hier nachholen.

Grund für diese Nachlässigkeit meinerseits ist hauptsächlich, dass dort seit längerem nicht mehr nennenswert was passiert. Es gab gelegentlich ein paar Mitteilungen auf der AB-Mailingliste - größtenteils zu Dingen, die nicht direkt etwas mit dem Advisory Board zu tun haben (meist von Rob oder Heather) aber kaum die Dinge, die eigentlich die Funktion des Gremiums hätten sein sollen, also

• Anfragen vom OSMF-Vorstand zu Stellungnahmen zu bestimmte Themen
• Initiativen aus dem Advisory Board, bestimmte Themen zu diskutieren.

Die einzig nennenswerte Aktivität war eigentlich die Bitte um Rückmeldung von Joost zu den Plänen einer vor-SotM-Umfrage. Ich hatte damals schon zuvor etwas detaillierter zum Thema Umfragen im OSMF-Kontext etwas geschrieben und hab dies ergänzt durch ein paar konkrete Bemerkungen zu den Plänen. Das Problem dabei war, dass der OSMF-Vorstand anscheinend eine recht ungewöhnliche Vorstellung von der Funktion der Umfrage als Mittel der Kommunikation zwischen Ihm und der OSM-Community hatte und weniger für das, wofür man Umfragen meist macht - um statistische Informationen über eine Gruppe von Menschen zu gewinnen.

Die letztendlich von Vorstand gestartete Umfrage findet ihr hier, eine Analyse der Ergebnisse hier

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Der OSMF-Vorstand hat gestern in seiner monatlichen Vorstandssitzung die Annahme eines neuen Grundwerte-Dokuments beschlossen, nachdem dieses zweieinhalb Stunden vorher den OSMF-Mitgliedern vorgestellt worden war. Ich möchte hier den Inhalt dieses Dokumentes kritisch beleuchten.

Warum mach ich dies auf Deutsch? Zum einen, weil ich vor einiger Zeit beschlossen habe, Diskussionen zum Themenkomplex Vielfalt und Werte in OpenStreetMap bevorzugt nicht mehr auf Englisch zu führen, um den englischen Muttersprachlern zu verdeutlichen, dass sie nicht die Deutungshoheit über die verwendeten Begriffe fordern können. Zum anderen weil die deutsche Sprache über das einzig passende Genre für diese Arbeit verfügt - den Verriss.

Die Vorgeschichte

Die Vorgeschichte kurz zusammengefasst: Nach den letzten OSMF-Vorstandswahlen gab es einige Unzufriedenheit mit den Ergebnissen von Seiten solcher, die sich etwas anderes gewünscht hatten. Und weil Twitter ja bekanntlich gut geeignet zum kollektiven Empören ist, entlud sich da ein veritables OSM-Bashing mit dem Grund-Tenor, dass es Zeit wird, dass diese Domäne des Patriarchats endlich mal anständig eingenordet wird entsprechend der Werte und Grundsätze, die man in dieser Filterblase nun mal so hat.

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Yesterday was the first meeting of the new OSMF board and i thought i’d write down some comments on it since it was noticeably different from previous meetings. With three of the previous board members having left, two of them having been on the board for a long time and one having been the chairperson for a long time it was obvious there were going to be changes and i want to share a few impressions of this from an outside perspective.

What has not changed is that many of the board members seemed remarkably unprepared. This is not necessarily a big deal, board members are volunteers and you cannot necessarily expect everyone to sit down for a few hours before the meeting preparing themselves for all subjects that might be discussed. But i as someone who just listens in and does zero preparation for that other than looking at the agenda five minutes before the start often find myself wondering when a matter comes up why no one is ready to discuss it. This especially applies to this first meeting after the election when the election of treasurer, secretary and chairperson are obviously on the agenda so you would assume that those who consider one of these positions to have made up their mind if they want it or not. Don’t get me wrong - i am generally a huge fan of just winging it - but you have to be able to do that if you want to.

The meeting started with everyone being unsure about who would chair the meeting since neither the former chairperson nor the former secretary were on the board any more. Ultimately Paul assumed the position of temporary chair since he had formerly been secretary. But it might be a good idea to make a note of the problem and add a rule for that to the board rules of order in the future.

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Die OSMF-Vorstands-Wahlen dieses Jahr sind vorbei - die Ergebnisse der Wahlen und Abstimmungen finden sich hier:

• https://www.opavote.com/results/6500446103404544
• https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Annual_General_Meetings/2019/Suggested_AoA_Changes_revised

Es ist bemerkenswert, wie sich jetzt anscheinend unter manchen Leuten Unverständnis, Enttäuschung und Ärger über die Resultate artikulieren, die ja doch eine recht breite Unterstützung in der OSMF-Mitgliedschaft für die Kernwerte des Projektes - die egalitäre und selbstbestimmte Zusammenarbeit zur Erfassung lokalen Wissens über die Geographie - erkennen lassen. Da hat wohl manch einer in seiner Filterblase etwas Anderes erhofft.

Beeindruckend ist auch, wie manche sich jetzt geradezu in ihrer Voreingenommenheit und Intoleranz suhlen und gemeinschaftlich darüber spekulieren, wie man denn nach einer Machtübernahme das Projekt nach den eigenen Vorstellungen und kulturellen Werten umgestalten könnte. Die Rede ist da zum Beispiel von bezahlten Managern, die die Mapper zu erwünschtem Verhalten erziehen sollen (euphemistisch als “active community management” bezeichnet) und von der Zensur unerwünschter Äußerungen (“active moderation”). Es geht da also klar erkennbar nicht um Offenheit gegenüber anderen Kulturen und Werten, sondern um die Ausgrenzung von solchen Ansichten und Werten, die der Dominanz der eigenen kulturellen Vorstellungen entgegenstehen.

Klar, wenn jetzt ein paar tausend amerikanische SJWs entschließen würden, in OSM einzufallen und dort mal aufzuräumen dann wäre OSM als soziales Projekt Geschichte. Insofern sind diese Überlegungen nicht komplett unrealistisch. Aber wie unverfroren und unreflektiert da manche ihre Intoleranz, ihre Ablehnung von anders Denkenden und Ausgrenzungs-Bestrebungen artikulieren ist schon bemerkenswert.

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The Answers and Manifestos of this year’s OSMF board elections have been published a few days ago and a lot of people are probably studying those right now. This is very interesting reading but also a huge volume of text so i have written an analysis of the candidates and their statements some might find helpful.

And since this year’s elections are significant because they could result in both a significant shift to the better and to the worse for the OSMF and the OpenStreetMap project i am also providing an overall voting recommendation based on my analysis. Please keep in mind that this analysis and the recommendation are based on the candidates’ qualification for the position of a board member. Just because i consider someone non-qualified as an OSMF board member does not mean i have an overall bad opinion for them as a person.

I would recommend to vote for (in that order):

• Guillaume
• Allan
• Rory
• Clifford
• Dietmar
• Eugene
• Nuno
• Gregory

I would not include:

• Jinal
• Mikel
• Steve
• Michal

(Edit 2019-12-08: I recommended not to include the last four candidates above but as Alan pointed out there is no harm including them. The likeliness of this making a difference is extremely low of course. What you should do depends on if you have a preference among those candidates you generally find non-suitable or if you want to make a distinct statement by not including them).

Every member should of course decide based on their own personal preferences who to vote for. Even if your values and ideas of what are important qualifications in a board member for the benefit of OpenStreetMap are similar to mine, you might vary the order from my recommendation to reflect your individual preferences. Read my arguments and reasoning and if you have the time also read the full answers and manifestos and form your own qualified opinion to make a good election choice.

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