Last year Joost provided some interesting statistics on the OSMF membership numbers by country and how these relate to mapping activity. In other words: How far the OSMF membership in their geographic distribution represents the active mapping community.

Since it is interesting to see how this changed since last year i asked the MWG to provide the data on this and Pascal was so nice to provide yearly statistics on the active mapper numbers

Two things that need to be stated in advance:

• i asked for the numbers on members eligible for this year’s elections but this is of course still subject to change since quite a few memberships expire around this time of the year and possible participation of mappers depends on if they renew their membership or not.
• Pascal’s numbers for active mappers per country are only semi-reliable of course. They only tell us about where mappers are active, not where they come from. And it does not tell if those mappers are part of a genuine local community or if they are just paid to map in that specific country.

So all this needs to be taken with a grain of salt but none the less how things have changed since last year is something interesting to look at.

In addition to the values Joost calculated last year i also added another column for the absolute member count mismatch - i.e. how many additional members or too few members come from a certain country compared to what would be a proportional representation of the active mapper community.

The numbers

Here are the numbers for the top 45 countries sorted by OSMF member count (first) and sorted by active mapper count (second, that is the equivalent to what Joost showed last year).

For explanation of the columns:

… See full entry

A few days ago the notice was sent out to OSMF members on this year’s annual general meeting (AGM) which will happen in mid December.

In addition to the usual board elections - which are covering 4 board seats this year and for which 12 candidates have been nominated who will provide their manifestos and answers to the official questions (if you are a candidate you might want to look at my guidance for candidates) there will be a number of resolutions being voted on by the members. Since the time before the votes begin will probably be fairly busy with discussions of the board candidates and their goals and qualifications after the publication of their manifestos and answers on November 30 i will use the time now to discuss the resolutions. You can also find the full details in a PDF supplied by the board.

There are going to be 7 votes on changes of the OSMF Articles of Association (AoA) - which are called special resolutions and one ordinary resolution (which is essentially just a formal decision of the members instructing the board and working groups to do as said).

The AoA changes can only be voted on by normal members (that is members who have registered as such and had to provide their address for that) and require a 75 percent approval by those participating in the vote. That is a high hurdle and therefore none of the resolutions is probably sure to be approved. Yet any significant change in the way the OSMF operates will require an AoA change. So these are not just meaningless tweaks of internal procedures, their approval or non-approval could have significant effects on the balance of power and influences within the organization.

… See full entry

OSMF board elections are taking place in December and this year there are four seats on the board to be filled so it will be a fairly significant event. Candidates for the board will be asked to nominate themselves in a few days.

Having observed the board elections during the past years with very different people putting themselves up for election and attempting to convince the OSMF members to vote for them using various strategies i thought i’d this year formulate some advise to potential candidates in advance based on my observations of the past years.

There are mainly two reasons for me doing this:

… See full entry

This post is an answer to Roland’s call for input on his planned SotM session on New processes to agree on tagging suggestions and their interaction with the editing software available on openstreetmap.org

I have no specific suggestion for an overall solution to the problem but a few observations on the matter that i would like to share on the level of problem analysis so to speak.

… See full entry

The OSMF board is making another survey of the OSM community and like with the last one i though i’d publish my answers. I think stating my opinion in public and this way inviting a public discussion of these matters is ultimately better than just having an asymmetric communication with the board through a survey.

How can we share your answers?

Does not really apply since i already publish the answers here.

But since i do not endorse collection of exclusive knowledge for the ruling class so to speak i chose the first option.

Are you answering as a group?

No

What is happening in your local community?

I am not really the right person to answer this on any level of locality.

What about your local community should be more widely known? What can other communities learn from yours?

One thing mapper communities in other parts of the world can see observing the German community is an example how and under what circumstances a hobby mapper community can grow organically.

Another thing is the professional OSM data user community in Germany being much more dominated by small and medium enterprises than in other parts of the world (in particular outside Europe) and how this supports technological and cartographic innovation.

Do you meet other mappers in person? Is there a local community beyond mapping?

Yes and yes.

(Note: If you want answers other than yes/no then don’t ask a yes/no question)

Are you engaged in the “global community”. If you aren’t, why not?

That’s a highly ambiguous question - both regarding what it means to be engaged and what “global community” means. There are no significant spatial limitations in my communication with others in relation to OSM. The most serious overall limitation is language which limits my active verbal communication to German and English. But i try to passively listen also to communication in other languages, in particular French, Russian and Spanish.

… See full entry

Diesen Bericht hatte ich eigentlich schon vor einem halben Jahr schreiben wollen - damals gab es jedoch noch nicht wirklich viel zu berichten, so dass ich mir auch noch gar nicht wirklich eine fundierte Meinung bilden konnte. Deshalb kommt er also erst jetzt als Bericht für das gesamte Jahr.

Ich bin seit letztem März Mitglied im sogenannten „Advisory Board“ der OpenStreetMap Foundation und vertrete dort den FOSSGIS in seiner Funktion als Organisation der deutschen OpenStreetMap-Gemeinde und „local chapter“ der OpenStreetMap Foundation. Diese Rolle hatte der FOSSGIS kurz vorher übernommen und ich wurde dann auf der Jahreshauptversammlung letztes Jahr für die Position vorgeschlagen und gewählt. Dieser Bericht soll deshalb auch ein bisschen als informeller Rechenschaftsbericht über meine Tätigkeit dienen.

Das Advisory Board ist ein recht merkwürdiges Konstrukt. Geschaffen wurde es ursprünglich im Rahmen einer Neuordnung der Firmen-Mitgliedschaften bei der OSMF, wo man den Käufern der teuersten Mitgliedschaften hierüber einen besonderen Anreiz bieten wollte. Diesem Gremium wurde dann nachträglich zusätzlich jeweils ein Vertreter der offiziell anerkannten local chapters zugeschlagen und jetzt besteht das Advisory Board etwa aus einer gleichen Anzahl von Firmenvertretern und Vertretern lokaler OpenStreetMap-Organisationen.

… See full entry

This is an update to my previous piece on techniques how mappers who reject the concept of verifiability in OpenStreetMap (i have written more elaborately on that) can paint labels in the standard map style on openstreetmap.org.

Meanwhile some mappers have taken my suggestions to heart (irony is a tricky thing…) and started drawing labels more or less exactly the way i demonstrated. The most prominent label in the map, showing at z2 and above, is now based on a completely non-verifiable polygon geometry.

so far the pinnacle of abstract non-verifiable polygon drawing to paint labels - but there is still a lot more potential, no one aimed for membership in the zoom level zero club yet

But there are other good news for label painters.

… See full entry

I want to provide a bit of analysis here for this year’s OSMF board election results.

The election was ultimately uninteresting in terms of STV voting dynamics since the final results were the same as what they would have been based on first round results only. None the less i want to look at the second choices here.

In STV voters give a priority list of candidates. It essentially says: I want to vote for <position 1> on my list but in case that vote would be pointless for some reason i give my vote to <position 2> and so on. One of the most interesting thing to look at in the ballots is the second choices grouped by first choices. Below you have for example the 189 people who voted for Tobias on position 1 (27.7 percent) grouped by who they voted for at position 2. The most popular choices were Joost with 82 votes (43.3 percent) and Guillaume with 64 votes (33.8 percent). Same for the other candidates. Here are the numbers:

Tobias Knerr 27.7 (189)

• Jo Walsh: 8.46 (16)
• Geoffrey Kateregga: 5.29 (10)
• Joost Schouppe: 43.3 (82)
• Guillaume Rischard: 33.8 (64)
• Miriam Gonzalez: 4.23 (8)
• Nuno Caldeira: 2.11 (4)

Jo Walsh 5.44 (37)

• Tobias Knerr: 13.5 (5)
• Geoffrey Kateregga: 16.2 (6)
• Joost Schouppe: 21.6 (8)
• Guillaume Rischard: 13.5 (5)
• Miriam Gonzalez: 32.4 (12)
• Nuno Caldeira: 2.70 (1)

Geoffrey Kateregga 10.0 (68)

• Tobias Knerr: 13.2 (9)
• Jo Walsh: 0 (0)
• Joost Schouppe: 25.0 (17)
• Guillaume Rischard: 8.82 (6)
• Miriam Gonzalez: 44.1 (30)
• Nuno Caldeira: 4.41 (3)

Joost Schouppe 20.4 (139)

• Tobias Knerr: 19.4 (27)
• Jo Walsh: 4.31 (6)
• Geoffrey Kateregga: 14.3 (20)
• Guillaume Rischard: 17.2 (24)
• Miriam Gonzalez: 39.5 (55)
• Nuno Caldeira: 2.87 (4)

Guillaume Rischard 13.3 (91)

• Tobias Knerr: 38.4 (35)
• Jo Walsh: 5.49 (5)
• Geoffrey Kateregga: 4.39 (4)
• Joost Schouppe: 35.1 (32)
• Miriam Gonzalez: 15.3 (14)
• Nuno Caldeira: 0 (0)

Miriam Gonzalez 17.2 (117)

… See full entry

Yesterday the answers of the candidates to the official question for the OSMF board election 2018 were published.

This is a lot of material to work through and to simplify this for me i produced a summary of the key points i read in the candidates’ answers and manifestos. In addition i put together some further research from publicly available sources. This is available here:

osm.wiki/User:Imagico/Analysis_of_OSMF_board_candidates_2018/

Although this does not really aim to communicate an opinion on the candidates - i try to describe the positions of the candidates rather than to judge them - this is of course not meant to be in any way an objective summary of the positions. I none the less thought it might be interesting for others to read and it might also be useful for candidates because there are comments pointing to answers that i perceive as strange and ambiguous. I would welcome any clarifying statements - here, on osmf-talk or on the wiki talk page.

I would also encourage others to present their own reading of the presentations of the candidates - because it is very valuable to learn how different people have different perspectives on the same matter. With the large spectrum of cultural backgrounds of the candidates this would help developing a clear picture of everyone and make a fact based decision in the election.

Yesterday was the last OSMF board meeting before this year’s Annual General Meeting. And like it is already kind of tradition this last meeting had more visitors listening in than any on the previous meetings and IIRC even more than last years pre-election meeting making it probably the largest board meeting in OSMF history.

And this despite the guests having to wait for half an hour because the board started the meeting with a closed session.

And here is where the surreal part started. The closed part was - as you can read on the meeting agenda - meant to determine if two of the board members (Frederik and Heather) had a conflict of interest regarding the subject of the OSMF organized editing policy or guideline as it is now called. This is because apparently two other board members (Mikel and Martijn) were already considered to have a conflict of interest (and after me asking at the end of the meeting confirmed that they recused themselves). Now we don’t know the details yet - no word was uttered by the board in the public part of the meeting about the outcome of the closed part of the meeting (did i already mention it was surreal?). We know that apparently Frederik and Heather were not determined to have a conflict of interest because they participated in the vote later. But we don’t know who decided this and we don’t know who decided that those who had a conflict of interest were allowed to participate in the discussion none the less.

… See full entry

A fairly big but silent change in the openstreetmap.org map rendering infrastructure has been completed in the last days which is going to have a significant effect on mapper feedback through the standard style map.

here

Technically this is just a system and software update. This however includes a new osm2pgsql version which fundamentally changes the way multipolygon geometries are assembled. This change in osm2pgsql already happened more than a year ago but osm2pgsql had not been updated on the OSMF rendering servers since then.

… See full entry

We have various communication channels in OpenStreetMap being used for different needs in communication. The mailing lists and forum work reasonably well for free and open discourse of the community, changeset discussions allow communicating on specific edits in the map (and we have for example Pascal’s tool to look through these). We have the user diaries for people publishing their thoughts and experiences on the project and discussing them with others. And we have the OSM wiki which is used as a place to document things.

All of these have their issues and room for improvements but they are widely used and accepted as the platforms where communication happens. And they all have relatively low entry barriers as evidenced by the fact that quite a lot of people use them actively.

What we don’t have and where we have in OpenStreetmap a fairly obviously increasing need for is a means for project organization and related communication, task and issue tracking etc. There is a very old trac instance but this is hardly used any more and has a fairly awkward usability, in particular for non-programmers. Safe to say this is not an established communication platform any more.

Because of that people have started widely using external commercial platforms, in particular github, for this kind of work.

Specific examples:

• corporations doing organized edits have github repositories to track their work - like here, here, here and here
• import planning is frequently performed on github - like here and here
• there are attempts to move tagging discussion to github issue trackers here
• the OSMF and its working groups using github for issue tracking (both publicly and internally), public examples here and here

For OpenStreetMap this is not a good development for various reasons:

… See full entry

Warning: this post contains irony that might not be immediately obvious to all readers.

So you are an OpenStreetMap mapper and consider the task of the mapper to be to draw the map. All this talk of a generic geo-database and we don’t map for the renderer sounds like esotheric nonsense to you. OpenStreetMap is a map. Mappers create this map. Period.

But map style designers make life really difficult since your mapping work is interpreted in a way that makes it hard to properly draw things on the map.

This in particular applies to labels. Sometimes you just need to draw a label somewhere. Here you learn how you can do this without also having other stuff show up in the map that you don’t want.

The classic method to do this is using place=locality. This is really nice because place=locality just means an unpopulated place with a name but no other verifiable properties. This means it cannot be easily falsified without local knowledge meaning it is fairly unlikely that another mapper will come along and remove your label because it does not actually describe something verifiable on the ground.

The big disadvantage of place=locality is that it is not rendered before zoom level 15 and you have no way to influence the label design.

A much more powerful tool for label placement is place=island. Large polygons tagged place=island are drawn with a label (and only with a label) starting at zoom level 4 already and the label size depends on the size of the polygon. This mean you can use this to place a label anywhere on the map in a wide range of sizes just by drawing a suitably placed and sized polygon and tagging it place=island + name=whatever.

… See full entry

Yesterday’s OSMF board meeting contained a discussion about the idea of translating OSMF wiki pages, in particular the board meeting minutes, into languages other than English.

There was no definite decision on the matter, the topic was essentially bounced back to the Communication Working Group. But there was an interesting discussion on the topic of translations i want to comment on here.

For context: The OSM community is a multilingual community in the sense that there is no majority of native speakers of any language in the community. But OSM community communication has always been centered on the English language - partly because OpenStreetMap originated in the UK, partly because English is the most widespread smallest common denominator language, i.e. it is the language most community members speak and understand at least rudimentarily - though this is also kind of a self fulfilling prophecy since people with no capability of communicating in English at all have it much more difficult to become a member of the OSM community.

The OSMF in particular is practically an organization with English as the only working language. The OSMF in terms of members also almost has a majority of native English speakers, on the OSMF board 4 of 7 members are native English speakers. None of this is codified in OSMF policy though and i would wish we had more variety of language in OSMF communication - like for example people posting on osmf-talk in other languages (which is rare - but it does happen).

… See full entry

Some time ago i reported here my impression of the first public OSMF board meeting and i kind of feel motivated to make another report on the most recent meeting.

I have attended quite a few of these meetings as a guest in the meanwhile and in most of them there were very few people listening in - rarely more than one or two in addition to myself. Listening to these meetings gives you a bit of insight into how the board ticks, how they communicate and how they make decisions. The last meeting had a quite extraordinary number of visitors and also seemed quite a bit different in several aspects. You can read up the formal minutes of all of the meetings on the OSMF wiki - what i here want to present is my personal impression and commentary on the thing. This is my subjective impression so there are certainly things i understood in a different ways than others and there are likely things i missed because i did not pay attention to them. If you want a neutral record of the meeting look at the minutes or better yet listen in on the meetings yourself.

Let me start by thanking the board for continuing to hold the meetings in public, i think this is of fundamental importance for connecting OSMF politics to the OSM community base. This diary entry is my contribution to this discourse - both by communicating my impression of the meetings to a larger audience than those who were able to be at the meeting and to provide feedback to the board on how their work is perceived.

It was the first meeting after the last board elections so there was the selection of officers - which was ultimately uninteresting because the same people as last time were elected.

… See full entry

With release 4.6 OSM-Carto now much more strongly than before encourages you to map waterbodies and water covered areas of rivers (riverbank polygons) with multipolygons as large as possible. The established and documented practice of dividing riverbank polygons into small, easy-to-handle areas, maybe even exclusively with closed ways instead of more complex multipolygons as it is documented on the wiki, has now been declared undesirable by OSM-Carto.

Some might remember the multipolygon fixing efforts from earlier this year, the numbers are raising again and will be on the same level as before the fixing effort in 1-2 years. It is also well known that large multipolygons break more often and more likely stay broken than smaller ones. Yet incentivising merging of small polygons into larger ones as done by OSM-Carto has no influence on that of course, because … oh look, over there, an ape with three heads…

… See full entry

Maproulette challenges have become fairly popular recently, especially due to Jochen’s Area fixing project. But it seems this has gotten out of hand now and creates serious damage to the OpenStreetMap project.

In general this kind of tool is prone to inviting mechanical work. But with the recent Island and Shoreline Alignment challenge this really gets over the top. I first saw this when various edits turned up in remote areas of the world by various mappers in very high frequency editing islands in changing locations far apart within minutes, often without factual basis and often factually incorrect.

This challenge does everything wrong that can be done wrong with a fixing effort:

• there are no useful instructions to the mapper what to do and what problems to consider. It only says: ‘‘Align the highlighted island to match imagery’’.
• there is no documentation who created this task and how the allegedly misaligned islands are detected.
• and most importantly: the task covers areas where the global images routinely available offer no basis for improving the existing data.

… See full entry

This year’s OSMF board elections are open now and if you are an OSMF member you will be asked to vote (if not - you might want to consider joining the OSMF).

OSMF board elections are done with Single transferable vote (STV). Since this has caused confusion and misunderstanding in the past occasionally here a quick and politically neutral helper how to vote with STV:

The name says it already in fact: Single transferable vote. You only have a single vote and you cannot split it. But you can specify an order of priorities who to give this vote to. In almost all cases your vote will go to the candidate you put on top of your list. Only in the rare cases where your vote for this candidate would be wasted it is transferred to the next highest candidate on your list (and subsequently possibly even further down the list). This happens in either of two cases:

• your top candidate does not stand a chance because he/she has too few votes overall.
• your top candidate got so many votes he/she does not need your vote to win.

To help your decisions you can find the list of candidates and their manifestos on the wiki as well as questions by the community and answers of the candidates - where you also can still ask questions if you have any.

Recently the OpenStreetMap Foundation issued the OpenStreetMap Awards.

The whole thing was primarily organized by Ilya Zverev who deserves thanks for doing this and for the courage to try something new.

When this was first suggested it seemed like a good idea to me but during the process i already had some critical thoughts on the way it turned out. I did not want to speak up while the votes were still running not to influence the procedure but now i think it is time to bring this up.

First of all the whole process was quite biased towards English language activities. There were non-native English speakers among nominees and winners but almost everyone on the list was nominated for activities in English language. Since the whole process was done in English only it was not possible for someone who does not understand English to competently participate in nomination and voting and assessing someone nominated for activities in a language you don’t understand is not really possible either - the few suggestions in the first nomination round that were formulated in languages other than English never stood a chance. This is a hard problem. But still i think this can be done better with not too much additional effort.

The three stage process - open nomination, preselection by committee and final open vote again - does not really work in reality. It gives an impression of manipulation since it appears the preselection is used to eliminate undesirable nominees and the final vote therefore appears staged. In the future i would probably either skip the committee selection (making it a fully open process) or eliminate the final open vote making the final choice by the committee - which would of course require this committee to be selected in an open process somehow.

… See full entry

Last week BushmanK wrote about the use of up-to-date open data satellite imagery for mapping in OSM and noted what i also frequently experience - that awareness and interest within the OSM community regarding the large bandwidth of up-to-date near real time open imagery that is available today is astonishingly very low. Mappers do complain that imagery in Bing and elsewhere is frequently outdated and poor quality but few are aware that newer imagery exists and is available and in contrast to Bing etc. is often truly open data.

The real problem here is that as a result of this mappers keep wasting energy and time on tracing things from images that are hopelessly outdated and at the same time often also poorly aligned. At the moment approximately 15-25 percent of the Earth land surfaces are shown in Bing and Mapbox with 15 year old imagery that is poor quality in a lot of aspects.

With this blog entry i hope to somewhat further increase awareness of this subject among mappers. I have been for quite some time making available recent imagery from open data sources for mapping in OSM. This is only a small contribution for select areas but shows that a huge body of primary data is available today and is largely unused for OSM-mapping.

Here a list of the most recent additions - you can find the full set of images currently available on the OSM images for mapping and some more details in various blog posts:

… See full entry