So you want to know why

And I thought “Yes, I know them, sounds good”. Just because I didn’t want to write up all the rules & procedures first doesn’t mean I am not guided by principles & ideas, it doesn’t mean I am making decisions on an ad-hoc basis with any thought. It’s unwritten rules & procedures, like lots of OSM.

Is not what i have in mind when i recommend

document and publish the key parts of the decision making process, in particular risk analysis that has been made on social implications and economic risks.

I think that is pretty self evident. You described that you formed your opinion based on what ‘sounds good’, you imply that in doing that you are guided by principles & ideas.

But you did not document and publish the key parts of the decision making process, in particular risk analysis that has been made on social implications and economic risks. With decision making process i mean the decision making process of the board collectively. This is clear from context i think. And i see nothing in that direction. There has been nothing along these lines in the public board meetings - i have been there. And i am not the only one who sees a deficit here - Andy and others have asked for essentially the same on osmf-talk (in context of the iD development - but that is highly related).

The recommendation (or if you prefer to call it that - the standard) is to have a public record of the deliberation of the board made during the process leading up to high impact decisions like this. This would not necessarily have to be written, if the deliberation of the board happened in audio communication an audio record would be equally fine. Or you could have the deliberation in public in the first place. I already explained in detail why i think this is useful and important. Again - if you disagree please explain where you think my reasoning is flawed.

Rory, i think we have quite a fundamental failure in communication here. I will try to explain my thoughts again in the terms that you seem to expect them in. I am not sure if that is going to help but there is really not much more i can do.

So trying to phrase my thoughts in form of an answer to your question:

what do you actually want?

What i want is the board to make good decisions for the long term benefit of the OSM community and the values of the project. I tried to explain where i see room for improvement here. If you want to boil it down to specific recommendations for actions here are the most important:

• reveal information that is going to be public anyway at the earliest possible moment and not the latest possible moment.
• do not stagger the disclosure of information (in this case the three project financing plans first and the much larger iD plans a few days later).
• better yet: have the whole process in public - that would make things much easier for everyone.
• on money spending decisions, in partiular such with a high impact on the social dynamics in the OSM community, design criteria and an auditable process for making these decisions. If you don’t think you have the time for that just ask for help - people will gladly support you with that.
• either have the deliberation on such decisions in public or document and publish the key parts of the decision making process, in particular risk analysis that has been made on social implications and economic risks.
• document and publish what alternatives you potentially have considered.

Again, these are not things i want individually, these are recommendations of what i consider beneficial for making better decisions, in particular by enabling others to provide more meaningful evaluation and review of your decisions - as explained in more detail in my previous comment.

If you disagree with either these suggestions or my analysis of the likely consequences of your decision i would be eager to hear your arguments and reasoning. If something in what i wrote - either in the diary or in the comments - just seems weird or nonsensical to you i will also gladly explain it in more detail.

Rory, please - i analyzed and commented on the board’s decisions and their likely effects from someone with an outside perspective without access to privileged information on the decision making process as i pointed out but with - as also explained - significant experience with the social dynamics in the OSM community. That is not a complaint (in the sense of an articulation of a negative opinion based on something going against my interest), that is an assessment (in the sense of an evaluation based on logic, ethics, arguments and reason).

If you think that analysis is wrong because i lack important information not available to me so far i would welcome any additional information that could lead me to revise my assessment. If you think my arguments and reasoning are flawed i would welcome counter-arguments and reasoning why that is the case.

What you present here - the assessment of the chosen projects/people being popular and having a track record of actions beneficial for the OSM community - that is a domain i deliberately did not comment on and which i don’t feel competent to assess. Popularity obviously not because i have way too little exposure to non-German/non-English speaking parts of the OSM community (which is the majority) to assess popularity among them. Track record of delivering things the OSM community benefits from - it seems to me that beneficial is a subjective characterization that depends on the goals you have and the time horizon you look at. I am not saying i would necessarily disagree with those characterizations (i would from my subjective perspective indeed consider what Sarah, Jochen and Richard do predominantly beneficial for OSM - though i am sure as far as Potlatch is concerned there are also quite a few people who would see that differently) but i don’t feel qualified to make an objective assessment here - hence i left this out of my analysis and i don’t think my arguments hinge on my opinion in that regard.

As the board you are obviously free to make decisions on whatever basis you deem appropriate. But i am also free to and in fact i consider it my moral obligation to critically look at those decisions and their likely consequences as i become aware of them. That is what i am doing here. I think it would be highly beneficial if this process could be based on (a) complete information being available on the decision making process so i could spend less time on assessing things i don’t know from the past and could spend more time looking at likely consequences in the future and (b) generic auditable rules, in particular in case of money spending decisions with an impact on the social dynamics in the community so the analysis and discussion could happen largely before concrete decisions are being worked on. This would lead to easier work, higher quality reviews of board decisions and ultimately higher quality decisions more beneficial for the OSM community. Not to mention more predictable decisions of the OSMF and as a result more trust from the community. OTOH - in case some board members are contemplating that - not doing that, making decisions always at hoc, not considering binding principles for decision making and not disclosing any more details on decisions than absolutely necessary and as late as possible - will not prevent a critical review by the members or the community independently forming an own opinion on them, it would just make it much more awkward for all sides.

Nice. I would think i can see a slight U-Curve along the timeline in your plots with larger average changeset sizes at the beginning and the end and smaller ones in between.

ST_Area() on geography will for large bounding boxes lead to quite significant errors if you don’t subdivide the long W-E-segments before calculating the area (because they will get calculated along the great circle and not along the parallel this way).

In any case - since you are after the size of the bounding box you should consider that the area might not be the best measure because an excessively large changeset editing features in America and Europe might be fairly small by that measure if the features are at approximately the same latitude. The circumference of the bounding box might be a better measure.

Regarding changeset size - if i look at the changeset history on the website somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean i get about 1-2 ocean spanning changesets per day usually. Not all of them will be larger than 2^40 square meters but many of them are. If you analyzed about one week per month you get over the course of 8 years to about the number you gave. So my intuition was a bit off here apparently.

Very interesting.

The obligatory question is of course: How did you calculate the bounding box area? That is non-trivial with large bounding boxes.

I am a bit astonished about the almost complete lack of bounding boxes above 2^40 square meters in your analysis. The whole earth surface is above 2^48.8 square meters (2^50.5 mercator square meters for the full mercator square). A larger bounding box with edits in several continents will usually be in the order of 2^44 to 2^45 square meters i think.

Thanks. I think i get your point now.

And the same argument about developer approachability applies to tier 2/3 as well of course - there need to be map styles and map rendering toolchains that are easy to get started with for new designers and there need to be options for sophisticated cartography with high performance as well

@SimonPoole - i would not be surprised if the average JOSM user was willing to pay ten times as much for their editor compared to the average iD user, ideological motives aside (the i don’t pay for open source software attitude). The vast majority of iD users are lurkers with just one or two edits and then loosing interest. The typical JOSM user is much more serious about OSM editing, making a conscious choice to use that editor and not the default. A 1:10 ratio on average in how much they value their choice of tool does not seem completely unrealistic.

@mmd:

No, that isn’t correct either. Both worlds have their merits, it just depends on the use case you’re lookling at.

Sorry - you lost me here. What different use cases are there? AFAIK these are developed for a single use on OSMF infrastructure. What other use cases do you have in mind? Things like opengeofiction?

In any case this whole part of the discussion is besides the point of course since my point was that tier 1 usually does not call for diversity in different independently designed and developed solutions while the other tiers do. If you have two entangled implementations of exactly the same functionality in tier 1 that is a different matter.

Just wanted to point out that your statement is inheritely incorrect in case of the Rails port and CGImap.

Note the operative word here is usually. There are exceptions and there are good reasons for exceptions at times. But i would be very surprised if in this case the duplication of work was not at times put into question.

Also - as you said - only one of the two implementations is operationally active. Therefore i would consider the double implementation less a case of permanent use in parallel and more a software development strategy - possibly more related to the plan to throw one away strategy.

I agree - Note that there is another fundamental difference between tier 1 and the other tiers: In tier 1 you naturally concentrate on exactly one toolchain to work reliably - replacing tools as they become outdated and incompatible but not usually developing alternatives for permanent use in parallel. In the other tiers however having the mentioned diversity in tools tends to be highly desirable for a healthy community, incentivizing innovation and avoiding abuse of monopolist power.

Yes, i think you highlight an important point - that is diversity in tools. Nominatim as you said has no real alternatives or in other words: it has more or less a monopoly. Map styles and map rendering toolchains seemingly are available in large numbers and different varieties but if you really get down to specifics (community maintained map styles suitable for broad mapper feedback, tools not under precarious control of corporations - see mapnik, carto or here) things look much more bleak. And editors see a massive market concentration towards iD and derivatives. The OSMF plans should also be seen in light of this - specifically we probably have a case of the Matthew effect.

I was actually on the brink of leaving all tile server/map related stuff away as, it is overall unclear how “core” they are.

Sure - but why include Nominatim and osm2pgsql then? If you want to define core infrastructure narrowly you should only keep what is required for the API and for generating and distributing planet files and diffs. If you adopt a wider definition including geocoding but not including map rendering is kind of a weird choice.

I am not sure how you define core infrastructure software. You include iD, osm2pgsql, Nominatim, rails-port, mod-tile/renderd and possibly osmium. But if you include mod-tile/renderd why do you not include mapnik and carto (which both have been in a precarious situation for years since mapbox has lost any interest in them)?

By the way there has been work on providing better feedback on coastline placement in OSM-Carto but it is stuck due to the lack of consensus among the maintainers:

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/3895

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/3930

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/4128

Since this might be looked at by a wider audience now - useful further information can be found on:

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2020-January/thread.html#50252

See in particular my comments here:

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2020-January/050259.html

Other useful links:

osm.wiki/Proposed_Features/Coastline-River_transit_placement osm.org/changeset/88211516

To actually achieve consensus here someone (that is someone speaking Spanish sufficiently well and being familiar with the subject - i.e. not me) has to break through the layer of political beliefs shaping the local tagging and have a discussion based on reason about the exact nature of the local physical geography and develop a tagging consensus based on that (which would probably be neither of the two versions proposed so far)

Since there are a few comments indicating displeasure with jotos hard stance on the matter - please remember that he does the work on maintaining a coastline extract free of larger errors. Everyone is free to take the code and create and make available their own extract - without or with different error checks. If such extracts would work well OSMF operations would probably gladly use them and joto would be happy to have less work.

What is being attempted now:

osm.org/way/194704675

is a questionable approach. The OSM coastline is meanwhile universally accurate enough that normal edits will not trigger the sanity check - with the exception of large iceberg calvings in the Antarctic that occur every few years. That means every edit triggering the sanity check when applied without piecemeal application trickery will be (or has been) one where someone is either scratching a personal or collective political itch or an actual mapping error. Avoiding the need for consensus building and defending your view of what the verifiable local geography is against broader scrutiny using such tricks is therefore problematic.

Last year update is on

osm.org/user/imagico/diary/391322

No newer data is publicly available so far (not even overall numbers - see: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Membership/Statistics)

I had been bugging the MWG several times to set up regular automatic publication of statistics and also offered to help but nothing came out of this so far. If you ask for current data you will probably get it though.

Like so many others who compare OSM to their favorite garden variety tech project you seem to not consider that those are all highly culturally non-diverse projects. What OSM tries to do is something very different. Running OSM like a garden variety tech project would be comparatively easy and this would avoid the need to deal with a lot of problems OSM is struggling with. But it would also mean giving up on the core of what OSM tries to achieve - creating a map of the world by the people for the people based on these people sharing their local knowledge in egalitarian, self determined cooperation.

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.

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?

For clarification - i was talking about OSM verifiability. As you demonstrated in your analysis you can surely talk in a scientific way about the naming of features and the history of it. If the results of such analysis can be documented in OSM is a different question. That depends on if that information can be independently verified locally without depending on secondary sources. If we as Europeans map remotely in an area outside Europe where we might not even be familiar with the local language that is usually hard to find out w.r.t. names. What Foucauld found out about local names a hundred years ago might have accurately described local knowledge back then and might form a significant component of our remote European understanding of the names in the area today. It however most likely is not telling much about currant name use in the area by locals.

Regarding your image - that looks fine - it is the larger area Bing screenshots that bothered me.