Regading the “Mapping company draft” - Kate replied on that and cited general board policy regarding internal communication IIRC and that the board cannot therefore make it available. Michael’s partial transcript kind of confirms that.

Regarding your description of the closed part of the meeting - you don’t mention any discussion or decision whether the CoI of Mikel and Martijn disqualifies them from participating in the discussion (which considering the “CoI demonstration” by Mikel in the public meeting i described is an obvious question from the perspective of the outside observer).

Did i understand you correctly that in internal discussion Mikel and Martijn were against voting on the policy in this meeting? For Mikel this seems pretty obvious but Martijn did not say a word in the public discussion so it would be significant to know.

This is certainly not the place to discuss Conflicts of Interest in general. As you know i have asked several question about this to the board candidates for the upcoming elections and i will certainly bring this up again afterwards.

https://twitter.com/Anonymaps/status/1063845660879962112

Unfortunately two days too late - Anonymaps running for board, that would have been something.

Does the MWG have Anonymaps registered as a member? Would Anonymaps be eligible for a fee waiver because Paypal is not available on Null Island?

Yes, and i hope everyone sees that in particular in a situation like this having the board meeting in public - or at least parts of it - is of significant value.

And i want to point out that the terms i used - surreal and comedy - do not in any way mean silly. Surrealist art and comedy to me are anything but silly. Both are in a way methods to express something that cannot easily be expressed with conventional means. Because we have similar problems elsewhere in OSM community discourse i sometimes wish we had more surrealism and comedy in OSM. Anonymaps is an example in what direction this could go and what positive effects this can have.

My impression from the outside as a guest listening in to the public part of the meeting without knowing about the non-public part is of course very different from your inside perspective and neither of us can probably accurately assess how it looks like for the other.

@Richard - yes, i realize that i should have restricted that statement to the public board meetings. But of course part of the surreal was that it was public.

I don’t agree with your assumption that github-style systems are uncomfortable for non-developpers.

1. I have never said that, what i have said is that github is primarily designed for software developers so non-developers will therefore inevitably feel less at home there. This is not only a matter of how it formally presents itself to the user, it is also a matter of who else is present there. In a pub where 90 percent of the customers are men women will feel less at home even if the design and presentation of the establishment on its own is equally attractive for men and women.
2. You should always be careful projecting you own personal experience as representative for the group you consider yourself part of.

Regarding use of ‘github clones’ like gitlab - i listed four reasons why widespread use of github for OSM matters is problematic. You can see for yourself which of these also apply for an alternative. The most likely point that could be solved by a github clone would be the ‘not open source software’ aspect.

Merci pour le soutien. Es ist schön zu sehen, dass das Thema auch in anderen Sprachen auf Interesse stößt und diskutiert wird. Avoir le courage de donner ton opinion en français.

Frederik indicated something different above with:

In the discussion, the number of “hobby mappers” who supported the draft was countable with the fingers of one hand, while people involved in corporate and humanitarian mapping cried havoc on Twitter and the mailing lists, demanding either my head on a platter or at the very least the whole policy to be re-written from scratch.

Anyway - i would be perfectly fine with you ignoring my opinion but it would probably be wise to take into account my arguments. What i argue for here with emphasis are not my personal or business interests of what i would like a policy to say but what i think a policy should be designed like independent of what it specifically regulates in substance in the interests of the mappers, the OSMF and the OpenStreetMap project as a whole.

And you should also not forget that Mateusz and muramototomoya also voiced their opinion and that the way this new draft is presented is also not exactly high profile so far.

My impression from talking to people about this matter recently is that not speaking up on it should not be interpreted as being fine with the draft (or being specifically opposed to it in a certain way for that matter). Mostly it seems to be that people don’t have the impression that articulating their opinion would have any positive effect on what the OSMF does. I think for the OSMF this is a much more significant problem than how much regulation of organized activities exactly is best to lead to the least opposition. Or in other words: If despite investing a significant amount of time in presenting arguments, with the background knowledge of the OSMF to support these arguments and with the ability to present my reasoning consistently in English i am not able to convince the OSMF that i have a valid point at least in some aspects how much do you think the average local hobby mapper is motivated to present their perspective on the matter here?

I would suggest to leave the democratic legitimacy of the OSMF out of the discussion - this is a subject a lot could be said on and the outcome of such discussion surely would not look good for the OSMF. But it has very little effect to the subject at hand. It is my understanding that whatever regulation or non-regulation of organized activities the OSMF decides on it is up to the individual mappers and the local communities how to use this. Unless the OSMF wants to enforce such a policy against local mappers (i.e. protect organized activities against resistance from local communities) the primacy of the local mappers and the local community would be unaffected. In other words: The OSMF can’t really order local mappers to accept organized activities under their rules.

I have not said and i don’t think you have any external interests influencing your views here. But as already said i think the attempt to try pleasing everyone more or less proportional to the intensity with which they voiced their opinion (this is approximately how i interpret the new draft) is a very bad idea because not taking into account the interests of the many thousands of active hobby mappers who would never voice their opinion on this matter directly is a big mistake. It would further deprive the OSMF from what it needs most, namely support and engagement from the OSM community. In light of most of the working groups looking for members this to me really seems fairly obvious.

Because for a hobby mapper it is not a matter of if they can live with it, it is a question of if they want to live with it.

This shows, once again, that we listened to all sides, and chose compromise over confrontation to get something that everyone could live with.

As already said this is not about who you formally listen to but whose input you take into account when writing the text. When you chose compromise over confrontation that to me translates to adjusting to the interest of those who shout loudest and threaten confrontation while sacrificing the interests of those who appear more influenceable or expendable.

The board questions being dominated by those board members with the most obvious conflicts of interests because they are employed by corporations involved in organized editing activities is just embarrassing. Of course the responsible approach of them would have been to refrain from participating in the discourse as board members but in absence of that the responsible thing for you would be to treat their commentary the same as any outside input from a corporate representative.

@rorym - as i tried to explain on osmf-talk this is in particular about the idea of OSM to subordinate itself to a supposed moral absolute of the humanitarian mapping community. It is fine if individual mappers engage in emergency response mapping but it is IMO not acceptable if the OSMF requires every mapper to accept the primacy of emergency response trumps the values of the OpenStreetMap project. It does not matter that much if this is an exception that is practically used as a loophole to circumvent the rules, this is more about the message of values and their priorities behind it.

The new PDF draft was first mentioned in the September OSMF board meeting agenda/minutes. It was also introduced to the general OSM community in a diary entry here.

I disagree with the idea that a vague policy is better than no policy at all - for reasons i explained on osmf-talk.

Also think about what this kind of policy document with the lack of clarity and the loopholes i pointed out communicates to mappers, organizations who potentially fall under this policy as well as the public in general. Even as a wishlist it kind of communicates you don’t really know what you want. You kind of wish how you want the world to be but you can’t even formulate a clear request targeted at specific people but instead use passive formulations as i pointed out. You know the German saying “Wie man in den Wald hineinruft so schallt es heraus”. Communicating in this style says that you like others to communicate to you in the same fashion - and i really don’t want to communicate on this level of non-committal vagueness.

and if these rules don’t solve the problem, they can pave the way for stricter rules down the line.

I don’t think that is a realistic scenario. As already indicated the most likely effect of not solving the problem is people turning their back to the OSMF and possibly OSM in general. This is typically not a reversible process. And those who have a problem with organized edits leaving would make it less likely that the remaining people perceive it to be a significant problem.

Also would like to add that my critique of the suitability of this draft as OSMF policy and as a method of the OSM community to regulate organized editing activities in OSM is in no way meant to express disrespect for Guillaume’s work in writing this. I know writing this kind of compromise document meant to not offend anyone is something of significant importance in our society and i can only try to imagine how difficult it is to write this because myself i am quite incapable of doing that (i have occasionally made attempts in that direction in the past in much easier cases but failed miserably).

So i appreciate the achievement in itself but this does not change my strong critique of this document as a document of policy for the OSMF and the OSM community.

If the self image of the OSMF is to represent those who shout loudest (in English language i would like to add) then your logic indeed carries. But that is not an OSMF that in my eyes serves a positive goal and frankly that is also against the mission of the OSMF as i read it. And this of course has nothing to do with democracy.

Ultimately in the long term if the OSMF ignores the interests of the hobby mappers because they don’t articulate these interests loud enough compared to the ‘stakeholders’ these hobby mappers will increasingly withdraw over time - from the OSMF, maybe also from OSM altogether. This possibility might have a positive appeal to those shouting loudly but it is not these opportunists who in the long term carry the project.

In the whole process i have always pursued what i perceived to be the interests of the local hobby mappers in OpenStreetMap - which i don’t perceive to be to ban organized activities or to regulate them particularly harshly but to create a meaningful regulation (meaningful in the sense that the policy actually has a defined objective real world meaning) that ensures a local hobby mapper is able to interact with any people involved in organized activities with at least the same sovereignty as they can with a fellow hobby mapper. It is not necessary for those mappers to articulate these interests for me to be able to assess what these interests are and to try voicing them.

The proposed draft does not do anything towards this goal as i perceive it - and beyond that it creates counterproductive incentives.

Overall i think our analysis of the political situation does not differ much but our assessment of the different options to proceed is quite different. I don’t think giving in to the cacophony of anti-regulation voices is an option with a significant likeliness of resulting in a striving OpenStreetMap project in the long term future. The best outcome you can hope for in that scenario is that said regulation will quickly become irrelevant because local mappers and local communities put in place more meaningful rules for organized activities. I completely agree that this is unlikely given the low degree of organization local hobby mappers have but still i think this is the best case scenario.

I think it’s unfair to me and ungrateful to everyone who helped me to suggest that there was no dialogue.

I have not said there was no dialogue but i have put into question that the new draft is based on discussions with the hobby mapper community. This is of course a not falsifiable statement but it does not have to be - i just challenge your statement and it is up to you to point me to where discussion happened that led to this draft.

I have had plenty of discussions on directed editing regulations - among them fairly specific ones regarding how to best design a policy for that - but that was mostly before or soon after the first draft. I don’t know what you remember in Karlsruhe and how this was advertised for people to participate. If that was at the hack weekend it was lost to me. I cannot find any announcement of such a meeting on talk-de or the Karlsruhe mailing list either.

I did not say good or bad things about the other existing policies

You wrote “We have written the organised editing guidelines in a similar way” - which implies a positive perception of these - why else would you want to write in a similar way?

I understand that you would have liked us to be less compromising in our compromise

I think i have pointed out very clearly that my critique is for the most part completely independent of what kind of regulation you want to have in substance. Reducing my critique to a certain perceived political view indicates you have not actually understood what i criticize.

To make it absolutely clear: A single sentence policy like “As far as the OSMF is concerned you may do organized editing without any constraints.” would be better than this new draft.

The “Informing the community” section, in particular, guarantees that local mappers won’t get steamrolled and strongly encourages a constructive collaboration.

I am sorry but you have got to be kidding me. I specifically criticized the wording of this paragraph on osmf-talk in multiple aspects. To me this part also demonstratively ignores the lessons learned from the import guidelines - that a vague ‘informing the community’ requirement (even as a strict requirement and not just a vague ‘should’ with exceptions like here) does not in any way ensure responsible behavior from those covered by the policy.

and got rid of the unfamiliar RFC-style writing

The funny thing about this is that i have never seen this kind of argument when it comes to other OSMF documents - like the terms of use or the privacy policy or the AoA. Those are full of convoluted legal language that is very difficult to understand even for well educated readers (which the first policy draft was not!). None the less this is almost universally accepted. But when it comes to formulating technical requirements on mapping you worry about precise language and clear rules being ‘unfamiliar’. For me this is a clear and rather euphemistic strawman argument. Of course those the policy is meant to regulate are unfamiliar with meaningful regulation of their activities. That is the whole reason why mappers see the need for having a policy.

Jetzt muss ich aber doch noch mal erwähnen, dass die Unterhaltung auf der Zugfahrt jetzt nicht wirklich eine einseitige Lästerei von meiner Seite war. Wir haben uns da über alles mögliche unterhalten und so weit ich mich erinnere waren das größtenteils recht ausgeglichene und entspannte Unterhaltungen wo alle zu Wort gekommen sind. Kann natürlich sein, dass ich das jetzt völlig verzerrt in Erinnerung habe und in Wirklichkeit allen total auf die Nerven gegangen bin, sich aber niemand getraut hat was zu sagen… :-)

Danke für diesen Einblick - ist sehr interessant zu lesen und bietet eine ganze Menge neues Material für meinen noch immer ausstehenden Blog-Post zum Thema scholarships. ;-)

Was Du eigentlich eher indirekt sehr schön illustriert hast ist, dass es eine Sache ist, ob die Gruppe der ausgewählten Stipendianten für uns in unserem komfortablen Wohlstand positiv nach Vielfalt aussieht, jedoch eine völlig andere, ob eine sinnvolle und gerechte Auswahl aus den Bewerbern getroffen wurde. Und das Fehlen jeglicher Transparenz über die Bewerber (selbst die ungefähre Zahl haben wir so scheint mir erst jetzt durch Dich erfahren) hab ich schon im letzten Jahr angemerkt:

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2017-December/004935.html

Schön zu sehen, dass Du und andere versuchen, die SotM-WG hin zu mehr Transparenz und zu einer besseren Einbeziehung normaler Mapper zu reformieren. Das Risiko dabei hast du aber schon selbst genannt - diejenigen, denen das eher nicht gefällt könnten einfach versuchen, dann die SotM in dieser Form zu beerdigen und durch etwas für die ‘Interessenträger’ passenderes zu ersetzen. Ich würd mich durch diese quasi im Raum stehende Drohung aber nicht beirren lassen.

Was Deine eigenen begrenzten ‘Street-Creds’ bei OSM angeht - das ist ein interessantes Thema. Am Ende ist das halt nur ein Versuch einen Maßstab für die Qualifikation einer Person für Führungs-Aufgaben zu finden. Und gerade unter denen, die sich völlig unqualifiziert versuchen als Community Leader zu präsentieren sind halt viele, die über keine nennenswerte Mapping-Erfahrung verfügen. Aus dieser Korrelation wird dann versucht, entsprechende Kennzahlen als Maßstab anzusetzen. Aber im Grunde kommt es eher auf Dinge wir Urteils- und Einfühlungsvermögen, Respekt gegenüber Anderen und die Fähigkeit und Bereitschaft zu offener Kommunikation und Selbstreflexion an.

Ob wie Du andeutest eine solche Korrelation auch bei Stipendien-Bewerbern vorhanden ist dazu fehlt mir natürlich jegliche Grundlage, das beurteilen zu können.

Und zuletzt: Wenn ich höre wie Design-Amateure sich für eine Professionalitäts-Imitation durch Adobe-Produkte einsetzen finde ich das immer wieder zum Schmunzeln. Dazu passend kann ich noch erwähnen: Ich hab von der SotM dieses Jahr ein in einer wunderschönen Handschrift geschriebenes Namensschild - viel schöner als alles, was ich jemals gedruckt gesehen habe, egal ob mit Adobe oder mit FOSS gestaltet. :-)

As already indicated on osmf-talk i am deeply disappointed by how the DWG now proceeds in what originally was a promising process. I have already pointed out some of the most obvious deficits in this draft there.

You have essentially whitewashed the whole idea of a directed editing policy to a point where a reader unaware of the context will inevitably wonder why you would want such a document in the first place. The new draft in my eyes lacks any precision in language and clarity of the ideas and concepts presented.

And i frankly don’t see a basis for the claim that this draft is “based on discussions with the community”. Can you point me to any discussion that led you to design any of the rules the way you did?

Since you say you designed this draft in a similar way as you perceive the automated edit and import policies - could you please point me to a number of recent imports where you think our import policy demonstrated to be effective?

It is in particular also saddening that you use Wikipedia as a positive example here because the failure of Wikipedia in creating a productive globally egalitarian and not culturally imperialistic community for many in the OSM community is a strong warning in what direction OSM should not go.

The whole idea is to regulate organized editing activities in a meaningful way in the interest of local craft mappers. This is inseparably connected to the need to step on people’s feet. If you try to avoid that at all costs and primarily try to please those you want to regulate you end up with a meaningless regulation which in return would spawn an irrelevant community of opportunists with no convictions, no values and ultimately no purpose.

The first draft was a good start, in particular because it was actually the result of discussions with and inquiries of the community and learning from the problems we have with the existing regulations of automated edits and imports. Further discussion of this draft revealed some problems which should have been worked on (and which could have been worked on) but this went in the right direction and especially if you now compare it to the second draft in comparison it looks really quite excellent - independent of how in substance you want the regulation to be.

The legal situation of Soviet military maps is complicated - both in terms of copyright an regarding classification of the larger scales. A few links can be found on:

osm.wiki/Soviet_military_maps

Soviet military mapping is by the way also interesting from a cartographic history perspective because it was one of the most ambitious cartographic projects of pre-digital times that aimed to depict the global geography to a uniform cartographic standard at larger scale and as such dealt with a lot of the same problems we have today with map styles for OSM based maps which likewise need to depict very different types of geography in different parts of the world.

I wonder if there’s a way of knowing where the BIGGEST multipolygon bugs are.

That depends on how you quantify a multipolygon bug.

If you mean the most complex multipolygon that was ever broken or that is currently broken that is rendered in maps you need to look at islands probably. The Great Britain MP is >680k nodes.

The most complex multipolygon rendered with a color fill is likely Lake Huron (390k nodes) - but there are a number of other lake polygons with fairly similar complexity. These break quite frequently.

I once called the Merowe Reservoir MP the most broken multipolygon in the database because it at that time contained more than a hundred errors. Most of these were noded self intersections though - which osmium can handle. Have not checked how many of those are still left.

In most cases with difficult to fix broken multipolygon the best advise to give is probably: Split it into smaller parts which are easier to deal with. Large lakes and islands are the exception here since they are by convention always mapped as a single MP. Here the best would be if experienced local mappers keep an eye on those.