I don’t think Mikel was lobbying for corporate interests

Well - his public statements indicate otherwise. And since we can’t look at the policy draft i can only assume this goes into the same direction as the public statements. I very much doubt there is any change in that policy draft that makes the policy any stricter in a meaningful way towards organized actors.

I’m curious why if you have serious doubts about the current board’s ability to self-regulate you have never put yourself forward to the board?

Me volunteering for a position on the board would be contingent on the OSMF at least broadly representing the OSM community. The board as it is right now is not a parliament where every member is independently voicing his or her opinion and follows their individual principles. The board makes and executes decisions jointly and i would not be able to do that for decisions i disagree with if the board does not have the legitimization from actually representing the OSM community and is ultimately subject to control by the community it represents. I know that my views are not always in line with the majority of the OSM community and that my ability to anticipate what is actually in these interests is limited, especially with topics that are ‘relatively far from home’. So i would depend on being able to trust the other board members to bring in the necessary additional perspective, their ability to make responsible decisions taking into account all the arguments and their willingness to open this process to the scrutiny of the community.

I do think the board should have a conflict of interest policy. […]

I am glad you say that but i don’t think this would be enough. Taking non-profits in the US as a model would only increase the strategic advantage of people from the US and people well versed in US organizational culture to route around the rules. And it is pretty clear to me that the model of a US non-profit is not suitable to guard against influences of outside interests.

My impression is that the OSMF needs more radical reforms to be able to in the future work in the interests of the OSM community. I am not sure though if the OSMF is able to initiate such reforms from the inside. I hope that in the upcoming elections candidates will present bold and practicable visions in that direction. At least they have gotten the questions that could encourage them to do so. We would then be able to see if the OSMF members are able and willing to jump over their shadows and vote for candidates that are likely to work to reduce the privileges they currently enjoy.

I also have a tiny bit of hope left that the corporations and organizations currently pressuring for more control over the OSMF to realize that biting the hand that feeds you is not usually a useful long term strategy (And yes, it is the OSM community that feeds the corporations, not the other way round). But that hope is rather small. One of the main constants in our society is that money is short sighted and stupid.

Thanks.

Based on what Stereo wrote above:

the set of amendments to the current guidelines that Mikel proposed to water them down

that board member seems to be Mikel. Which means he actively lobbied for corporate interests not only during the board meeting but already before.

Given the intensity with which special interests are pursued today from within the board combined with the silence and passivity on this by most other board members i have serious doubts about the board’s ability as a whole to self regulate and to ensure they pursue the interest of the OSM community.

I understand it might seem that other matters are more urgent at the moment but you should not underestimate the importance of this question (the ability of the board to collectively make decisions in the interest of the OSM community also against significant outside pressure and the trust of the OSM community in this ability).

Equating a policy draft sent to the board for consideration with private conversation between individuals is not something i would consider fitting. I have already explained there is IMO no reasonable expectation of confidentiality in this case. And that this kind of approach will likely sooner or later fall onto the board’s feet.

I fully agree that anonymous publication is not the ideal solution in this case - but it might be the only way for the OSM community to get to know how corporate interests try to influence policy making of the OSMF.

I also distinctly noted that you did not answer any of my questions from my last comment.

Thanks for the additional information. Was the text sent to the board from the outside or did a board member send it to the board? Did any discussion happen among the board members about the content of the draft?

I would still encourage anyone who has access to said text to make it available publicly - if you prefer to anonymously.

Needless to say there is no reasonable expectation of confidentiality of a policy draft sent to the board since the only reasonable purpose of such action would be to try making such draft into actual policy which would obviously make it public anyway. Therefore the claim by the board they can’t make it public to me is a straw man argument to avoid responsibility. The level to which this discredits the board as a whole is pretty extensive. I mean in the end this essentially means anyone can try anything to influence the board by sending them ‘suggestions’ and would not have to fear any serious backlash because the board does not publicly disclose such attempts at influencing their work.

imagico, does your questions mean that you think that stating “A is important” implies “B is not important”? Color me surprised.

No, my question was expressing a genuine interest in Heather’s priorities. As i explained your analysis is specifically working out the degree of proportionality between geographic distribution of mapping activities and geographic distribution of OSMF members. Since Heather’s statement was in my eyes sidestepping the discussion with the “welcome all” i became curious about her opinion on the main topic.

In the abstract form you ask - there are of course potential pairs of goals A and B that are mutually exclusive. For example the goal to finance the OSMF through individual membership fees and the goal for proportional representation would be fairly hard to equally pursue.

Ah, sorry - i misread - you are not filtering features, you are filtering tags, i.e. you modify the data instead of just dropping certain features. This you of course can’t do with osmium tags-filter

My approach for this kind of thing is to modify the style rather than modifying the data. This should make rendering more efficient since you don’t have all the layers with no data. Filtering specific layers from the mml file is something you can do with sed (yes, somewhat ugly) or probably more elegantly with python using the YAML parser.

Examples for label collisions:

https://map.atownsend.org.uk/maps/map/map.html#zoom=6&lat=51.82&lon=-0.88 https://map.atownsend.org.uk/maps/map/map.html#zoom=16&lat=53.03933&lon=-2.86514 https://map.atownsend.org.uk/maps/map/map.html#zoom=16&lat=53.13563&lon=-2.18444

The main problems with that approach are that

• you necessarily draw the boundaries above everything else including labels - which you normally would not do of course.
• you get label collisions.

For the collisions you could try rendering all labels in both layers and just render the ones you don’t want to actually show in transparent color. I have not actually tried this so i don’t know if that would work.

I am not quite sure about your two step filtering here:

https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/Boundary_Scripts/blob/master/update_boundaries.sh#L127-L133

First this seems very inefficient because you can also use negative filtering with osmium. But more importantly why do you specifically drop boundary features with those tags? For my low zoom demo i just use:

osmium tags-filter osm_lowzoom.pbf r/admin_level=2,3,4 -o osm_lowzoom_admin.pbf

as source for the boundary data processing.

Der Grund, warum unser Datenmodell praktisch nicht zur Analyse genutzt wird, ist eigentlich nicht, dass es schon in den OSM-Anfangstagen Open-Source-GIS-Software gab, die nach dem Simple-Features-Modell gearbeitet hat, sondern dass der Wechsel von einem Knoten-Kanten-Modell zu einem Simple-Feature-artigen Modell in der GIS-Welt schon vor 20 Jahren (oder etwas länger) erfolgt ist, weil es schlicht und einfach praktische Gründe gibt, eine Abstraktionsebene weniger zu haben.

Oh, da wäre ich vorsichtig. Die Entstehung von Simple Features und welche Interessen dazu geführt haben, weshalb dies so aussieht wie es aussieht - mit all den damit verbundenen Vor- und Nachteilen - ist ein äußerst interessantes Thema. Dass da praktische Gründe eine Rolle gespielt haben (was im Grunde nur ein anderes Wort für Partikularinteressen ist) kann durchaus sein. Das zu einem Beleg zu erklären, dass diese Art der Modellierung objektiv und universell besser ist als andere ist aber - wie soll ich sagen - mutig.

Die GIS-Leute sind genau wie OpenStreetMap-Leute Menschen, die es sich leider allzu oft in ihrer kleinen und übersichtlichen Blase bequem machen und oft wenig Interesse haben, auch mal über den Tellerrand zu schauen.

q.e.d.

While still waiting for Heather’s answer i wanted to point out that the subject of Joost’s analysis was comparing per-country numbers of OSMF members with per-country numbers of mappers or in other words: The representation of mappers in the OSMF.

I can’t help but notice that the comments from Brits and Americans so far seem oddly unrelated to this subject in a whataboutism kind of way. I know that being made aware that you are on the privileged side of decreasing diversity trends in the OSMF is not the most comfortable experience but just ignoring this and concentrating on other more pleasant things is not going to change anything. So all of your should ask yourselves the same question i have asked Heather: Do you think proportional representation of the OSM community in the OSMF membership is important?

So Heather - does your statement mean that you think proportional representation of the OSM community in the OSMF membership is not important?

I think that’s a bit of a broad conclusion to base on the stated evidence.

Yes, even if there are also other indicators that broadly speaking the contributor structure differs significantly between the US and Europe this is something a closer look at is required, especially if you want to make quantitative statements.

Thanks - i was contemplating doing a similar analysis but i already suspected this is something others will look into so no need for me to invest time. :-)

My suspicion already was that the traditional over-representation of Germans in the OSMF has reduced significantly over the past years. But this is of course not due to the German community being less represented in the OSMF but because the US kind of raised the bar for everyone else. Your numbers also confirm an impression i already had before that in terms of absolute numbers Russia, Japan and Poland are the countries most severely underrepresented in the OSMF.

What i would really like to see (and i hope maybe Pascal will be able to provide a better look at this at some point) is how the same analysis would look like not for OSMF members per mapper but OSMF members per hobby mapper. As Simon for example pointed out a much larger portion of mapping activities in the US seem of commercial nature compared to most of Europe so the US overweight would probably be even more extreme if you take into account that SEO spammers are not really the kind of mapper you want represented in the OSMF.

Peter’s statement in the board meeting clearly indicates this was not a document previously circulated but something new. From the statements made so far it is not completely clear to me if it was communicated to the board directly from the outside or if it was introduced by a board member.

And since this is repeatedly being communicated incorrectly - this was not a document written by the advisory board, it was something written by members of the advisory board (unclear who exactly was involved) - it was never discussed by the advisory board as a whole AFAIK before being proposed publicly - if it were this would have been documented in the board meeting minutes. If i make a policy proposal that does neither make it a document written by the advisory board even if i write it together with Patrick Stählin or Christian Quest or someone else on the AB. It only becomes a suggestion from the advisory board by being transparently proposed on the advisory board mailing list giving all other advisory board members the opportunity to provide input and making sure the process is properly minuted.

Kilkenni linked to the Ukrainian forum discussion:

https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=726332

There is a similar discussion in the Russian forum:

https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=64205

@Kilkenni - you are fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the statement by the DWG.

While your statement of opinion in the diary entry is ok and as i said i think it is good you make it the attacks in your comment (delusion etc.), which serve no purpose in argument but are clearly just aiming to insult without arguments, are not.

Attempting to discredit the DWG to force them to change their statement into something you see more favorable politically is not an appropriate approach.

Note as you linked to the DWG has sought input on the matter before they formulated the new statement. You did not bring anything into the discussion except the expression of the desire to keep things they way they are. You now after the decision formulate some arguments (which as said is good) - but you criticizing the DWG for not taking those arguments into account before you have made them is somewhat cheap. As said i am sure the DWG will take them into account in future deliberation on the matter but frankly your strongest argument from my perspective is the comparison to other disputed boundary cases and as i explained you so far failed to sufficiently take into account the full spectrum of such cases and picking just a few ones that might seem to support your position is not ultimately very convincing. Of course ultimately the basis of arguments against the on-the-ground rule is rather thin anyway.

So my suggestion to you is to instead of attempting to discredit and insult the DWG to re-evaluate and possibly refine your arguments and potentially your position. This might be hard for you because your political convictions are strong but you are not likely to convince a lot of people with just those convictions.

To my knowledge at least the following statement is somewhat misleading:

First of all, one needs to understand that in case of Crimea, two countries are de-facto at war

This implies that there is currently an ongoing armed conflict about control of Crimea which to my knowledge there is not. This does not mean there is no armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia but it is quite definitely not currently about the de facto control over Crimea.

Regarding other examples how OSM handles administrative boundary disputes - the Western Sahara case is a relatively prominent example. Other smaller examples exist elsewhere - for example in the South China Sea. Other situations to consider which are probably not on your radar since they have been unchanged for a long time are the Taiwan-China conflict, the dispute over the Kuril Islands and Argentina’s claim to the Falkland Islands. None of these is 1:1 equivalent with Crimea of course - still they all have similarities in some ways.

And you are definitely wrong with stating that the DWG does not act within its mandate when making such statements. In fact it does in a way do exactly what you want it to do, namely being transparent about their approach to resolving editing conflicts. The statements on Crimea to me seems nothing more than a documentation of the standing principles under which the DWG handles any editing conflicts that might occur in the area.

None the less i think it is good you argue your point here. I am sure the DWG will read it and will take it into account with any future revisions of the statement on Crimea.

Having a CoI does not require someone recuse themselves from discussion, just voting. We have been advised on this by a lawyer, and it is supported by other documents I have read about the UK’s companies act. The OSMF could adopt a stricter CoI policy.

To be clear that refers to the minimum legal requirements under UK law. It does not in anyway prevent the OSMF to create CoI rules beyond the minimum legal requirements.

As Mikel so nicely demonstrated in the meeting there are very good reasons why a board member with a CoI should not have any privileges in discussions on the matter in question. This is not a question of minimum legal requirements to me but a question of credibility of the board. Knowing that the specific secondary interests represented by board members with a CoI have unlimited representation in the internal discussion of the board while any other special interests have none totally undermines the position of the board as a balanced representation of all the interests of the OSM community.

Thanks - i think there are not too many other reasons why Mikel and Martijn would dispute the existence of a circular resolution that did not meet quorum so… ;-)

Regarding disqualification from discussion - without intention to open up a full discussion on CoI here - my understanding of recusal would be that the board member recused for a certain matter on that matter would not have any of the privileges of a board member including the right to speak at a board meeting without invitation. But as you said this is not such a big issue in the public meeting because this is subject to public scrutiny - an opportunity which i made use of here.

But of course if the recusal extended to other things than votes the question why this was not considered much earlier in the process would become more significant.

Additional question: Did the question of employment contract clauses like Rory brought up in the board candidate questions play a role during the interview of Heather?