Quite remarkable color quality for a reproduction more than 100 years old.

Interesting fact - these maps were produced before the discovery of Severnaya Zemlya - which was not fully charted until the 1930s and which therefore is not included.

What i wonder: Does the discussion about the fundamental differences in the way we look at the world between OSM and Wikimedia projects - local verifiability (a.k.a. original research) in OSM vs. culture specific major consensus narrative from secondary sources in Wikimedia - play any role in the Wikimedia community?

I can’t say i follow communication of the Wikimedia community with any significant level of intensity so any pointers to reflections and discussions on the matter would be great.

Note from a classic perspective and also from how OSM looks at it glaciation is viewed as part of the land. This manifests for example by peak heights typically including any glacier ice cover and in polar regions the coastline being placed at the outer edge of the permanent ice. The mentioned data set shows the shape of the bedrock which in OSM is only mapped where it is visible at the surface.

By the way this is open data, NSIDC announced availability today:

https://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0756/versions/1

Interesting fact - our knowledge if the shape of the bedrock below the ice in the Antarctic is to a large part better than our knowledge of the shape of the ocean floor.

All comments on my blog require approval - i activated yours as soon as i saw it.

Thanks for elaborating on your agenda for the board. In my attempt to summarize the candidates’ statements i of course needed to reduce some of the more subtle differentiations and the nuances in the different views of insufficient attribution were one of these. Glad to hear this is an important point for you.

Complete agreement on that, thanks for the elaborate writeup. In my voting recommendation i added a note on that.

Practically leaving out a small number of candidates you more or less equally find unsuitable in a list of 12 candidates for four seats is most likely not relevant. It would - as you said - require all the candidates you have included to be either voted for or eliminated. In this case with four left from the list that would mean three elected and five more eliminated before the 9th place could become relevant. But you are completely right that in principle if you have a preference you should articulate it.

My consideration for leaving candidates off the list i find completely unsuitable was more that this would make a distinct statement that is visible in the voting data afterwards. But on the election this has no meaningful effect.

@Mikel - the whole my door is open story is kind of hollow. There is substantial critique that many of your actions (and i am not just talking about the GlobalLogic incident here of course) are bad for OpenStreetMap. This critique has been articulated with solid support through arguments - not only here but on countless of other occasions. If you neither acknowledge the critique as being valid nor present arguments and reasons against it the offer to talk in the form of superficial platitudes (put the relationship […] on much better footing, etc.) is not worth much. In other words: Every public critique of your actions on the OSMF board - whether it is Steve here or Nicolas or me for example - is an offer for an open discussion based on arguments and reasoning. It is you who continuously rejects those offers by - if you answer at all - dragging the discussion to a personal level, telling only your world view without listening to and engaging with what others say or, as you also often do, trying to move conversation away from the public channels.

I won’t comment here on your and the other corporate representatives’ agendas to impose tighter control over the working groups from the board and making the OSMF a more centralized, hierarchical and more secretive organization - that is something for another place. But given the inability/unwillingness of the board to act - on this and on countless other topics (license violations anyone?) i very much applaud the MWG’s initiative and bold stand against a board that is non-constructive on matters like this. The fact that you feel pissed by such boldness to me is confirmation that it is advisable and necessary to do things like that. The MWG would clearly very much have preferred not to present the board with a deadline.

I have only asked for and therefore only received numbers on current paid up memberships.

In general the more specific additional data is the more serious potential privacy concerns are. It is ultimately up to the MWG what to release but i would be a bit concerned about that.

Things that i would find interesting are:

• the post election numbers for the same thing, i.e. who was actually ultimately eligible to vote.
• data on the seniority of members (i.e. how long the members from the different countries have been member) - when rounded down to full years this would probably not be too problematic.

The last one would provide information on how large fluctuations in membership are in an integrated fashion which is less hairy than looking at the rates.

I have not shown if a country accounts for zero or one OSMF members. I had a short exchange with Michael about that after publication and he mentioned that they would have liked to also anonymize up to two members but agreed that it makes little sense to remove the information after it has been published so i kept it. If that is made a general policy i have no problem with that.

By the way - the most work intensive part about this kind of data processing are different forms of country names and matching them. :-(

@dieterdreist - there are a lot of very interesting possibilities of other measures for the mapping community activities in a certain country. In particular i would like to see statistics that exclude all accounts that have less than something like five active mapping days to only consider serious mappers and exclude all the typical SEO spam throw away accounts.

It is always somewhat sad to see small companies go, but i guess that is life in that line of business - eat (and expand and grow) or be eaten.

Good luck with your new job - will you be staying in Belarus or does this involve moving elsewhere?

I don’t understand your question but i will try to explain the membership types and what they imply:

• all members whose membership is current can vote on vote 8 and on the board elections.
• only normal members whose membership is current can vote on vote 1 to 7.
• the free membership that is to be introduced by the vote 8 resolution in the future will be an associate membership - as is the membership based on the current fee waiver due to financial hardship or technical payment difficulties.
• only normal members can become board members.

That normal membership (and the additional rights this entails) is still to be the privilege of those who pay is not nice but IMO not a reason to vote against going the first step for free associate membership.

Thanks. There is some irony in that this is mentioned here on a communication channel that is not listed in said database. ;-)

Thanks for this summary and thanks for your work on the board.

Since you mention the middle way - and i am not sure if you have the buddhist concept of the Middle Way in mind here - i wanted to mention that in Buddhism, at least as far as i understand it, this concept is less a call for making compromises on practical decisions (where the compromise between two extremes in a multi-dimensional parameter space might not in any way represent moderation) and more, as it is usually phased, calls for moderation between the extremes of sensual indulgence and self-mortification or between the ideas of existence and non-existence. Translated into the world of practical community cooperation i would think this to be more a call for a middle way between self confidence (or self-conceit/arrogance in the negative extreme) and tentativeness (or self-denial in the negative extreme). Or - to use your term - a middle way between my way or the highway and treating every decision as a calculation of arithmetic means between different articulated interests.

You mentioned a Community Map of ‘channels’ which i am not aware of - could you provide a link?

A comment on both the original post and the idea of having something like that in OSM-Carto - the problem with the prominence tag for peaks is that it is computable and at the same time in the general case practically non-verifiable except through computation using external data. Therefore it is IMO not suitable to be stored in OSM.

From a cartographic perspective other importance measures for peaks are also much more suitable than prominence and tend to be simpler to compute at the same time. See:

osm.wiki/User:Maxbe/Dominanz_von_Gipfeln

I think you are putting too much trust in an inherent justness and balance of verbal communication. What you call conversation ‘more subtle’ than arguments and reasoning i consider very prone to manipulation and lobbying for specific interests.

As said already i perfectly understand that a communication style devoid of arguments and reasoning can appear to be capable of solving problems you can’t solve based on reason and logic. You can pursue X without pursuing X’ despite fundamental logic telling that X implies X’ for example. But that only works within a perceptual filter bubble or a dogmatic belief system that does not depend on being compatible with logic. And in that case the ‘more subtle’ conversation style would mainly aim to get people to adopt the belief system and reject logic.

I am all for having facts change my mind on things - but as said based on arguments and reasoning and not based on some superficial rhetoric aiming to circumvent reason.

But i am getting carried away a bit of course here. Getting back to the subject of board work: One of my main principles i try to follow when looking at the board’s work is the English saying “The proof of the pudding is the eating”. If the board comes to good decisions with conversation styles more subtle than arguments and reasoning i try not to fuzz about it and accept the good results. But if the board is criticized for their decisions based on fundamental arguments although you say it seemed a good compromise between different views and interests at the time you made it (and there are a lot of decisions where exactly this is the case) it might be useful to consider that the reason for this is a lack of a solid critical discussion based on arguments and reasoning in the process leading up to the decision. If you ignore that you might end up in a kind of filter bubble increasingly encapsulated from the basic reality of individual people in the OSM community. I don’t think that is the case right now but there are definitely significant risks in that direction.

AFAIK right now any member of the OSMF can run for the board. If you are no member you would have to sign up before you nominate yourself.

Note there is going to be a change in the AoA up for vote this year as well that would require a 180 day lead time in the future:

https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/w/images/c/c5/Suggested_AoA_Changes.pdf

I don’t think i substantially misunderstood your position here. This is not about having a static, immutable position on certain practical questions or not, this is about what leads you to change your position. I would want board members to do this based on arguments and reasoning after being convinced by the better arguments and logic in a (preferably public) discussion. For you this seems to be more a matter of negotiation to achieve political majorities under the base assumption of there being no right and wrong. Accordingly the struggle for decisions seems to be a lot about winning and loosing (and optimization in the way of making sure the number of people who win is maximized while the number of people who loose is minimized). Hence also the idea that arguments are mostly about ‘winning an argument’ rather than struggling for the best solution. To me ‘loosing an argument’ on the merits or being argued with under the hypothesis that i am wrong in discourse is not in any way demeaning, it is an honor and a sign of a healthy and productive exchange.

Now i perfectly understand that in the current political constellation on the board your approach might be the only way to actually come to substantial decisions in the short term. But this does not necessarily mean it is a useful strategy in the long term. I firmly believe that board members with strong values and convictions rooted in the shared base values of the project are the best basis for ensuring the OSMF stays relevant within the OpenStreetMap project in the long term - even if that in the short terms might mean more struggle to actually come to substantial decisions on the board because some board members firmly reject the argumentative discourse as a basis of making decisions.

The Crimea decision is a good example here, the decision made was - according to the board’s own statement - designed to minimize strife while refusing to even discuss the long term consequences of making a decision against the fundamental core values of the project. The board might have mended relationship with the working groups as a result of this but it has not done so with the OSM community as a whole and it seems to me the standing of the OSMF board in possible moderation of future disputes within the OSM community is permanently damaged because of that.

Coming back to my original thought - no matter if you agree here or not what you should notice i think that by rejecting the participation of people who want to work based on clear values and convictions (of which there are certainly quite a few among active community members) you would alienate a significant fraction of the workforce that would have the qualification to do valuable volunteer work within the OSMF.

Reading reflection of board members on their views now in comparison to a year ago or when they were elected would definitely be of a lot of interest. And this specifically includes those board members who will leave the board in December.

If you’re a perfectionist, you will suffer. If you just want to try your best, please join :)

You don’t need to be “good at winning arguments”, you need to be good at changing your point of view […]

Wow, i am not sure you realize how large a fraction of the OSM community you are explicitly discouraging for running for the board here.

As i read your comments you seem to say running for the board requires people without strong convictions who are able and willing to smoothly adjust the the political necessities of the situation.

My view would be the exact opposite: What we really need on the OSMF board are people with clear values and convictions firmly rooted in the core values of the OpenStreetMap community who are not willing to sacrifice those under political pressure or perceived necessities - specifically in situations like the ones you cited (mass signup, Crimea conflict).

Especially the second quote, communicating the idea that board work is not about a struggle of arguments and reason but about negotiation of political compromises between competing interests, is quite disappointing. If that was indeed the self image of the current board that in my eyes would essentially be a declaration of bankruptcy for an organization within a project like OSM clearly rooted in the values of enlightenment and humanism

Likewise regarding:

That means traveling from wherever you are to wherever the meeting is

I would rather like to see candidates not able or willing to travel internationally than people for whom the chance for free travel opportunities at the OSMF’s expense seems a significant benefit of being an OSMF board member.

What i would actually like to ask you is how you today see what you wrote before the last elections, how you think the plans and goals you stated there have worked out during the past year and what changes in those you see for the coming year. But based on what you have written above with next to no substantial discussion of actual board work during the past year i am not quite sure if you consider that a relevant subject in this context.

For those who are unfamiliar with some of the terms:

• agender, genderfluid, genderqueer, nonbinary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-binary_gender
• asexual: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asexuality
• bi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisexuality
• pan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pansexuality
• qpoc: Queer People of Color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer
• rainbow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_flag_(LGBT_movement)
• trans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transsexual

I am always somewhat annoyed by the fact that none of the different version of the rainbow flag is perceptually uniform:

https://peterkovesi.com/projects/colourmaps/

From a theoretical perspective this is interesting and useful read. From the practical perspective of mappers and data users in OSM this is less significant than it might seem after reading this post in isolation.

For almost all sources of coordinate data used in OSM (be that standard non-differential GPS or any kind of satellite imagery) the inherent tolerances in such data are much larger than the systematic errors you are discussing here. But more important than this fact alone is that mappers to a large portion are very much unaware of most of these error sources. Even systematic offsets in imagery (which is what is discussed most frequently in OSM of these) are often ignored.

In other words - measures to tackle the data consistency problems you are discussing here would necessarily be preceded by measures recording the absolute accuracy of the data we record. And that would again need to be preceded by measures that allow and enable mappers to actually assess the absolute measuring precision of their coordinates with an accuracy that comes somewhere close to the range you are talking about here. And we are far away from even the basic technical ability to achieve this for any significant fraction of the earth surface or the mapper community.

At the moment we are struggling even with the basic problem that huge location errors in some coordinate data sources (in particular high resolution satellite imagery) in the order of 50m and more systematically dilute the quality of coordinate information in OSM despite the fact that we have the technical ability already to do better than this.

If i understand you correctly your project is to add SVG support by converting to a raster image in the original SVG coordinate system.

The much more interesting feature for 3d rendering would be to have native support for rendering 2d vector data. That is of course much harder to accomplish and way beyond what can be done in a GSOC.

In case this is interesting for you see http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~bowman/publications/asyTUG3.pdf.