Hi Rico, I’m completely swamped at the moment, but I’ve been hinting for some of the other MWG members to release some stats when the election deadline has passed.

I wouldn’t say Waze is a role model (Jezus :)). Why I mention it is that a lot of their volunteers might as well have been OSM volunteers and that they are able to harness a huge amount of non-technical contributors.

On more fundamental issue: there is no roadmap for vector tiles because there is no clear strategy on what services the OSMF should be providing and for which audience and how these should be differentiated (or not) from commercial offerings.

Agreed, so even one step deeper than what I wrote. The problem is that this is hot potato. Addressing issues like this brings about such fundamental differences in how we see OSM and OSMF that it’s easier to just ignore them. And anyway, there are always more pressing matters to address. I hope we’ll get some people on board who want to work on this kind of stuff. It’s work that is high investment, slow impact and with low chance of succes…

Hi SomeoneElse, Thanks for your feedback, and the subtle kick in the behind. We need that, as it’s easy to let things slide with the limited amount of time and energy us volunteers on the Board have. I have some action items for this, but I guess more fundamental work will be for after the elections. I wouldn’t mind having a chat about this with you.

While currently the Board-WG project lacks a specific focus, I think it might be good to start working on a clear policy on how to deal with disputed territories. I think it would be good to have a subgroup of Board and DWG members work on this specific issue.

Imagico, What I was trying to say, is that I think it’s important to listen to the exact position of other people. I see a lot of discussion based on assumptions: this person says X, and we think that means X’, because we believe them to believe in core value Z. Or where we do logical extension of what someone is saying beyond what was actually meant: this person says X, but that also implies X’ and I firmly disagree with X’, so therefor X is bad. While I believe it’s more productive to try and understand where X is coming from. This will then help you find how there might be an option for an X’’ which doesn’t conflict with the core values of both people. Since people aren’t perfectly logical creatures, some of this conversation will be based on arguments and reason. And some of it will be more subtle.

This capability in no way conflicts with having strong convictions. In fact, this discussion style makes it easier to spot the underlying differences in fundamental beliefs. Which in turn make it easier to understand how something you find important might be implemented in a way acceptable to them. Or to find out which facts you need to find to change the belief. What I am trying to say, is that I think it’s a good thing if you’re willing to have facts change your mind on things.

As for Crimea: my article was speaking about my experience on the current board and my wishes for the future. It was not speaking about decisions made by the past Board. You are right that there is still some permanent damage there. Maybe you’re even right that there was a lack of rational, public discussion about this from the Board. But from what I understand how things went down, I think most of the root cause of the issue is the messy relationship between working groups and the Board. Hence why I think it’s important to have people on the Board who like to think about this organisational work. Now if we clear out how these kinds of decisions should be made in the future, we can then have a proper debate on how to handle this and future conflicts.

Talking about “strong convictions”. Let me clarify: I usually avoid discussing with people if I know there is no scenario where they might change their minds. I like discussing things with people with whatever set of values, if they are actually willing to change their point of view. And as they explain their point of view, I am willing to reconsider my own. Otherwise, why have a chat at all? That doesn’t mean people often succeed in doing that (nor do I), but I like to think I keep the option open.

If you are to represent a diverse community like OpenStreetMap, I think that this flexibility is needed. At the other extreme, you’d have seven ivory towers disagreeing about everything with all the others. I refuse to see other Board members as “wrong” - their opinions are as ligitimate as mine. I would much prefer to work with people who accept that their vision for the OSM project is just their vision, rather than people who believe their vision is the only correct one. I find it hard to imagine you’d disagree on that, so I’m guessing we’re misinterpreting what the other is saying.

With regards to Crimea: the fundamental decision had been made by the previous Board. We didn’t go back and overrule the previous Board. We did try to pick up the pieces by trying to do a relations reset with the Working Groups, and with each other. We are trying to clarify what we expect from our relations with each other. That’s the fundamental work that needs to be done to make sure that this kind of thing doesn’t happen in the same way again. With the signups, I think the new Board did do the right thing. Though some really regretable things happened in the process, I felt like within the Board it didn’t take long to get to a common strategy to move forward. Maybe more important than the actual incident, this has set the agenda for much of our work the last year, resulting in the AoA changes that the membership will vote on soon. The discussions within the Board about that were anything but “a struggle of reason”, it was also anything but “a negotiation of a compromise”. It was rather just people working to a common goal, at least in my experience. Because it turns out, some of the core values of the Board are surpringly similar. So far in my term, I haven’t seen much cases where my core values with regards to OpenStreetMap are under attack. We just differ in opinion on how best to get there. Some fundamental disagreements do come to mind, but if you are not willing to work towards a win-win situation, you’ll wind up with a lose-lose situation. And to me, being willing and able to turn lose-lose into win-win is much more important than differences in vision about the project. Maybe it’s also our personal contacts that makes things often less pointed than on the public fora.

Funny you should mention my manifesto. I was afraid to re-read it, since I felt like I wasn’t able to work on any of my personal priorities much at all. Hence the “90% events” thing in my post. But when I re-read it now, it’s not as bad as I thought. I absolutely think that writing about the personal experience and realisations of a Board member are relevant, and it would be a good ask to have all board members do that. Maybe someone else can go first? A year is a bit short though to get much done (yeah, I know). But hopefully soon, Board members will kind of have to do this every other year, since we’re looking to implement term limits.

As inspirational as way 469178602 was, I couldn’t help myself and fixed it. Sorry.

Also, I thought I was the last person to abandon the Potlatch2 ship.

The link to your custom routing XML is broken. My playthings are here: https://github.com/pietervdvn/pietervdvn.github.io/blob/master/routing_radical_hiking.xml Includes “prefer cycle routes when driving by car” (because they tend to be scenic and you want to drive slow), “prefer country roads” (because you are just cruising and only want to get to your destination eventually) and “radical hiking” (which will make detours to allow for as much paths as possible)

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

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

note that my statement that a large number of the new mappers in the US

Thanks for clarifying, Simon.

Whilst some worry about the last column having values well in excess of 100, others worry about the last column having numbers far less than 100. Personally I have no issue with come countries “raising the bar” - it encourages others to get involved too.

That’s a bit happy-go-lucky, Rob. I think the relative advantage (native) English speakers have in having their voice heard is something serious. I’d love to see more research investigating the possible link between mapping community size and level of English in a country. And as well the impact on the correlation between mapping community size and OSMF membership. The privileged need to understand their privilege if they want to lift the rest to their level. Otherwise they risk building something that is only relevant to people like them. I count myself among the privileged BTW, since my native language Dutch is (on a global scale) extremely close to English. But being Belgian, the language issue is of course something you are confronted with on a daily basis. This is part of a wider issue I think. The medium is the message, right? For example, maybe part of why OSMF is such a “political” place, is that we choose a medium (mailing lists) which are excelent for people who like deep thinking, but aren’t great for involving people with a more occasional involvement (e.g. the easy participation of upvoting in Reddit).

but country names are followed by “LC” if they are an OSMF local chapter

That’s an interesting addition, Gregory. In Belgium, there’s no membership fee, but straight from our chatroom I saw a nice example. Someone saying they rather pay a donation to OSMbe rather than OSMF, because OSMbe are people they know and trust, and OSMF is seen as a more “political” organisation. Anyway, i wouldn’t expect a perfect correlation between LC and representation, since large part of their being a LC or not is the result of individual action (e.g. having people crazy enough to build an organisation)

@seandebasti: there have been tries before of what you seem to want. The latest project was quite succesful and is even integrated into the ID-editor. It’s this project: https://github.com/osmlab/osm-community-index/ Jonathan Beliën turned it into a website: https://community.osm.be/ And there’s talk about making it into a map too: https://github.com/osmlab/osm-community-index/issues/79

Exactly: let’s not forget to talk about the lack of representation from Tanzania, Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, Thailand and Vietnam - to just name a few countries with a lot of mappers and not a single OSMF member…

My suspicion already was

Exactly the point of statistics: confirming (and occasionally disproving) suspisions :)

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

I think that’s a bit of a broad conclusion to base on the stated evidence. There is also a significant drop in other countries. And it might just be that US Americans have a greater tendency to map at work or busier weekends. Making a more sensitive indicator of “probable hobby mappers” vs “probable commercial mappers” would of course be useful.

For further analysis, I would personally be most interested in the correlation between representativeness and English proficiency.

I don’t agree with your assumption that github-style systems are uncomfortable for non-developpers. I can speak from personal experience, since I’m not a developper. The strength of the Github system is exactly the interface between the “code” and the users. But the code can just be a currated document, or even an Excel file! I have been introducing Github to a lot of people in the government sector, because it is the easiest way to introduce them to open source logics for collaborating openly accross organisations. Mind you that we’re not talking about git -at all-, we just use the web interface. With osmbe we just set up our first GitLab account recently, for practical, not philosophical reasons. The web interface lacks some of the sexyness of Github, but it might be good enough to be an alternative to us non-developpers. But is GitLab open enough?

I didn’t mean to disagree, Verdy. It’s more like this: - high volume discussion: Riot - wider mapper participation: talk-be mailing list - outreach: www.osm.be - mapper/data-user documentation: wiki pages

I think we do a reasonable job managing the Belgian wiki pages, but I’d be interested to hear if and how you think our use of it differs from what you’d like to see.

Sadless74 points to a very relavant discussion. The main problem is there is no obvious solution, and “showing leadership” and deciding already has the risk of betting on the wrong horse.

We’ve used the OSMF Slack for a while with the Belgian community, but since moved on because a) Slack is invite-only unless you set up some sort of self-subscribe server, b) our open source radicals didn’t like us to use it. We migrated to Riot (matrix), which is kind of cool. It has a lot of the feautres of Slack (though it is missing a few interesting ones), and it has a smartphone app. Oh, and we just set up a bridge to IRC to cater to that school. Still it is an application that feels a bit weird to people who aren’t very “techy”, and we are still thinking about another migration. I guess the biggest missing feature is a way to keep the channels united, and still have a manageable flow of conversation.

As Verdy points out, there is a need for summarizing. Places like Slack, Riot and Telegram are very high volume, and allow for fast discussions. However, they can become an echo chamber of the very hard core. Hence some extra work: summarizing and documenting what has been said, and getting wider participation when necessary. The Wiki is a good place to canonize, but for us the place for that wider participation is still the Belgian mailing list. Maybe it’s a good development, since it feels like that list has gone a little more quiet and easy to follow since we’ve moved to chat.

I think it would be interesting to bring all the points of view on the different chat-like channels together at a SotM workshop/birds of a feather, and see if we could come to some kind of common solution.

@mmd: thanks, I posted there

@math: to me that sounds a strange after first saying “Don’t use it to put your personal notes.” I’m a bit confused by the wording of that bullet point. Anyway, I don’t mind people doing that, in fact I find it mostly interesting because it might point to a need to make it easier to see your own un-closed notes (you have to go to a third party website now)

There is too much going on in OSMF right now for me to form a definite opinion about whether or not we need a CoC, let alone whether or not to endorse this proposal.

Hi Philippe, Sorry, I forgot about your question here! I don’t have any magic solutions on that. Where the OSMF maybe could help, is in collecting best practices about how to deal with these things. Maybe as well in empowering local communities that are doing their share of data curation. That said, I think we generally handle theses issues pretty well already. The biggest issue to me is vandalism that is hard to detect. And that it depends on very few people doing very much work. I’d like it very much if, as a community, we could work towards post-hoc validation of as many changesets as possible. Some restrictions on note creation might over time become necessary. The biggest problem I see there is a lack of responsiveness by note posters. Apps that leave anonymous notes or that leave notes where the authors are systematically unreachable might need some restrictions in the future. I’m actually working on an analysis of the global and local scale of that kind of problem.

This is really awesome!

I used Ubuntu 14 something. I have a vagrant file that does most of the installing, would that help you? That one does install a very old Postgress version, I’m not sure it would work with a newer version too. There’s also a recent thread (in Spanish); in Chile someone played around with this tool too.

There might be a smaller association between gender/sex and mapping habbits in OSM than expected, since women mapping in OSM are a small subset of women. The same of course goes for men. For example, there could be as much interest in mapping power lines among both male and female mappers, even if (say) in the general population there is much more general interest in power lines among men than women. The same goes with differences explained in the general population by educational attainment, age, income, whatever. Finding any effect at all would thus be quite significant.

The bias might not be in the mappers, but in missing the things that are of interest to the non-mapper. I would say a necessary step in a bias analysis is to define real world things as either male or female (good luck), find good spatial data about them (good luck) and compare them to what is mapped in OSM. But that process sounds a bit paternalistic (unless you can find things that are extremely gendered, like the feminine hygiene example) and possibly more likely to replicate the personality of the researcher than an actual bias. So again, good luck :)

Another approach could be to find some resource which measures the presence of people by gender (by old school counting people, or with some novel approach like sexing geolocalized twitter or flickr streams), and then “just” compare the completeness of the map between places with a more female or a more male presence.