 While riding on a bus, I remembered we have an ongoing vandalism in Russia and Israel on the map. Folks fighting it are heroes, and it's great seeing our infrastructure harden. That what wars do, after all. But, mapping-wise. (Sorry for the rant) I spoke about our inability to deal with large scale imports in 2017 ("How to break OSM"). You though it was a joke? I proposed improvements to API and data model in 2019 to mitigate that. Starting with "area datatype? are you even serious". 13 comments
I can remember many projects that would have made mapping OSM better. Starting with OWL successor. Our best tool for monitoring changes is OsmCha — are you even serious? And that is a corporate-backed tool. I am absolutely not suprised they resorted to having highly curated dumps made with closed tools and processes. So — there is nothing much made for mappers (SC is a miracle. ED is a miracle. JOSM is a huge miracle), nothing outside of editors. That's a big fail for a project 20 years old. Okay, this goes into directions I did not intend to, so I'll finish by saying, this right now is very weird, but defining time for the OSM governance. I'm obviously a bit bitter with lacking support, but I understand the reasons, and won't push. I have many offers from really great companies. Offers to do GIS stuff very lightly related to OSM, and absolutely not for mappers. For good money and benefits. Idk what I choose, but I wanted to point at a trend. Which I've been doing since 2015. OpenStreetMap is mappers. Their volunteer work, not only mapping, but also documenting, organizing events, and making stuff, is what made it the best map in the world. OSM at core is not developers, so OSM has been losing them, is losing right now, and will lose them. Developers define how efficient mapping is. Whether we manage our volunteers' time well. Like, do they have to spend it on fixing vandalism instead of adding addresses. Maybe we should at least think of changing?  @zverik "Change" as in welcoming (more) contributions in a more diverse way, including development, marketing etc? @richlv More as in changing how we see the OpenStreetMap project in general. Like, maybe, not just mappers?.. As I said earlier, just accept that supporting is not just providing tools. Although we fail even at that. Actually I've just looked at OSMF mission statement and could not even find "support the community" line. So that would be the change. For OSMF to start supporting OSM. @zverik Yeah, that seems to be happening, even if slowly - additional categories of contributing are recognised. Perhaps another way to look at it - as opposed to a more "classic" opensource project, anybody can start mapping. Whereas not everybody can start programming. Thus it would still be accurate that OSM is about mappers - just that we might want to encourage and recognise other types of contributions more. Would that be similar?  @zverik ED == iD? So your argument is that it is our fault, for some unclear reason, that the corporate QA tools were/are never made available to #OpenStreetMap For example like the @linuxfoundation QA toolchain for the Overture Map Foundation? Which BTW makes the OMF unforkable? A surprise from the LF, well actually not. @simon @linuxfoundation No, ED = Every Door. iD was corporate-born. Half a million dollars. Not a miracle. And it's absolutely not about opening their toolchains. It's that they had to create those toolchains in the first place. Like, imagine a company creating a validation toolchain for Wikipedia. How and why and what for? For OSM, these questions have clear and immediate answers. @zverik that comparison is, very, flawed as you know. Not only has the WMFs distribution model always been very different from OSMs, it has always been the major end user distribution point for its data, contrary to OSM. @zverik and for historically correctness, the myth of the "pure" OSM dev environment, is just that, a myth. Major parts (if not a majority) of central OSM software infrastructure was originally written by people paid to do so, typically by their then employers. You can only "lose" something if it was yours to start with. @simon Exactly! I mentioned this on my russian-lang channel. Cloudmade would be the most obvious example, plus most key things were paid for, e.g. the redaction bot. |
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Mapping in OSM is and should be strictly volunteer-based. As I wrote to @bdon , OSM is competing with corporations for resources — making it a competition for an outlook on OSM data.
And OSM have consistently been losing the best developers to Mapbox, Grab, Meta, or private endeavours. I have been a sub-par employee at some of my jobs because I wanted to improve OSM as well, and I should not have.