Dear board members, it has come to my attention that many community members feel that openstreetmap-carto is stagnating. Some feel that there is no vision, no project goals, and that maintainers don’t care about the community instead trying to follow their own agendas. I am concerned that it may negatively impact long term health of the project.

As the first/default style that is visible on https://openstreetmap.org openstreetmap-carto can be considered one of core OpenStreetMap projects. While it may not be as important as the backend API and database it is the first thing that anyone going to OSM’s site sees. It is therefore of great interest to the entire project that the style is maintained and community is involved and proud of the results.

OpenStreetMap grew as a project and right now it is one of the largest open datasets of geospatial data. Many researchers as well as companies from startups to FAANG rely on OSM. There are more mappers than ever. For a very long time it was all serviced by volunteers but with that growth there is a need for more time and professionalism from maintainers.

As the project grows so does the responsibility. We know that OSM Foundation is trying to help by e.g. hiring new SRE, hiring iD developer, organizing committees and working groups, creating grant programmes. I believe that openstreetmap-carto should at least get involved in Software dispute resolution panel and if possible start leveraging paid resources to help with maintenance and design.

What was reported to us first was that one of our members tried to make a Pull Request adding rendering of some feature to the style and maintainers were hesitant to accept it even after extensive discussions and clear interest from the community. That in itself would not have been a cause for concern - not everything can/should be displayed on the map - but the last comments in the discussion turned to general issues with project maintainership and it was clear that many community members are dissatisfied with how openstreetmap-carto maintainers conduct the discussions and make decisions about the project.

Most concerning however was the comment from swedneck that one of openstreetmap-carto maintainers revealed information about him that he was not comfortable sharing (doxxing) and that nothing was done. Andy - openstreetmap-carto creator - was informed in another comment and ignored it. The issue was raised on OpenStreetMap discord where Amanda - board member - saw it but claimed that carto’s Code of Conduct does not list that doxxing is explicitly forbidden. This is very disappointing as it damages community’s trust in the project. Since then another maintainer Mateusz corrected that some actions were taken but this generated a comment only after I made diary entry that elicited 46 comments making some noise within the community.

Problems with openstreetmap-carto were raised in discord and again many community members expressed that the project is not very receptive to feedback. In one of threads for Question Of The Week event moderator asked what would the community like to change about openstreetmap-carto and the first response it was proposed that maintainers should be replaced. This response received seventeen “+1” reactions.

It’s clear that there are many people disappointed with the current state of affairs which for such an important project is concerning. I don’t think geospatial data can be disassociated from a map. OSMF choosing to focus only on database/API and editors is not enough in my opinion.

I hope this message will open discussion and meaningful actions can be taken to restore community’s faith that their input is valued in the project.

I have attached discussions that I mentioned (discord plus last part of github PR) so they are all in one place.