Hi polyglot,

Here’s a query that shows the four subrelations at the same time: http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/WZE I don’t see why not to put the “omleidingen” and the “wenslijn” both in the same superroute? Those two are the same thing, it’s just that for this one leg you have two variants. Right?

For relation 11479948 I understand that this is your personal opinion of where you can cycle now. That’s not really how we map and I think anyone who is bothered by it would be in their right to simply delete this. To make it less likely that someone should be bothered much, this type of detour should have some very clear tags.

I also don’t really understand how exactly you differentiate between “proposed” and “realized”. I don’t think there’s any actual waymarks on this route, right? So is it simply “if there’s a section that still needs to be built” (like https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/834756731) then you make a decision about which part of the route becomes unusable? Because again, that would mean “mapping your opinion” - you might want to avoid stairs, other people might want to avoid sand, others everything that’s not smooth asphalt.

If my assumptions here are correct, I would consider this alternative: - all routes that are not waymarked are “proposed” entirely - only when there’s an official detour, we map the detour

This has some advantages: - it’s a better fit for OSM - it’s much less work

The disadvantages are minor: - you can still track the state of realization by monitoring the tags of the ways within the relation - a data user gets realistic data: “this is a place that in the future will be nice for cycling” - they can still use that info to guide routing, but avoid sections that have problems. Decisions about that can then be based on user preference.

Would you consider such an alternative?

No wonder I’m feeling a little overwhelmed

Hi James, We don’t really know what went wrong with our previous bank, but they decided to terminate our account. We were fortunate enough that they did allow us to stay on until we found an alternative - and we’re really happy to be with Triodos UK now! It has been quite the headache for Guillaume though.

Hope the venting helped and you can get back to mapping now :)

If you have the feeling the organised (corporate?) editors in your area are not delivering quality, and/or are not respecting the organised editing guidelines, do get some more people involved. Be it from your local community or from OSMF if needed.

seav, MWG already had a meeting this year and have some first ideas about how to implement this. This should go to Board soon, and should be not -too- hard to implement. However, I think without an active and personal recruitment campaign, the impact could be disappointing. That is also on the Board and MWG radar already, though more support will obviously be welcomed.

Thank you to you too!

For those looking for more details, Kate mentioned https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/OSMF_updates during the GM. There’s also this nice overview of all the Board meetings during 2019: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Board_Meeting_Minutes/Overview_201912

Can’t help myself but play around with the numbers. I put your stats together with mine from last year. Here’s the growth rate of daily mappers by country for the top 20.

The “best” measure would be based on the home location I’d say. There’s only a few users that set that themselves, but Pascal’s hdyc profile makes a very good guess by way of the “main activity area”. I’d like to see some stats based on that. And as you suggest, only including users with at least a few mapping days would be good.

I live it when I don’t have to do the same thing twice. Thanks for picking this up Christoph. One note: MWG has the practice to censor small numbers of OSMF by country, because it becomes a bit too easy to quess which person could be behind that number. BTW, MWG member Thomas was also working on some similar stats, not sure when he’ll be able to publish them

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.