The new PDF draft was first mentioned in the September OSMF board meeting agenda/minutes. It was also introduced to the general OSM community in a diary entry here.

I disagree with the idea that a vague policy is better than no policy at all - for reasons i explained on osmf-talk.

Also think about what this kind of policy document with the lack of clarity and the loopholes i pointed out communicates to mappers, organizations who potentially fall under this policy as well as the public in general. Even as a wishlist it kind of communicates you don’t really know what you want. You kind of wish how you want the world to be but you can’t even formulate a clear request targeted at specific people but instead use passive formulations as i pointed out. You know the German saying “Wie man in den Wald hineinruft so schallt es heraus”. Communicating in this style says that you like others to communicate to you in the same fashion - and i really don’t want to communicate on this level of non-committal vagueness.

and if these rules don’t solve the problem, they can pave the way for stricter rules down the line.

I don’t think that is a realistic scenario. As already indicated the most likely effect of not solving the problem is people turning their back to the OSMF and possibly OSM in general. This is typically not a reversible process. And those who have a problem with organized edits leaving would make it less likely that the remaining people perceive it to be a significant problem.

Also would like to add that my critique of the suitability of this draft as OSMF policy and as a method of the OSM community to regulate organized editing activities in OSM is in no way meant to express disrespect for Guillaume’s work in writing this. I know writing this kind of compromise document meant to not offend anyone is something of significant importance in our society and i can only try to imagine how difficult it is to write this because myself i am quite incapable of doing that (i have occasionally made attempts in that direction in the past in much easier cases but failed miserably).

So i appreciate the achievement in itself but this does not change my strong critique of this document as a document of policy for the OSMF and the OSM community.

If the self image of the OSMF is to represent those who shout loudest (in English language i would like to add) then your logic indeed carries. But that is not an OSMF that in my eyes serves a positive goal and frankly that is also against the mission of the OSMF as i read it. And this of course has nothing to do with democracy.

Ultimately in the long term if the OSMF ignores the interests of the hobby mappers because they don’t articulate these interests loud enough compared to the ‘stakeholders’ these hobby mappers will increasingly withdraw over time - from the OSMF, maybe also from OSM altogether. This possibility might have a positive appeal to those shouting loudly but it is not these opportunists who in the long term carry the project.

In the whole process i have always pursued what i perceived to be the interests of the local hobby mappers in OpenStreetMap - which i don’t perceive to be to ban organized activities or to regulate them particularly harshly but to create a meaningful regulation (meaningful in the sense that the policy actually has a defined objective real world meaning) that ensures a local hobby mapper is able to interact with any people involved in organized activities with at least the same sovereignty as they can with a fellow hobby mapper. It is not necessary for those mappers to articulate these interests for me to be able to assess what these interests are and to try voicing them.

The proposed draft does not do anything towards this goal as i perceive it - and beyond that it creates counterproductive incentives.

Overall i think our analysis of the political situation does not differ much but our assessment of the different options to proceed is quite different. I don’t think giving in to the cacophony of anti-regulation voices is an option with a significant likeliness of resulting in a striving OpenStreetMap project in the long term future. The best outcome you can hope for in that scenario is that said regulation will quickly become irrelevant because local mappers and local communities put in place more meaningful rules for organized activities. I completely agree that this is unlikely given the low degree of organization local hobby mappers have but still i think this is the best case scenario.

I think it’s unfair to me and ungrateful to everyone who helped me to suggest that there was no dialogue.

I have not said there was no dialogue but i have put into question that the new draft is based on discussions with the hobby mapper community. This is of course a not falsifiable statement but it does not have to be - i just challenge your statement and it is up to you to point me to where discussion happened that led to this draft.

I have had plenty of discussions on directed editing regulations - among them fairly specific ones regarding how to best design a policy for that - but that was mostly before or soon after the first draft. I don’t know what you remember in Karlsruhe and how this was advertised for people to participate. If that was at the hack weekend it was lost to me. I cannot find any announcement of such a meeting on talk-de or the Karlsruhe mailing list either.

I did not say good or bad things about the other existing policies

You wrote “We have written the organised editing guidelines in a similar way” - which implies a positive perception of these - why else would you want to write in a similar way?

I understand that you would have liked us to be less compromising in our compromise

I think i have pointed out very clearly that my critique is for the most part completely independent of what kind of regulation you want to have in substance. Reducing my critique to a certain perceived political view indicates you have not actually understood what i criticize.

To make it absolutely clear: A single sentence policy like “As far as the OSMF is concerned you may do organized editing without any constraints.” would be better than this new draft.

The “Informing the community” section, in particular, guarantees that local mappers won’t get steamrolled and strongly encourages a constructive collaboration.

I am sorry but you have got to be kidding me. I specifically criticized the wording of this paragraph on osmf-talk in multiple aspects. To me this part also demonstratively ignores the lessons learned from the import guidelines - that a vague ‘informing the community’ requirement (even as a strict requirement and not just a vague ‘should’ with exceptions like here) does not in any way ensure responsible behavior from those covered by the policy.

and got rid of the unfamiliar RFC-style writing

The funny thing about this is that i have never seen this kind of argument when it comes to other OSMF documents - like the terms of use or the privacy policy or the AoA. Those are full of convoluted legal language that is very difficult to understand even for well educated readers (which the first policy draft was not!). None the less this is almost universally accepted. But when it comes to formulating technical requirements on mapping you worry about precise language and clear rules being ‘unfamiliar’. For me this is a clear and rather euphemistic strawman argument. Of course those the policy is meant to regulate are unfamiliar with meaningful regulation of their activities. That is the whole reason why mappers see the need for having a policy.

Jetzt muss ich aber doch noch mal erwähnen, dass die Unterhaltung auf der Zugfahrt jetzt nicht wirklich eine einseitige Lästerei von meiner Seite war. Wir haben uns da über alles mögliche unterhalten und so weit ich mich erinnere waren das größtenteils recht ausgeglichene und entspannte Unterhaltungen wo alle zu Wort gekommen sind. Kann natürlich sein, dass ich das jetzt völlig verzerrt in Erinnerung habe und in Wirklichkeit allen total auf die Nerven gegangen bin, sich aber niemand getraut hat was zu sagen… :-)

Danke für diesen Einblick - ist sehr interessant zu lesen und bietet eine ganze Menge neues Material für meinen noch immer ausstehenden Blog-Post zum Thema scholarships. ;-)

Was Du eigentlich eher indirekt sehr schön illustriert hast ist, dass es eine Sache ist, ob die Gruppe der ausgewählten Stipendianten für uns in unserem komfortablen Wohlstand positiv nach Vielfalt aussieht, jedoch eine völlig andere, ob eine sinnvolle und gerechte Auswahl aus den Bewerbern getroffen wurde. Und das Fehlen jeglicher Transparenz über die Bewerber (selbst die ungefähre Zahl haben wir so scheint mir erst jetzt durch Dich erfahren) hab ich schon im letzten Jahr angemerkt:

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2017-December/004935.html

Schön zu sehen, dass Du und andere versuchen, die SotM-WG hin zu mehr Transparenz und zu einer besseren Einbeziehung normaler Mapper zu reformieren. Das Risiko dabei hast du aber schon selbst genannt - diejenigen, denen das eher nicht gefällt könnten einfach versuchen, dann die SotM in dieser Form zu beerdigen und durch etwas für die ‘Interessenträger’ passenderes zu ersetzen. Ich würd mich durch diese quasi im Raum stehende Drohung aber nicht beirren lassen.

Was Deine eigenen begrenzten ‘Street-Creds’ bei OSM angeht - das ist ein interessantes Thema. Am Ende ist das halt nur ein Versuch einen Maßstab für die Qualifikation einer Person für Führungs-Aufgaben zu finden. Und gerade unter denen, die sich völlig unqualifiziert versuchen als Community Leader zu präsentieren sind halt viele, die über keine nennenswerte Mapping-Erfahrung verfügen. Aus dieser Korrelation wird dann versucht, entsprechende Kennzahlen als Maßstab anzusetzen. Aber im Grunde kommt es eher auf Dinge wir Urteils- und Einfühlungsvermögen, Respekt gegenüber Anderen und die Fähigkeit und Bereitschaft zu offener Kommunikation und Selbstreflexion an.

Ob wie Du andeutest eine solche Korrelation auch bei Stipendien-Bewerbern vorhanden ist dazu fehlt mir natürlich jegliche Grundlage, das beurteilen zu können.

Und zuletzt: Wenn ich höre wie Design-Amateure sich für eine Professionalitäts-Imitation durch Adobe-Produkte einsetzen finde ich das immer wieder zum Schmunzeln. Dazu passend kann ich noch erwähnen: Ich hab von der SotM dieses Jahr ein in einer wunderschönen Handschrift geschriebenes Namensschild - viel schöner als alles, was ich jemals gedruckt gesehen habe, egal ob mit Adobe oder mit FOSS gestaltet. :-)

As already indicated on osmf-talk i am deeply disappointed by how the DWG now proceeds in what originally was a promising process. I have already pointed out some of the most obvious deficits in this draft there.

You have essentially whitewashed the whole idea of a directed editing policy to a point where a reader unaware of the context will inevitably wonder why you would want such a document in the first place. The new draft in my eyes lacks any precision in language and clarity of the ideas and concepts presented.

And i frankly don’t see a basis for the claim that this draft is “based on discussions with the community”. Can you point me to any discussion that led you to design any of the rules the way you did?

Since you say you designed this draft in a similar way as you perceive the automated edit and import policies - could you please point me to a number of recent imports where you think our import policy demonstrated to be effective?

It is in particular also saddening that you use Wikipedia as a positive example here because the failure of Wikipedia in creating a productive globally egalitarian and not culturally imperialistic community for many in the OSM community is a strong warning in what direction OSM should not go.

The whole idea is to regulate organized editing activities in a meaningful way in the interest of local craft mappers. This is inseparably connected to the need to step on people’s feet. If you try to avoid that at all costs and primarily try to please those you want to regulate you end up with a meaningless regulation which in return would spawn an irrelevant community of opportunists with no convictions, no values and ultimately no purpose.

The first draft was a good start, in particular because it was actually the result of discussions with and inquiries of the community and learning from the problems we have with the existing regulations of automated edits and imports. Further discussion of this draft revealed some problems which should have been worked on (and which could have been worked on) but this went in the right direction and especially if you now compare it to the second draft in comparison it looks really quite excellent - independent of how in substance you want the regulation to be.

The legal situation of Soviet military maps is complicated - both in terms of copyright an regarding classification of the larger scales. A few links can be found on:

osm.wiki/Soviet_military_maps

Soviet military mapping is by the way also interesting from a cartographic history perspective because it was one of the most ambitious cartographic projects of pre-digital times that aimed to depict the global geography to a uniform cartographic standard at larger scale and as such dealt with a lot of the same problems we have today with map styles for OSM based maps which likewise need to depict very different types of geography in different parts of the world.

I wonder if there’s a way of knowing where the BIGGEST multipolygon bugs are.

That depends on how you quantify a multipolygon bug.

If you mean the most complex multipolygon that was ever broken or that is currently broken that is rendered in maps you need to look at islands probably. The Great Britain MP is >680k nodes.

The most complex multipolygon rendered with a color fill is likely Lake Huron (390k nodes) - but there are a number of other lake polygons with fairly similar complexity. These break quite frequently.

I once called the Merowe Reservoir MP the most broken multipolygon in the database because it at that time contained more than a hundred errors. Most of these were noded self intersections though - which osmium can handle. Have not checked how many of those are still left.

In most cases with difficult to fix broken multipolygon the best advise to give is probably: Split it into smaller parts which are easier to deal with. Large lakes and islands are the exception here since they are by convention always mapped as a single MP. Here the best would be if experienced local mappers keep an eye on those.

That was to be expected. You should expect the possibility that this could happen at any time to any other AWS hosted open data sets from https://registry.opendata.aws/

Anyway your assessment that the Copernicus Open Access Hub is the only way to access the data is wrong - there are plenty of other options meanwhile. Note however if you want a recent image the Open Access Hub will always be the fastest.

You can find a fairly extensive list of alternative access methods on

https://github.com/Fernerkundung/awesome-sentinel

while it can argued that having a non-github like issue tracker would remove the real or imagined bias towards software developers, it is however unlikely that the devs would want to give up the tight integration of the issue tracker with git that github-like systems provide.

Which is why i specifically focused on projects that are not primarily software development projects - just look at the examples i gave.

Should we in the future at some point have such a system established it seems pretty likely to me that software developers would deliberately use it for purposes where they seek input from the broader OSM community and not just developers.

And i think even having one of the various open source github clones set up specifically for OSM use (with as you said single sign on) could already - through a different culture of use and nuances in configuration - be significantly more non-developer friendly.

Right - i tried to make it a bit simpler than it actually is.

Self intersecting closed ways will also not show up in the map any more.

And open ring errors of course do not happen with closed ways. ;-)

That’s a broken multipolygon:

http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=areas&lon=12.92661&lat=57.46135&zoom=10

And yes, splitting this into smaller and less complex polygons is a good idea.

A summary or paraphrasing of communication is always subjective. Just to give you an example: In the original ideas there was

• We should stop (to) look at OSM as a tech project.

You write:

• We should stop to consider the essence of OSM as a technological project.

I do not necessarily disagree with the interpretation but this is definitely not semantically the same statement. If i had written that i would probably like to have it reproduced accurately and any subjective interpretation being indicated as such.

There are also statements i do not find covered in your summary - most obvious the somewhat ambiguous “stop the insulting men”. I don’t want to try giving a full list of ideas you missed because that would be my subjective interpretation of the ideas.

Thanks for the summary of that session.

I am somewhat irritated by the list of ideas presented here and how it differs from what can be found in:

https://pads.ccc.de/WXSlyAqS8t

Presenting a subjective selection of the ideas communicated or paraphrasing them IMO kind of defeats the idea of the whole exercise to collect diverse ideas and to let people express themselves how they feel about things directly. I think it is also a matter of fairness towards those who wrote their ideas on a sticker there to faithfully reproduce what they wrote and not just engross their contribution in a selective summary.

The exact titles of the sections by the way - as visible in the photos - were:

• I will do
• We should stop
• We should start or continue

I know many non-programmer mappers who dislike being forced or urged to use github to participate in OSM related discussions. This might not always have identifiable reasons in usability - it might in parts simply be a psychological effect of visiting a place that is obviously primarily meant and optimized for programmers.

The way github presents and scores the users for example (with contributor activity information, repositories etc.) is clearly favoring developers. Objectively this is not all that meaningful but it still communicates certain priorities and preferences to people.

In your sample rendering the drawing order of the roads looks odd, kind of random.

Regarding styling, i have to say at the moment i don’t really see where it aims at. It to me pretty much looks like an OpenMapTiles/MapboxStreets look-alike in slightly different colors but without a distinct cartographic direction. I know this is still in an early state but i would contemplate the question of cartographic goals before putting too much work into it. Starting with a clear vision design wise can help you a lot.

Thanks for sharing your observations.

I would advise a bit of caution with the emphasis on how many different countries the participants came from. This is a relatively poor measure of the geographic diversity at the conference. It is a bit like claiming to have gender diversity because you also have a woman in your group.

2/3 of the visitors at the conference were from Western Europe or the United States, the vast majority of them from Italy, Germany, US, UK, France and Switzerland. About half of the 56 countries were only present with one person and about half of those were there through some kind of scholarship.

This is all fairly natural for a conference like this and from my point of views is no indication for a particular degree of geographic and cultural inclusiveness or of being representative for the OSM community (see here for some numbers regarding the geographic distribution of mappers).

BTW, @SK53 - we missed you in Milano.