We are drifting away more and more from the subject of the diary entry here so this is beginning to be seriously off-topic here.

It is not clear to me what you mean by “codified work culture” in the OSMF.

I mean this - as explained here.

When i say that a huge majority is pretty much excluded or alienated i am talking about the approximately 60 to 90 percent of the OSM community who either don’t speak English on a level that would qualify them for a board appointed committee (so far a hundred percent of all committee members the board has appointed were people with good to excellent English language abilities - in contrast to the working groups which traditionally have been much more inclusive in that regard) or who are seriously alienated by the work culture in the OSMF (which among German mappers is for example the number one turnoff).

There is a cheap shot at the Board here, “English language and Anglo-American culture filter bubble” […]

No, it is not. It is an assessment i have developed based on a large number of observations and that i have explained in detail on many occasions (some of which i have linked to above). The increasing detachment of the work and communication in the OSMF from the base of the international mapper community is an assessment i can make with high reliability.

This is not primarily the fault of the current board of course - what i’d criticize the board for here is primarily that you fail to critically reflect on the fact that you are much more part of the problem than you are part of the solution.

Anyway - the context in which i mentioned this was the need for a discussion within the OSM community about how the traditionally consensus based and do-ocratic decision making processes can scale in a growing and increasingly diverse global and multicultural/multilingual community. That is a discussion that has to happen in the OSM community as a whole and not just within the much more narrow realms of the OSMF.

[…] and which approved the active contributor program, so that a more diverse membership can be recruited for the Foundation.

The OSMF members mandated that program by resolution in the last AGM, the implementation by the MWG and board was simply implementing that decision. Presenting that as a pro-diversity achievement of the current board is quite a distortion of history (for the record - the idea for a need-independent free membership for active mappers goes back at least to my suggestion of this in September 2017

You note correctly “the growing and increasingly diverse community” and to some degree at least that growth and increased diversity has been helped by Board actions over the past year, and will be in the future.

No, i was referring to increase in diversity in the OSM community, not in the OSMF. And not in the past year but roughly over the past decade. And that is not in any significant way the result of OSMF board activity.

@Allan:

Well, Christoph, I don’t deal in hypothetical possibilities. […]

Here might lie a major source of why Simon and me see this matter differently from you. Our critical remarks are based on thinking this through more than one step ahead and that requires dealing in hypothetical possibilities. If our respective hypothetical assessments are correct is open to debate, looking at hypothetical possibilities however is not. Making strategic decisions (and AoA changes definitely qualifies as such) without looking at hypothetical possibilities for the long term results is just reckless IMO.

I observed similar issues in the past - some time ago in the context of the board’s hiring plans several community members were concerned about the lack of a proper risk assessment by the board. And risk assessment is of course exactly that - dealing in hypothetical possibilities. If the board as a principle does not deal in hypothetical possibilities that in my eyes radically and fundamentally limits their ability to make beneficial strategic decisions.

We are having trouble reinvigorating the EWG

And i am not at all astonished by that - neither are most long term OSM community members. I expressed my concerns about the negative effects of the OSMF selectively starting to spend money on work on volunteer motivation back in July.

One of the main strategic benefits of all day-to-day work in the OSMF being done by volunteer working groups created and managed from the community rather than by the board is that it ensures that what the OSMF does remains grounded in and connected to the consensus in the volunteer mapper community. If you have difficulties recruiting volunteers that should be taken as an indication IMO that your plans are not grounded that much in the community any more. As i have also expressed before it does not help that a huge majority is pretty much excluded or alienated by the dominant and meanwhile also codified work culture in the OSMF.

And again: Yes, i get that this approach seems inefficient to the board seeing current and urgent needs to get thing done. And it is without doubt that with the growing and increasingly diverse community overall consensus based processes (like the grassroots formation of working groups from the OSM community) are struggling. I am probably more painfully aware of that in my OSM-Carto work than most. That is a matter we need to discuss in the OSM community overall. As expressed before my preferred answer to that is increased federalization, more internal diversity and competition and more and more efficient base democracy. But i am open to discussing other options - including elements of more hierarchical centralization. But the discussion needs to happen in the full breadth of the OSM community and not just within the English language and Anglo-American culture filter bubble of the OSMF.

To address your other points in summary - i never doubted that the board has reasons for doing things the way they do. That is not the issue here. The issue are the unintended consequences of the changes you make.

And i never said that the board seeks centralized control of the iD editor - that is a red herring.

Well - we are drifting a bit off-topic here.

As usual the discussion about interpretation of the Mission statement in its inherent vagueness is moot.

The traditional practice in the OSMF has been that the day-to-day business (or housekeeping, or mundane tasks) is done by the working groups and that the board’s task is mainly to set and maintain the circumstances for this work to function properly. The creation of ad-hoc special committees selected and appointed by the board in non-transparent processes that are tasked with matters that are typical working group tasks is probably the most obvious example of this having changed during the past year. And you now have another case (software dispute resolution panel) where the board even has a concrete offer from an existing working group to take on that task that the board will most certainly - and i venture a guess here, though that is a pretty safe bet - not task to the independent working group but to a board selected panel.

Now don’t get me wrong - i fully understand that with the various big changes you have made during the past year you see the necessity for creating new structures to support these changes. But claiming that the working groups and their position in the OSMF are unaffected by this is unrealistic.

Regarding how the thing would affect the future of the working groups - you obviously cannot look at it merely from the perspective of how would the current plans of the current board affect the current working groups. To get an idea of one part of the problem maybe ask yourself this question: What would happen if a number of community members would, after you have created committees for that, offer to create a working group for budgeting, contractor management or other things, i.e. they would say: We volunteer for doing this work - but only as an independent working group, not as members of a committee headed by a board members where volunteers are merely there to help the board and as alternative […] to hire professional staff. Would you dissolve the committee then in favor of having a working group or would you urge the volunteers to subordinate themselves to the board headed committee because you think that this task is something you want to retain immediate control over and do not want it to be done by an independent working group? If your answer is the latter then you - as i said - create a second branch of the OSMF for everyday tasks and demote the working group to be limited to secondary tasks not considered significant enough to warrant a board headed committee mandated by the AoA.

I have commented in more depth on the near term perspective for the OSMF based on the current direction of the board on my blog - including on the background of the AoA change and how it fits into the general trend of increasing centralization of the OSMF.

For completeness - the one diary entry [that] has been posted by a community member is

osm.org/user/SimonPoole/diary/394975

Allan, i think you just confirmed one of the key points of Simon - that the intention of the board with the proposed AoA change is to create a second branch of the OSMF for everyday tasks (formulating the budget, raising funds, and managing personnel) besides the working groups, which so far - as Simon explained in detail - have been the only part of the OSMF tasked with day-to-day business.

And you also seem to confirm my main point here - that branch is not - like the working groups - meant to be independent of the board but to work under direct instructions and control of the board. That the board has during the past year - and in conflict with the Mission Statement i might add - taken over more and more day-to-day tasks itself might make this seem the natural next step but considering this not to affect the position and practical work of the working groups seems at best naive.

By the way - regarding dark motives - i kind of admire your confidence that none of your six colleagues on the board has motives you are unaware of. I know many of them longer than you have and still i would not claim to understand the motives of any of them well enough to be able to make a statement of moral trust.

To start at the end - companies do not typically have work done by volunteers. And staff of companies has the contractual obligation to follow the order of their boss, and that of the boss of their boss - and ultimately the board.

What has been the common pattern of OSMF work for the past decade+ is that decisions of working groups with any more substantial effect for the OSMF as a whole required confirmation by the board. The whole point of committees as defined by the AoA to me seems to be to avoid that and to delegate actual power (while still controlling its use through organizational hierarchy). Otherwise why would the board propose an AoA change? They are free to create a new type of “board headed working group” any time without changing the AoAs. In fact they have already done so (in the form of the special committees - though not all of them are headed by board members).

Regarding the historic context - i think that was the Management Team, not Management Board.

Regarding the Committee AoA change proposal - i fully agree that this essentially means putting into question or demoting the existing working groups and in general breaking with most of the traditions of the working groups in the OSMF that - as you have pointed out - have in large parts been developed from the painful experience of past failures.

But i don’t think removing the requirement of a board member heading a committee would solve anything here. The thing that distinguishes the committees according to the AoAs from working groups or any other informal bodies in the OSMF is that the board is supposed to be able to delegate its formal powers to to the committees:

The Board may delegate any of its powers to committees […]

As i see it, that is legally only possible if the committee is controlled by the board - which would not be the case if the committees are not headed by the board. So IMO the ability of the board to delegate formal powers to committees would be inherently connected to the board having immediate control over them. Even if the committee would have a ceremonial figurehead that is not a board member.

My reading of the board’s motive for creating committees with also members from outside the board is that the board wants to be able to recruit staff for doing work for them. Staff here not necessarily in the sense of being paid by the OSMF, but in the sense of people working under immediate control and orders of the board or board members. For example, the board members evidently see the upcoming need for quite a significant volume of work in the domain of personnel management (i.e. managing the various people meanwhile being paid by the OSMF for work in some form) and they don’t want to or feel they don’t have the time or abilities to do this all themselves. But if they’d create a working group or a different informal structure for that, they’d run into the problem that such entity could not make any legally binding statements towards personnel (like instructing them what to do, handle requests for leave, dealing with payment matters, approval of deliverables/invoices from independent contractors etc.)

That the concepts of volunteers who are bound by orders from the board is not going to work is a different matter. Practically the whole thing would probably mean either the committees consisting of friends of board members who they trust personally, that members of the committees would be required to sign some kind of oath of loyalty or that members of the committees are people who are already contractually bound to the OSMF (as staff or independent contractors) or to other companies/organizations with a contractual relationship with the OSM (i.e. leased laborers).

These lines - as can be derived from where they are located - result from boundary line segments (here from admin_level 2 boundary relations) crossing the 180 degree meridian. Since practically almost all geodata processing software by default interprets line segments as if geographic coordinates were cartesian coordinates and therefore assumes any such segment no matter how short it actually is to wrap around the whole earth along the parallel you need to avoid such segments by splitting any geometry crossing the 180 degree meridian along the meridian. If a mapper not aware of this carelessly moves a node across the 180 degree meridian the result is like what you point out (in this case probably fixed in osm.org/changeset/88746336)

First of all my complete chat logs from OSM related channels. Bottom line: I don’t use real time chat for anything other than individual person-to-person communication. There are reasons for that but that is outside the scope here. If you do this differently i don’t mind but i can’t provide advise how to deal with the technical constraints of the medium obviously.

I will try to explain in detail my fifth point in the list of recommendations i gave before and provide practical suggestions how it could be implemented. That seems to be where our misunderstandings are about. If you don’t understand any of the other suggestions please let me know. Likewise if there is something unclear about the following.

There are a number of ways you can practically implement the fifth recommendation:

• Have the deliberation on such decisions in public. This is by far the easiest, least work intensive and most comprehensive way for everyone i think. In this case you would not have to worry about documentation no matter what medium of communication you use because the community will most certainly take care of that. If no one else takes the initiative i would organize that in any such deliberation session one or two people would be there and take notes. With high impact subjects like funding of community projects i am sure there will be no problem in finding volunteers for that.
• If you decide you don’t want to deliberate decisions like that in public the most convenient way for the OSM community to implement my recommendation would be to publish a documentation of key parts of the deliberation and decision making process in written form. If you don’t write and keep such a documentation internally for your own reference and for the benefit of future board members to read up on past decisions then this approach would involve additional work. How would such a record practically look like? Similar to board meeting minutes or notes taken on a pad during audio conversation. Nakaner has a lot of experience in writing those - he would likely be able to give you good practical advise on that.
• If you are opposed to that an alternative would be the publication of a direct record of the deliberation process. Practical implementation of this depends a lot of the medium of communication the discussion is happening on. I can essentially only comment on email and real time audio conversation. Past boards have done quite significant deliberation on decisions via email, i have seen records of such (won’t say how ;-)). I have also obviously witnessed quite a bit of deliberation during public board meetings. I have however as indicated in my introductory remark no experience with real time text based group chats and i have never seen any logs of such chats where serious discussion and deliberation on decisions took place. That limits my ability to give advise specifically on that.
  • When using email you can export and publish specific threads of the conversation and that in my experience is pretty strait away in practical implementation.
  • In real time audio conversation publishing an audio record of the conversation is a simple method and could be transcribed by volunteers if necessary. There are also fairly decent methods for automatically transcribing audio conversation meanwhile but they tend to work best with high quality audio like in a podcast. In a meeting that would require probably quite a bit of discipline and investment in quality to lead to good results.

Again - this advise how to practically implement my suggestion is based on my own experience with past boards’ communication practice and outside of the OSMF. I understand that if the current board works very differently from that (i don’t know - public board work does not look that fundamentally different but it is obvious that the current board does a much higher volume of work non-publicly and as a result i have very little idea of that) these practical suggestions might not be overly useful. But in general: If you have practical difficulties implementing the suggestion to document and publish the key parts of the decision making process on high impact matters like this (independent of the question if you want to do that or not) it might be advisable to have a critical look at how you do your deliberation process technically. I know different people work differently. But i for example could never peoperly do my job as an OSM-Carto maintainer and make decisions there if there was not a full, structured and searchable record of past deliberations and decision making processes available to me. And i know other OSM-Carto maintainers similarly make extensive use of the past communication record during their work. Obviously a development project like OSM-Carto and OSMF board work are not the same but if you have practical difficulty implementing my recommendation that probably also means it is practically difficult for you to look up the record of a specific deliberation and decision making process in the archive of the board’s communication. And even if that does not appear to be a problem for you, you should be aware that future board members might not be able to work in a similar fashion.

Sorry - but what does self-evidence have to do with moral justification?

Anyway - we continue to have fundamental communication failure here. I don’t know what more i can do. I can offer you to explain it in German but i doubt that would help. I explained explicitly in several different variations what my recommendations are. I did not leave it at stating this is self evident, that was just the introductory remark, If you stopped reading there please go back and read the full comment. You seem to be pointing to your explanation of your thought process while i am talking about the deliberation of the board members with each other during the decision making process. I explained this explicitly in my last comment but you still do not seem to understand what i mean. You now seem to suggest that my recommendation can only be met by publishing all your IRC logs though i think i have been clear that this is only about the deliberation of the board on the matter at hand. But yes, in case you deliberate on IRC publishing the IRC logs of that would evidently be valuable.

Note what saddens me here is not that you don’t follow my recommendations due to not understanding them. My aim here is not to get others to do what i want. In fact i would very much prefer to be convinced that these recommendations are unnecessary. What i am sad about is that since you don’t understand my suggestions you don’t have the chance to evaluate their merit - you just dismiss them as unintelligible.

In light of my fruitless attempts in communicating my recommendations i will go back to the beginning - and the diary where my second point is the analysis of the probable social implication of the new direction of the OSMF. In light of me not being the only one who thinks risk assessment and analysis of possible downsides is important this might be a useful thing for the board to consider. And i make pretty specific predictions about the future here so it will be easy enough to evaluate the merit of this analysis in the time coming.

So you want to know why

And I thought “Yes, I know them, sounds good”. Just because I didn’t want to write up all the rules & procedures first doesn’t mean I am not guided by principles & ideas, it doesn’t mean I am making decisions on an ad-hoc basis with any thought. It’s unwritten rules & procedures, like lots of OSM.

Is not what i have in mind when i recommend

document and publish the key parts of the decision making process, in particular risk analysis that has been made on social implications and economic risks.

I think that is pretty self evident. You described that you formed your opinion based on what ‘sounds good’, you imply that in doing that you are guided by principles & ideas.

But you did not document and publish the key parts of the decision making process, in particular risk analysis that has been made on social implications and economic risks. With decision making process i mean the decision making process of the board collectively. This is clear from context i think. And i see nothing in that direction. There has been nothing along these lines in the public board meetings - i have been there. And i am not the only one who sees a deficit here - Andy and others have asked for essentially the same on osmf-talk (in context of the iD development - but that is highly related).

The recommendation (or if you prefer to call it that - the standard) is to have a public record of the deliberation of the board made during the process leading up to high impact decisions like this. This would not necessarily have to be written, if the deliberation of the board happened in audio communication an audio record would be equally fine. Or you could have the deliberation in public in the first place. I already explained in detail why i think this is useful and important. Again - if you disagree please explain where you think my reasoning is flawed.

Rory, i think we have quite a fundamental failure in communication here. I will try to explain my thoughts again in the terms that you seem to expect them in. I am not sure if that is going to help but there is really not much more i can do.

So trying to phrase my thoughts in form of an answer to your question:

what do you actually want?

What i want is the board to make good decisions for the long term benefit of the OSM community and the values of the project. I tried to explain where i see room for improvement here. If you want to boil it down to specific recommendations for actions here are the most important:

• reveal information that is going to be public anyway at the earliest possible moment and not the latest possible moment.
• do not stagger the disclosure of information (in this case the three project financing plans first and the much larger iD plans a few days later).
• better yet: have the whole process in public - that would make things much easier for everyone.
• on money spending decisions, in partiular such with a high impact on the social dynamics in the OSM community, design criteria and an auditable process for making these decisions. If you don’t think you have the time for that just ask for help - people will gladly support you with that.
• either have the deliberation on such decisions in public or document and publish the key parts of the decision making process, in particular risk analysis that has been made on social implications and economic risks.
• document and publish what alternatives you potentially have considered.

Again, these are not things i want individually, these are recommendations of what i consider beneficial for making better decisions, in particular by enabling others to provide more meaningful evaluation and review of your decisions - as explained in more detail in my previous comment.

If you disagree with either these suggestions or my analysis of the likely consequences of your decision i would be eager to hear your arguments and reasoning. If something in what i wrote - either in the diary or in the comments - just seems weird or nonsensical to you i will also gladly explain it in more detail.

Rory, please - i analyzed and commented on the board’s decisions and their likely effects from someone with an outside perspective without access to privileged information on the decision making process as i pointed out but with - as also explained - significant experience with the social dynamics in the OSM community. That is not a complaint (in the sense of an articulation of a negative opinion based on something going against my interest), that is an assessment (in the sense of an evaluation based on logic, ethics, arguments and reason).

If you think that analysis is wrong because i lack important information not available to me so far i would welcome any additional information that could lead me to revise my assessment. If you think my arguments and reasoning are flawed i would welcome counter-arguments and reasoning why that is the case.

What you present here - the assessment of the chosen projects/people being popular and having a track record of actions beneficial for the OSM community - that is a domain i deliberately did not comment on and which i don’t feel competent to assess. Popularity obviously not because i have way too little exposure to non-German/non-English speaking parts of the OSM community (which is the majority) to assess popularity among them. Track record of delivering things the OSM community benefits from - it seems to me that beneficial is a subjective characterization that depends on the goals you have and the time horizon you look at. I am not saying i would necessarily disagree with those characterizations (i would from my subjective perspective indeed consider what Sarah, Jochen and Richard do predominantly beneficial for OSM - though i am sure as far as Potlatch is concerned there are also quite a few people who would see that differently) but i don’t feel qualified to make an objective assessment here - hence i left this out of my analysis and i don’t think my arguments hinge on my opinion in that regard.

As the board you are obviously free to make decisions on whatever basis you deem appropriate. But i am also free to and in fact i consider it my moral obligation to critically look at those decisions and their likely consequences as i become aware of them. That is what i am doing here. I think it would be highly beneficial if this process could be based on (a) complete information being available on the decision making process so i could spend less time on assessing things i don’t know from the past and could spend more time looking at likely consequences in the future and (b) generic auditable rules, in particular in case of money spending decisions with an impact on the social dynamics in the community so the analysis and discussion could happen largely before concrete decisions are being worked on. This would lead to easier work, higher quality reviews of board decisions and ultimately higher quality decisions more beneficial for the OSM community. Not to mention more predictable decisions of the OSMF and as a result more trust from the community. OTOH - in case some board members are contemplating that - not doing that, making decisions always at hoc, not considering binding principles for decision making and not disclosing any more details on decisions than absolutely necessary and as late as possible - will not prevent a critical review by the members or the community independently forming an own opinion on them, it would just make it much more awkward for all sides.

Nice. I would think i can see a slight U-Curve along the timeline in your plots with larger average changeset sizes at the beginning and the end and smaller ones in between.

ST_Area() on geography will for large bounding boxes lead to quite significant errors if you don’t subdivide the long W-E-segments before calculating the area (because they will get calculated along the great circle and not along the parallel this way).

In any case - since you are after the size of the bounding box you should consider that the area might not be the best measure because an excessively large changeset editing features in America and Europe might be fairly small by that measure if the features are at approximately the same latitude. The circumference of the bounding box might be a better measure.

Regarding changeset size - if i look at the changeset history on the website somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean i get about 1-2 ocean spanning changesets per day usually. Not all of them will be larger than 2^40 square meters but many of them are. If you analyzed about one week per month you get over the course of 8 years to about the number you gave. So my intuition was a bit off here apparently.

Very interesting.

The obligatory question is of course: How did you calculate the bounding box area? That is non-trivial with large bounding boxes.

I am a bit astonished about the almost complete lack of bounding boxes above 2^40 square meters in your analysis. The whole earth surface is above 2^48.8 square meters (2^50.5 mercator square meters for the full mercator square). A larger bounding box with edits in several continents will usually be in the order of 2^44 to 2^45 square meters i think.

Thanks. I think i get your point now.

And the same argument about developer approachability applies to tier 2/3 as well of course - there need to be map styles and map rendering toolchains that are easy to get started with for new designers and there need to be options for sophisticated cartography with high performance as well

@SimonPoole - i would not be surprised if the average JOSM user was willing to pay ten times as much for their editor compared to the average iD user, ideological motives aside (the i don’t pay for open source software attitude). The vast majority of iD users are lurkers with just one or two edits and then loosing interest. The typical JOSM user is much more serious about OSM editing, making a conscious choice to use that editor and not the default. A 1:10 ratio on average in how much they value their choice of tool does not seem completely unrealistic.

@mmd:

No, that isn’t correct either. Both worlds have their merits, it just depends on the use case you’re lookling at.

Sorry - you lost me here. What different use cases are there? AFAIK these are developed for a single use on OSMF infrastructure. What other use cases do you have in mind? Things like opengeofiction?

In any case this whole part of the discussion is besides the point of course since my point was that tier 1 usually does not call for diversity in different independently designed and developed solutions while the other tiers do. If you have two entangled implementations of exactly the same functionality in tier 1 that is a different matter.

Just wanted to point out that your statement is inheritely incorrect in case of the Rails port and CGImap.

Note the operative word here is usually. There are exceptions and there are good reasons for exceptions at times. But i would be very surprised if in this case the duplication of work was not at times put into question.

Also - as you said - only one of the two implementations is operationally active. Therefore i would consider the double implementation less a case of permanent use in parallel and more a software development strategy - possibly more related to the plan to throw one away strategy.

I agree - Note that there is another fundamental difference between tier 1 and the other tiers: In tier 1 you naturally concentrate on exactly one toolchain to work reliably - replacing tools as they become outdated and incompatible but not usually developing alternatives for permanent use in parallel. In the other tiers however having the mentioned diversity in tools tends to be highly desirable for a healthy community, incentivizing innovation and avoiding abuse of monopolist power.