I have not expressed any position on name tagging here. I have no issue with the verifiability of the name Baffin Bay.

This is what just happened - you demonstrated that it is false and needs to be improved.

No - and you selectively quoting what you like and leaving out the rest does not make it right. If i demonstrated something that is the self referential cultivation of completely made up ideas is swashing over to OSM from Wikipedia.

As linked to i have written at length about the idea of verifiability in OpenStreetMap. I don’t really feel like explaining the fundamentals again here.

Everyone is free to map stuff the way shown. What i try to do here is give readers a bit of an idea why this is a bad idea and a bad development for the project. Not everyone will understand that - as said irony is a tricky thing. And some people just want to paint labels in the map (which i perfectly understand).

Nice to see someone is falling for my trap (sorry).

Please check if the following applies:

☐ you have understood that verifiability in OSM means independent verifiability based on the observable geographic reality.

☐ you are aware that the polygon painting in OSM is not anywhere near the IHO declaration.

The raw data is relatively easy to interpret: All lines containing a vote start with 1 so you can just grep for ^1 to get the data lines. After the 1 follows the vote with the candidates represented as numbers. The first empty place on the ballot is marked with a 0.

It is clear that since Tobias got by far the most first priority votes most of the identical ballots were with him on position one. Of the 189 people who voted Tobias first as i mentioned 82 voted Joost second and of these as you say 11 had no third choice and 29 had Stereo on third and then empty. This seems a pretty natural distribution if you take into account the political similarities (i.e. that people who voted for Tobias first have a higher preference for some candidates than for others).

Regarding “So no statistical conspicuity for sold voted” - that is not something you can necessarily observe as an outsider. The technique Rory discussed would be along the lines of “You should vote for A first and for us to verify you actually did so please fill the rest of your ballot with the following random sequence” Since there are 6!=720 possibilities for this specific combination together with the desired first position candidate you would have a relatively high risk of no other voter incidentally voting the same combination. But only the person who actually assigned someone to vote this way would be able to detect if the instructed voter obeyed the instruction.

Similar things apply for the possibility of collective voting instructions. Such instructions would usually call for who to vote for on position one and maybe two but there is not that much gain in instructing people to a specific whole sequence. The distribution of pairs of first and second choice is - as i analyzed - pretty broad and while there are combinations more frequent than others (which is natural given similarity and dissimilarity in what candidates represent) there is no single one that stands out specifically.

If you’d think about how much effort it would have taken to change the election to a different outcome - the distance between Joost and Miriam in the end was about 45 votes. That is is about how much votes you would have needed to add or remove to change the result - assuming that this specific change (Miriam instead of Joost) is what you want to accomplish. All other potential goals would have been much more expensive to accomplish.

I added links to this and other statements by candidates made after November 30 on

osm.wiki/User:Imagico/Analysis_of_OSMF_board_candidates_2018/#Tell_us_a_little_about_your_OSM_activities

I would suggest to focus on recent years and not the full duration of the archive since that could lead to a bias towards the old timers. A long time experience is a valid argument for a candidate but should not be mixed with recent activity.

I think it would be good to include other channels than mailing lists - you mentioned the forum and wiki activities already - diary entries and comments to them are another venue, so are changeset discussions. I think it is fine to exclude proprietary platforms because their use for OSM community discourse is problematic anyway.

And it is always important to keep in mind that in communication quantity does not necessarily say something about quality. Some people comment a lot of things while others contribute more rarely but provide more thoughtful messages.

I understand the difficulties. My main concern here is that the decision of the board on accepting requests for waivers due to financial hardship should be subject to external supervision and transparency and the best way to do that is to have numbers for that being publicly reported on a regular basis. This should be separate for the two reasons for waivers currently allowed.

Obviously it will take some time until a routinely working system to track and document decisions is established. I just wanted to make sure this is on the radar of the MWG.

My impression is that while github and github clones are in total fairly programmer centric (though you can argue about to what extent this applies to the issue tracker aspect of them alone) phabricator seems more management centric. Since Wikimedia has a much higher degree of centralized management than OSM you would need to think about to what extent it makes sense to use a tool designed specifically for that. In general i would prefer using software that is being developed for a wide audience and avoid tools that are developed for a specific application outside of OSM that is in the future not unlikely to develop in a very different direction.

But ultimately i think this should be about collecting the options we have, find out the pros and cons and then make an informed decision.

Thanks for the update.

That Iran is on top of your list is both nice to see and logical since it is the country from your list with the most active mapper community. It is also the most active mapping community in the Middle East in total.

Even more important than the relatively formal decisions on the technical waiver approvals are of course the financial hardship cases where a subjective decision is to be made. Am i right to assume that even if the board makes the decisions on those the MWG will be able to provide reporting on this in the future?

Regarding the structure of OSMF governance and checks and balances - i think we have discussed this before - i generally tend towards a direct democracy and am fairly critical towards multiple levels of indirect control (like local mappers -> local chapters -> OSM parliament -> executive board). But the need to facilitate communication across language and culture barriers is of course paramount and this is obviously a difficulty with direct democracy.

I think it would be good to work on and discuss different options in this domain but any such scenario would mean the current board and the OSMF members essentially giving up a large part of their privileges and i am not sure this is realistic.

Regarding the basis of my assessments about what the OSMF needs - yes, i make fairly bold statements here and do not support all of them with a lot of arguments. My assessments about this kind of thing are usually based on plausible scenarios i see. But it is always possible there are scenarios i do not see. Therefore i always look for others describing possibilities that are new to me. If you have a scenario how the current development of the OSMF without any major changes leads to a future with the OSMF supporting the local OSM contributors all over the world in their diverse needs without this being overshadowed by external interests i would be eager to hear.

I don’t think Mikel was lobbying for corporate interests

Well - his public statements indicate otherwise. And since we can’t look at the policy draft i can only assume this goes into the same direction as the public statements. I very much doubt there is any change in that policy draft that makes the policy any stricter in a meaningful way towards organized actors.

I’m curious why if you have serious doubts about the current board’s ability to self-regulate you have never put yourself forward to the board?

Me volunteering for a position on the board would be contingent on the OSMF at least broadly representing the OSM community. The board as it is right now is not a parliament where every member is independently voicing his or her opinion and follows their individual principles. The board makes and executes decisions jointly and i would not be able to do that for decisions i disagree with if the board does not have the legitimization from actually representing the OSM community and is ultimately subject to control by the community it represents. I know that my views are not always in line with the majority of the OSM community and that my ability to anticipate what is actually in these interests is limited, especially with topics that are ‘relatively far from home’. So i would depend on being able to trust the other board members to bring in the necessary additional perspective, their ability to make responsible decisions taking into account all the arguments and their willingness to open this process to the scrutiny of the community.

I do think the board should have a conflict of interest policy. […]

I am glad you say that but i don’t think this would be enough. Taking non-profits in the US as a model would only increase the strategic advantage of people from the US and people well versed in US organizational culture to route around the rules. And it is pretty clear to me that the model of a US non-profit is not suitable to guard against influences of outside interests.

My impression is that the OSMF needs more radical reforms to be able to in the future work in the interests of the OSM community. I am not sure though if the OSMF is able to initiate such reforms from the inside. I hope that in the upcoming elections candidates will present bold and practicable visions in that direction. At least they have gotten the questions that could encourage them to do so. We would then be able to see if the OSMF members are able and willing to jump over their shadows and vote for candidates that are likely to work to reduce the privileges they currently enjoy.

I also have a tiny bit of hope left that the corporations and organizations currently pressuring for more control over the OSMF to realize that biting the hand that feeds you is not usually a useful long term strategy (And yes, it is the OSM community that feeds the corporations, not the other way round). But that hope is rather small. One of the main constants in our society is that money is short sighted and stupid.

Thanks.

Based on what Stereo wrote above:

the set of amendments to the current guidelines that Mikel proposed to water them down

that board member seems to be Mikel. Which means he actively lobbied for corporate interests not only during the board meeting but already before.

Given the intensity with which special interests are pursued today from within the board combined with the silence and passivity on this by most other board members i have serious doubts about the board’s ability as a whole to self regulate and to ensure they pursue the interest of the OSM community.

I understand it might seem that other matters are more urgent at the moment but you should not underestimate the importance of this question (the ability of the board to collectively make decisions in the interest of the OSM community also against significant outside pressure and the trust of the OSM community in this ability).

Equating a policy draft sent to the board for consideration with private conversation between individuals is not something i would consider fitting. I have already explained there is IMO no reasonable expectation of confidentiality in this case. And that this kind of approach will likely sooner or later fall onto the board’s feet.

I fully agree that anonymous publication is not the ideal solution in this case - but it might be the only way for the OSM community to get to know how corporate interests try to influence policy making of the OSMF.

I also distinctly noted that you did not answer any of my questions from my last comment.

Thanks for the additional information. Was the text sent to the board from the outside or did a board member send it to the board? Did any discussion happen among the board members about the content of the draft?

I would still encourage anyone who has access to said text to make it available publicly - if you prefer to anonymously.

Needless to say there is no reasonable expectation of confidentiality of a policy draft sent to the board since the only reasonable purpose of such action would be to try making such draft into actual policy which would obviously make it public anyway. Therefore the claim by the board they can’t make it public to me is a straw man argument to avoid responsibility. The level to which this discredits the board as a whole is pretty extensive. I mean in the end this essentially means anyone can try anything to influence the board by sending them ‘suggestions’ and would not have to fear any serious backlash because the board does not publicly disclose such attempts at influencing their work.

imagico, does your questions mean that you think that stating “A is important” implies “B is not important”? Color me surprised.

No, my question was expressing a genuine interest in Heather’s priorities. As i explained your analysis is specifically working out the degree of proportionality between geographic distribution of mapping activities and geographic distribution of OSMF members. Since Heather’s statement was in my eyes sidestepping the discussion with the “welcome all” i became curious about her opinion on the main topic.

In the abstract form you ask - there are of course potential pairs of goals A and B that are mutually exclusive. For example the goal to finance the OSMF through individual membership fees and the goal for proportional representation would be fairly hard to equally pursue.

Ah, sorry - i misread - you are not filtering features, you are filtering tags, i.e. you modify the data instead of just dropping certain features. This you of course can’t do with osmium tags-filter

My approach for this kind of thing is to modify the style rather than modifying the data. This should make rendering more efficient since you don’t have all the layers with no data. Filtering specific layers from the mml file is something you can do with sed (yes, somewhat ugly) or probably more elegantly with python using the YAML parser.

Examples for label collisions:

https://map.atownsend.org.uk/maps/map/map.html#zoom=6&lat=51.82&lon=-0.88 https://map.atownsend.org.uk/maps/map/map.html#zoom=16&lat=53.03933&lon=-2.86514 https://map.atownsend.org.uk/maps/map/map.html#zoom=16&lat=53.13563&lon=-2.18444

The main problems with that approach are that

• you necessarily draw the boundaries above everything else including labels - which you normally would not do of course.
• you get label collisions.

For the collisions you could try rendering all labels in both layers and just render the ones you don’t want to actually show in transparent color. I have not actually tried this so i don’t know if that would work.

I am not quite sure about your two step filtering here:

https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/Boundary_Scripts/blob/master/update_boundaries.sh#L127-L133

First this seems very inefficient because you can also use negative filtering with osmium. But more importantly why do you specifically drop boundary features with those tags? For my low zoom demo i just use:

osmium tags-filter osm_lowzoom.pbf r/admin_level=2,3,4 -o osm_lowzoom_admin.pbf

as source for the boundary data processing.

Der Grund, warum unser Datenmodell praktisch nicht zur Analyse genutzt wird, ist eigentlich nicht, dass es schon in den OSM-Anfangstagen Open-Source-GIS-Software gab, die nach dem Simple-Features-Modell gearbeitet hat, sondern dass der Wechsel von einem Knoten-Kanten-Modell zu einem Simple-Feature-artigen Modell in der GIS-Welt schon vor 20 Jahren (oder etwas länger) erfolgt ist, weil es schlicht und einfach praktische Gründe gibt, eine Abstraktionsebene weniger zu haben.

Oh, da wäre ich vorsichtig. Die Entstehung von Simple Features und welche Interessen dazu geführt haben, weshalb dies so aussieht wie es aussieht - mit all den damit verbundenen Vor- und Nachteilen - ist ein äußerst interessantes Thema. Dass da praktische Gründe eine Rolle gespielt haben (was im Grunde nur ein anderes Wort für Partikularinteressen ist) kann durchaus sein. Das zu einem Beleg zu erklären, dass diese Art der Modellierung objektiv und universell besser ist als andere ist aber - wie soll ich sagen - mutig.

Die GIS-Leute sind genau wie OpenStreetMap-Leute Menschen, die es sich leider allzu oft in ihrer kleinen und übersichtlichen Blase bequem machen und oft wenig Interesse haben, auch mal über den Tellerrand zu schauen.

q.e.d.

While still waiting for Heather’s answer i wanted to point out that the subject of Joost’s analysis was comparing per-country numbers of OSMF members with per-country numbers of mappers or in other words: The representation of mappers in the OSMF.

I can’t help but notice that the comments from Brits and Americans so far seem oddly unrelated to this subject in a whataboutism kind of way. I know that being made aware that you are on the privileged side of decreasing diversity trends in the OSMF is not the most comfortable experience but just ignoring this and concentrating on other more pleasant things is not going to change anything. So all of your should ask yourselves the same question i have asked Heather: Do you think proportional representation of the OSM community in the OSMF membership is important?