[OHM] Administrative changes to the OHM Github organization

[Jeff Meyer]

Albin, Rob -

Thanks for bringing these issues to light & thank you both for your
leadership & hard work.

I don't speak for the community, but there may be many questions out there
about these points, I certainly have many questions, I don't agree with
many of the points above, and I'd love to see if we can organize some
community solutions.

Can you share some of the details about the "concerns about the
sustainability of the project" or of how the gatekeeper approach will work?
E.g. how will pull requests be approved? If I made a pull request to
completely rebase the whole project, as the code base is 7 years old, how
would that be reviewed?  Also, what are the metrics of success for this
model?

Contrary to Albin's assertion, I for one, am very confident about the
future of the project, but I do have concerns about our current lack of
governance and individual control over any parts of our operations.

I'll send more thoughts in the next couple of days, but I find these steps
to be quite strong reactions to some vaguely-referenced & not openly
discussed concerns.

This project was started as a community effort, with community
consultation, and community input to how things should be done. I am hoping
that will continue.

Regards,
Jeff



On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 11:48 AM Rob H Warren <warren at muninn-project.org>
wrote:

> I want to thank Albin for taking care of the github organization, which is
> a thankless job. Projects on github were no longer manageable and not being
> able to track what was deployable and who-owned-what was hindering
> operations. OHM is going through the same issues that OSM and other open
> source projects have to deal with and this was necessary. Going forward,
> pull requests are going to be required to specific repos for any
> operational deploy.
>
> There are many critics of this gatekeeper approach[1]; balanced out by the
> chaos that results when too many cooks spoil the broth. Vectored tiles and
> the timeslider *will* be integrated into the main site and a clustered tile
> service is on its way. Please realize that the devil is in the details,
> there is technical debt and there are moving parts that are not obvious.
>
> OHM is based on the OSM stack with all of its glitter and warts. Yes, it
> has acknowledged problems. It was also designed by people with the
> foresight to support third party applications and authentication. If you
> think some great application is missing, go ahead and build it; no one will
> stop you. But before you do, take the time to read through the relevant
> standards and ask around: all of these standards have more than one gotcha!
> It's your time that's wasted if it doesn't work and half-baked solutions
> will not get deployed.
>
> It may be time for a code of conduct[2,3], through I'm not sure how to
> formalize "We're not your employees" and "Be a decent human being". I've
> hesitated to discuss this publicly so far, but my watershed moment was
> earlier this year when OHM "followed me to work". Someone (who could be a
> stand-in for "Pig-Pen" in the Peanuts comic) managed to get into a
> corporate event to share their strong enthusiasm about OHM. It's still
> unclear how a badge was issued but it did not reflect positively on anyone.
>
> Besides the routine administrivia, I've received demands/requests for root
> access, password files and raw database dumps. DNS requests for services
> that were meant to die. Sometimes the request is politely written,
> sometimes not. The behaviour is best described by the quote: "The reason
> it's so vicious is because it doesn't matter".  Also, we may have never
> written this down because it should be earthquake obvious but: OHM has a
> responsibility to its users and will not release its user data. Period. I
> can't make it any clearer.
>
> Lastly, OHM is a community project with a decentralized structure that
> caters to a wide audience. This includes the survivalist in his log cabin
> on a 27th floor NYC condo,  the teenager in his parent's basement with an
> unhealthy interest in the Sumer trade routes and other documenting
> ...forgotten payphone locations? We don't judge, you are all welcome. Do
> what you are passionate about, go your own way and do good work.
>
> All my best,
> R
> [1] https://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2018/02/16/osm-is-in-trouble/
> [2]
> https://nolanlawson.com/2017/03/05/what-it-feels-like-to-be-an-open-source-maintainer/
> [3] https://lwn.net/Articles/759654/
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-- 
Jeff Meyer
206-676-2347
osm: Open Historical Map (OHM)
<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Historical_Map> / my OSM user page
<http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/jeffmeyer>
t: @OpenHistMap
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