[OHM] Administrative changes to the OHM Github organization

[Rob H Warren]

Tod,

Everyone has been taken off the OHM group, including me and Jeff, pending cleanup. 5+ years of everyone doing what they wanted means a pile of forgotten integrations, phantom auth keys and runaway branching. Deployment was no longer possible and it wasn't going to get better.

re: sysops loads, I'm leaning on a few people people (Richard and Bert), who also have to prioritize their own workload. -rhw


> First off, I'd like to thank each and every person who has dedicated any
> time and effort to the the cause of Open Historical Map. It's a huge
> undertaking that requires all of us. However, let's allow cool heads to
> prevail here. I don't think Jeff and his cohort are ill-willed and I'm very
> excited by the recent developments they've been working on for the OHM.
> 
> I do agree that the GitHub org has become very cluttered, but I think we
> can work through this without pointing fingers of blame unnecessarily.
> 
> Rob, is there any particular reason why you're uncomfortable with sharing
> the devops/sysops load with others? I think we should prioritize getting
> the new codebase/website up ASAP.
> 
> Let's focus on collaboration and good will rather than gatekeeping.
> 
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> 
> –Tod
> 
> 
> On Mon, Nov 4, 2019 at 7:38 AM Rob H Warren <warren at muninn-project.org>
> wrote:
> 
>> Storm in a teacup. Stop it.
>> 
>> No data, commit, repo, branch or OHM contribution has been lost. The
>> github re-org is in line with vanilla best practices in industrial,
>> academic and open source projects.
>> 
>> Your linkedin page lists job titles such as director of engineering, CTO
>> and product manager at Microsoft. Given the projects you've managed, you
>> should have been calling for this to be fixed a long time ago. The
>> "community" had been wrestling for some weeks about how to deal with the
>> hairball that the repos had become.
>> 
>> Yes, it's a pain. I have to go through Albin since I have no admin access
>> myself but it is necessary.
>> 
>> Now please let him do his job so we can all do ours.
>> 
>> -R
>> 
>>> Message: 1
>>> Date: Sat, 2 Nov 2019 19:22:41 -0700
>>> From: Jeff Meyer <jeff at gwhat.org>
>>> To: Albin Larsson <albin.post at gmail.com>
>>> Cc: Rob H Warren <warren at muninn-project.org>,
>>>      "Historic at openstreetmap.org" <historic at openstreetmap.org>
>>> Subject: Re: [OHM] Administrative changes to the OHM Github organization
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Hi all -
>>> 
>>> Here is some background & questions with some details below:
>>> 
>>> I’ve been paying developers to work on OHM features for the last couple
>> of
>>> years - timeslider, working search, refreshing site to current OSM, etc.,
>>> with some new features coming soon, including: new inspector, new styles.
>>> The goal of this has been to deliver cool time-based mapping features to
>>> the community. They were also in line with documented OHM wish/need
>> items.
>>> 
>>> We have not been able to deploy any of this software deployed, which I
>>> believe is driving the friction identified by Rob & Albin below.
>>> 
>>> I agree with some of the goals outlined by Rob & Albin:
>>> - Having code reviewed by community members before deployment
>>> - Having a repo branch that represents deployed production code
>>> - Need for a code of conduct
>>> - We should align our github repos with best practices
>>> 
>>> While I disagree with some of Rob & Albin's other actions/decisions, I’m
>>> also not sure the community fully understands their concerns. For
>> example,
>>> I don’t believe there was discussion of these concerns in any public,
>> group
>>> forum over the past year. Regardless of that, I want to see if we find a
>>> model that works so that everyone feels respected and valued. Right now,
>>> that’s clearly not the case. I’m also very sorry that it reached this
>>> breaking point.
>>> 
>>> Rob & Albin -
>>> 
>>> I sincerely hope that you will reconsider the recent pronouncements,
>>> restore the community access to github, and open a more interactive
>>> discussion about how to resolve your concerns. I’d suggest at least 2
>> group
>>> meetings and a deadline to have a new model within a month, but would
>>> gladly engage in alternative community approaches.
>>> 
>>> Key question: I know you have the community’s best interests at heart,
>> but
>>> do these decisions have the support of the community? How do you know?
>> What
>>> if they don’t?
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> Jeff
>>> 
>>> P.S. I recently came across a relevant quote:
>>> 
>>> “Open source projects hinge entirely on contributors. Without regular
>>> patches, the project dies. Or, as someone put it, rather ironically, in
>> the
>>> email that drove me out of the project:
>>> ‘A protocol spec only dies when people refuse to work together on it.’ “
>>> - https://sealedabstract.com/rants/nanomsg-postmortem-and-other-stories/
>>> 
>>> DETAILS
>>> 
>>> A quick bit of background on my involvement with OHM:
>>> 
>>>  -
>>> 
>>>  I’ve been intrigued with the concept of an any geo, any time based map
>>>  since 2004
>>>  <
>> https://www.slideshare.net/gwhathistory/global-world-history-atlas-introduction-2004
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  -
>>> 
>>>  Around 2012, I came across the OSM community and the OSM stack and
>>>  talked with a bunch of people (Steve Coast, Ian Dees, Mikel Maron)
>> about
>>>  using it for historical mapping. Turns out, it had been discussed by a
>>>  bunch of other people prior to that (Frankie Roberto, Schuyler Erle,
>> Tim
>>>  Waters, Sanjay & others)
>>>  -
>>> 
>>>  In late 2012 and early 2013, I helped set up the original OHM website
>>>  along with Rob, Tim Waters, Sanjay, & others & hosted the first
>> Hangouts
>>>  -
>>> 
>>>  From 2015-2017, I had to check out of the community for a few years due
>>>  to work, getting married, etc. I regret that absence deeply.
>>>  -
>>> 
>>>  In early 2018, came back to my passion, OHM, and found that little had
>>>  changed in terms of features to the core website. The OHM Tasking
>> Manager
>>>  <http://tasks.openhistoricalmap.org/> was up (Thanks, Bert) & that was
>>>  and is awesome. The site itself was still up in spite of a scary
>> outage and
>>>  hosting transfer (Thanks to Rob!). But, it was lacking new features
>> and the
>>>  site were out of sync with mainline OSM. Unsatisfied with the pace of
>> OHM
>>>  feature dev over the past 5 years and not seeing any motion for that to
>>>  change, out of my own pocket, I hired a nonprofit dev firm
>>>  <https://www.greeninfo.org/> with ties to Stamen <https://stamen.com/>
>>>  and OSM board members. I asked them to start working on desired
>> features
>>>  already identified within the community. Later, we added members of
>>> Development
>>>  Seed <https://www.developmentseed.org/>, another firm with very close
>>>  ties to the OSM community and also the original OHM sysadmin, Sanjay. I
>>>  viewed all of these people as legitimate 1st-class members of the OHM
>>>  community and with OHM’s goals and best interests at heart. All of the
>> work
>>>  performed has been designated open source and as close to license free
>> as
>>>  possible. No one involved in this effort has any commercial interest
>> in the
>>>  work being done. We all just want to get features added to OHM and to
>> see
>>>  it thrive. I have not wanted to identify myself as the source of the
>>>  funding of these efforts on this list, as I have thought it wasn’t
>>>  important, don’t want any credit, and don’t want this to be viewed as 1
>>>  person’s project. It’s not. It’s a community effort.
>>>  -
>>> 
>>>  They have built the time slider you’ve seen on our prototype site, made
>>>  search work, and are working on a new inspector and map style. We are
>>>  currently trying to get this software deployed, which is driving some
>> of
>>>  the friction identified in Albin & Rob’s mail.
>>>  -
>>> 
>>>  I’ve also worked to make the OHM community more active and have been
>>>  hosting frequent meetings, postings to the aliases, attendance at
>>>  conferences, and outreach to other groups, which I’ve tried to share
>> with
>>>  the community.
>>>  -
>>> 
>>>  My ultimate goals have been to:
>>>  -
>>> 
>>>     Get the OHM feature-rich enough to be a more appealing platform a
>>>     wider user base
>>>     -
>>> 
>>>     Make OHM a more appealing part of grant proposals
>>>     -
>>> 
>>>     Essentially to make OHM a little closer to its stated vision of a
>>>     rich environment for historical mapping
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I would suggest we use HOT OSM as a good comparable and example of how to
>>> encourage participation across a community and to create a rich
>> environment
>>> for application development. https://github.com/hotosm
>>> 
>>> I’d also suggest we look at some basic best practices for github
>>> organization management,
>>> 
>> https://github.com/todogroup/guides/blob/master/participating-in-open-source.md
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Fri, Nov 1, 2019 at 1:40 PM Albin Larsson <albin.post at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Hi Jeff and thank you for sharing your concerns and questions.
>>>> 
>>>>> Can you share some of the details about the "concerns about the
>>>> sustainability of the project" or of how the gatekeeper approach will
>> work?
>>>> 
>>>> I do not intend to turn this into a gatekeeper approach long term. To
>>>> begin I think we need to make sure the code on Github represent the
>> code on
>>>> the server. Baby steps. Regarding pull request those will be managed by
>>>> whoever maintains a repository. The only repository which today
>> represents
>>>> code running on the server is the task manager one. Bert who maintains
>> it
>>>> have already full access to it and can merge pull requests.
>>>> 
>>>> Before this change anyone of the many owners could delete any code,
>> invite
>>>> anyone, commit whatever code, and edit git history. We can't have it
>> that
>>>> way and we can certainly not deploy code we do not trust.
>>>> 
>>>>> 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?
>>>> 
>>>> No matter the organisation that would require both meetings and
>>>> coordination. I assume in the end when it comes to Github the repository
>>>> would be replaced with a new one.
>>>> 
>>>>> what are the metrics of success for this model?
>>>> 
>>>> The first aim is to to actually clean up Github and make sure it
>>>> represents the code on the server. To allow incremental change in the
>> first
>>>> place.
>>>> 
>>>>> 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 read such concerns as sustainability concerns. I'm deeply sorry if I
>>>> have misrepresented someones 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.
>>>> 
>>>> It's my belief that this change and the clean up will allow community
>>>> contributions to be merged and deployed to begin with. Without that
>>>> possibility community meetings and input doesn't do much. While general
>>>> concerns regarding governance are related to this I consider such
>> concerns
>>>> out of scope for this particular effort. Solutions to those concerns
>> would
>>>> also require wider community consultation.
>>>> 
>>>> Best regards
>>>> //
>>>> Albin Larsson
>>>> 
>>>> On Fri, Nov 1, 2019, 15:53 Jeff Meyer <jeff at gwhat.org> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> 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/
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> Historic mailing list
>>>>>> Historic at openstreetmap.org
>>>>>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/historic
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> --
>>>>> 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
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Historic mailing list
>>>>> Historic at openstreetmap.org
>>>>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/historic
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> --
>>> 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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> 
> -- 
> Tod Robbins, MLIS
> todrobbins.com
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