[OHM] Administrative changes to the OHM Github organization

[Rob H Warren]

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/