[Osmf-talk] "Legitimacy from an election process to direct attention" – Your response to the question regarding Working Groups

[Christoph Hormann]

On Thursday 12 December 2019, Michal Migurski wrote:
>
> I imagine that if you wanted to argue in bad faith, you could
> circularly define the community as craft mappers in order to preempt
> the legitimacy of robot, crisis, armchair, and other mappers [...]

Let it be noted that you are just using the conjunctive here to slightly
disguise the baseless claim of me arguing something i have not argued
based on motives i don't have.

It is you who is having the bad faith argument, not me.  And this is
further emphasized by the fact that i have written at length in public
about the role of bot mapping for OSM and the significance of local
verifiability for the project, which - if you were familiar with that -
could have shown you my fairly differentiated views on these subjects.
But instead you choose to throw around baseless implications of bad
faith arguments.

If you don't know what my views are on these things and cannot be
bothered to educate yourself about them you should not assume them to
match what is most convenient for your storytelling about the bad craft
mappers that prevent OSM from becoming what it should be:  A sweat-shop
for producing data needed by corporate data users.

To make it abundantly clear:  OpenStreetMap is about the social process
of producing a world wide database of local geographic knowledge in
egalitarian cooperation across language and culture barriers.  This is
the fundamental constitution of the project and there are reasons why
this is essential for the project.  There can be perfectly valid
discussion about how in the details this social process can and should
be embellished but if you are putting the usefulness of the OSM data
for certain short term business needs above this fundamental idea you
are fighting against what OpenStreetMap is in its essence.

> Based on my own observations from the past decade+, I see a vocal
> traditionalist community defending an artisinal approach to mapping
> while the demands placed upon OSM are shifting toward the global east
> and south where craft mapping does not succeed at growing the map.

Thanks for once again putting it so bluntly that you are fighting a war
here against the global craft mapping community - or in other words:  A
culture you apparently do not understand and dislike).  And that you
don't seem to care about the values and interests of the OSM community
(https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/How_We_Map) but about "the demands
placed upon OSM" by - lets face it - primarily your employer.

And don't get me started on the irony of you talking about the "global
east" while the Russian mapper community is one of the most active
mapping communities world wide and at the same time drastically
underrepresented in the OSMF membership.

--
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/