[Osmf-talk] Iterating the Alternative Plan

[Mikel Maron]

> I’m sure I’ve missed something, if so please let me know.

Steve, I think you're missing talking to the OSMF and the people working hard to figure things out. There's not one of us who can do this alone. I feel like you're talking past me and many others. Maybe you and I can talk directly? I think we can do a whole lot more if there's trust regenerated between you and the OSMF and the OSM community.

The website is one of the most important things to focus on, there's no disagreement. And you're exactly right, this is in the remit of OSMF to figure out. Let's figure out how your energy can be aligned and help in productive ways.

-Mikel

* Mikel Maron * +14152835207 @mikel s:mikelmaron






On Wednesday, May 17, 2023 at 04:02:20 PM EDT, Steve Coast <steve at stevecoast.com> wrote: 





Dear all,

Summarizing here some takeaways from the public list and private conversations on changes to make to the plan and next steps, this is really a grab bag of things I’d love feedback or even help on:


* Engineering changes in general:

Questions about the role of OSMF and the website are intertwined. I’ve had feedback to focus on “one line” changes like turning on map notes by default. I’ve had feedback to write code code myself, to have the OSMF do bounties, to run bounties myself, to giving up entirely on OSMF and having a parallel organization focused on technical support for all the background and foreground work that happens. All of these have pros and cons. A recurring theme is “why work with the OSMF” - I argue it’s important as mappers and others look to it for leadership and authority. It’s a common theme on engineering changes - people look to OSMF to authorize a change because there are downsides and someone has to take the responsibility for them. For example, if we make the map “worse” by putting map note pins all over it, some people will complain and it shouldn’t fall to any particular engineer to deal with that. I think OSMF has a role and we should find a way to build a smart, simple, actionable plan for the map.

* Remove the conference and local member payments back to OSM

I’ll remove that from the wiki version of the plan.

* Should we focus on addressing?

Is addressing this really the biggest problem, and therefore should it be the focus?

I really don’t care what we focus on, but I do care that we focus and make the map better.

>From all the data I’ve seen, addressing is the biggest gap between OSM and any other widely used map. It’s arguable that PoI’s are the main gap, however, fixing addresses would tie many PoIs to a location via their address, but if we focused on PoIs then it wouldn’t help addresses. I’d be super interested if anyone has a bigger “hole” in OSM than either of these.

* Changing the map to not show roads which don’t have addresses:

One person suggested don’t make the map just go blank, instead we render roads with addr:complete as they look today, but if they don’t have that tag, then render them translucently so that they are still there and usable but obviously wrong and need work. I’ll change the plan to this, it seems like a great compromise. Another suggestion was to make roads translucent that have any address data near them, but aren’t marked complete. This seems like much more engineering effort than a simple rendering switch, as some process has to be built, run and maintained to find these roads and then integrated in to rendering.

* Other simple changes:

There are a variety of third party volunteer, supported and charter tools (maproulette, Neis’ OSM stats, OSMCha, mapwith.ai… ) which would have vastly more power and usage if they were integrated in to osm.org. These can be

•    general tools like broad statistics
•    specific to users like what they mapped recently
•    specific to an area you are looking at like if there are map notes near where you are looking. 

The near-zero cost and maintenance way to integrate these is simply provide links out to them in the right contexts, I’m sensitive to not giving anyone any additional work, especially maintaining anything. But the feedback is - what things could be integrated, for as low cost as possible, so they aren’t off to the side that most people don’t know about?

* Broadening the conversation:

I had feedback to talk to more communities and I started on twitter[1], happy to do more.

…

I’m sure I’ve missed something, if so please let me know.

Best

Steve

[1] - https://twitter.com/SteveC/status/1658208914360664065

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