[Tagging] Proposal process [was: healthcare]

Sun Nov 6 11:26:27 UTC 2022

Hi Brian,

I appreciate all the effort you underwent with the "river tagging 
scheme. I do mean it. And I support it. Now, the process to achieve it 
seems ridiculously hard. You say people "reached out across many 
channels to discuss the proposed changes",  "I had to discuss the 
specifics of river tagging with many many people. Those people talked to 
other people." They "generated statistics, procedures, and 
visualizations of our progress". And in spite of 99% completion I 
personally could just go out and tag the old way with anyone having the 
right to "correct" it if I was willing to fight for it. This is why the 
process is dysfunctional. It is dysfunctional because there is no 
established path which people you need to talk to, which software 
support you need and how to do it, how many people you need to convince, 
etc.

Sometimes you can be lucky. People like you can make a huge effort and 
what is proposed is overwhelmingly convincing. I won't deny that in 
those cases things can happen. At least from what I see here, if this 
isn't the case there is no way to reach any decision that really means 
something.

I still don't understand why we are not able to create a space where all 
these people you mention can come together, discuss a scheme and the 
community finally adopts it - or not. It would be exactly the same as 
what you have done but in less time, with less effort, more transparent 
an inclusive. A space where regular mappers, software developers and any 
other stakeholders know that THIS is the space where we come together to 
add, improve, modify things, a space where decisions are made and 
everybody can be heard. And most importantly to finally reach a 
conclusion on how we want to do things.

Regarding standardization: First of all, I hope we all work on the basis 
that we want to improve things. Can you move a ton of sand with a spoon? 
Sure, but it will take you days and with an excavator you are done in 5 
minutes. My point is that you CAN do something or that somethings WORKS 
doesn't mean we can do something or make that somethings works better.

Some time ago I asked Alexander Borsuk (Organic Maps). The context was 
the debate on the "contact" controversy but it can be extended to other 
less heated topics... (The conversation was in the open OM Telegram 
channel and can be found by everyone, so I am not disclosing opinion, 
subject to privacy)

The key sentences for me are:

"A bigger problem is different public transport schemes, where it's way 
harder to write a "converter" from one into another. For example, subway 
map in Vienna was missing because local community decided that it's ok 
to have two different level platforms in one stop_area. That is really a 
pain."

"...the proper way would be to merge into multiple values for one chosen 
tag (and filter duplicate values, of course). That's a bit of a hassle, 
but it is solvable."

"Of course it is easier if all tags have the same scheme. Then we don't 
spend our time on the scheme differences, focusing on a better product 
instead."

Let me ask you then: Can you provide evidence or a few examples in which 
tag standardization is harmful or represents any disadvantage?

Cheers

Am 06.11.2022 01:00, schrieb Brian M. Sperlongano:

> On Sat, Nov 5, 2022 at 6:45 PM Robin Burek <robin.burek at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
>> And if we now get to the point of just "throwing away" the consensus 
>> of 12 years ago.
> 
>> do we still need the proposal process at all? Because the result from 
>> 12 years ago is also completely ignored by you.
> 
>> it was already decided to deprecate in 2010, but no one has finally 
>> implemented it.
> 
> What you are discovering firsthand, are the limits of the proposal 
> system. Indeed I encountered the same challenges. A proposal compels 
> nobody to do anything. A proposal is nothing more than a communication 
> tool to demonstrate support for an idea to other players in the 
> community. It's a signal to other parts of the ecosystem. In other 
> words, if the participants thought something was a good idea a decade 
> ago, but the rest of the community (mappers, renderers, editors, data 
> consumers) didn't adopt the change, in reality, then the persuasive 
> value of that approved proposal from 12 years ago has faded 
> significantly.
> 
>> In this community, we seem to be moving further and further into a 
>> system where improvements to the system are massively prevented and 
>> established double tagging is simply left in place instead of finally 
>> being cleaned up.
> 
> I don't agree this has "moved" at all!  The project has always operated 
> this way.  Eliminating duplicate tagging that has been supplanted by a 
> newer approved tag is obscenely difficult. I led an effort to resolve 
> duplicate river area tagging to 99% completion[1]. which was also a 
> change that was the subject of an approved 2010 proposal. Despite the 
> approved proposal, it was still controversial, with some community 
> members disagreeing about exactly what was approved due to how the 
> proposal was worded and debating whether the old approval was still 
> valid or even a good idea.
> 
> The river project accomplished its goal because enough mappers cared 
> about it to have community discussions about river tagging in countries 
> worldwide.  They reached out across many channels to discuss the 
> proposed changes and the value it brought. And even with that, some 
> people disagreed, and we had some rough spots early on in the process. 
> The retagging was followed up with proposals and PRs to change software 
> support across the project's tooling to drop the old tag.
> 
> I was the biggest advocate for the change, but it only happened because 
> I was met with strong agreement.  Building consensus is hard.  I had to 
> write really clear and persuasive documentation.  I had to discuss the 
> specifics of river tagging with many many people.  Those people talked 
> to other people.  Other mappers generated statistics, procedures, and 
> visualizations of our progress.  At one point, I even gave a "Mappy 
> Hour" talk[2] on the project.
> 
> If that sounds like a lot of work -- it was!  And just for a single 
> tag!  But THAT is the scope and scale of effort that it's going to take 
> to change tagging that has tens to hundreds of thousands of objects 
> tagged.  You need overwhelming agreement AND enough support from 
> motivated community members to make all the pieces of the ground game 
> come together.  Is this an indication that our community is 
> dysfunctional?  Maybe.  But it's 100% the reality that we live in if 
> you want to accomplish wide-ranging change.
> 
>> This, by the way, is one reason why certain companies refuse to use 
>> OSM data. The data structure is unnecessarily inflated and complicated 
>> by such duplications. If we don't stick to our own conventions and 
>> enforce consensus, perhaps the consensus process should be abolished 
>> altogether?
> 
> This point would be much stronger if you could point to a specific 
> company that refused to use OSM data. I've asked for concrete examples 
> about why our free-for-all is a problem, but I always seem to get 
> hand-waving instead about the general benefits of standardization[3], 
> which is the reason I've submitted a question to the candidates in the 
> OSMF election to see where they stand on it[4].  While I don't like 
> duplicate tagging, I have so far not seen a convincing argument that 
> it's particularly troublesome, and this is speaking as someone that's 
> built and operates a service that uses OSM data.
> 
> If you want to propose tagging for something that's never been mapped 
> before, a proposal is a great way to ensure that the tag you're making 
> up is reasonable.  If you want to make a change of significant scope 
> and scale to tagging on the project, you must understand that a 
> proposal is only a single tool to generate support for your idea, which 
> must be part of a broader effort towards consensus-building and 
> community action.
> 
> [1] 
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Waterways/River_modernization
> [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5YwXDKGr2Y
> [3] 
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2022-October/066238.html
> [4] 
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Foundation/AGM2022/Election_to_Board#Question:_Tagging_Standards
> _______________________________________________
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> Tagging at openstreetmap.org
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