[OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap Future Look

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 01/08/2013 06:08 AM, Jeff Meyer wrote:
> Also, almost none of the observations are supported by data.
> Can you provide any?

Frankly, I'm surprised that you should ask. The first couple of 
paragraphs in my message are essentially describing undisputable facts 
(naming companies that have paid for various developments, and that OSMF 
doesn't control that process). Then I say that people often deman all 
sorts of things from OSM which is practically supported by any 
longer-term reading of them mailing lists. Then I say that the current 
model requires that you do it yourself if you want something done which 
I believe doesn't need an explanation either. Then I go on to mention 
some risks/dangers I see; you can hardly ask for "data" that supports 
someone mentioning a risk - I mean, if I say "if we are awash in cash 
there's the risk of more heated arguments about what to spend it for" 
then what kind of data would you want to see?

> I also find that many of the arguments in your mail are contrary to the
> Mission Statement of the Foundation
> (http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Mission_Statement). As you are a
> member of the OSMF Board of Directors, this is confusing to me.

I wasn't aware of contradicting the OSMF mission statement in that 
message, but in general board members are entitled to their own opinion 
even if it deviates from board resolution (as long as they don't claim 
to be speaking for the board).

> Isn't one of the widest reaching and largest volunteer mapping forces in
> the world worthy of a mature and well-oiled organization?

I wasn't saying we shouldn't have one, and in fact making OSMF work 
better is something I've been, and will be, working on.

> The questions are: how well has it evolved? Could it have evolved
> better? We don't know. We only know how it has performed in the absence
> of a stronger leadership presence and with minimal fundraising. We could
> investigate the alternative and see how that goes.

Yes but there won't be a way back. Once you have 10 employees you are 
extremely unlikely to get to a point where you can say "well, maybe this 
wasn't so good after all, let's scale back". Especially not in a PR 
driven, over-heated IT climate where this would directly translate into 
headlines of failure.

>     Thing is, many of us know what they want individually, but we don't
>     have good methods of finding the collective will from that.
>
> What methods are considered good? Is voting a bad method of divining the
> collective will?

I have very strong opinions on this - yes, for our project, voting is a 
very bad method of divining the collective will, for a number of 
reasons. It excludes too many people (who don't understand what the vote 
is about or who don't speak the language or whose cultural background 
makes it hard for them to grasp the consequences), and also it sidelines 
minorities. Large democratic systems tend to have mechanisms in place to 
avoid or at least balance these effects; we don't. In OSM, 15 people can 
vote to deprecate a tag all of us are using and it won't even get noticed ;)

There's also the question of who can vote at all and what kind of 
majority you need to make a decision.

I would like to get to a point where we can say: The OSMF determines 
important points of the OSM future, and if you want to participate in 
that side of the project, then join the OSMF. Once the OSMF has enough 
members, from a wide enough section of the OSM community, I think it can 
start acting like that, but with 400 largely European white males as 
their membership compared to a million people who have an account with 
OSM we can hardly claim to be representative.

Voting is bad but at the same time we don't have a working alternative. 
Which, for me, means that we should be very careful about what we use 
voting for. For example I don't think that a simple majority of either 
OSMF members or OSM community members should be allowed to define what 
the project's core values are.

> As one of the OSMF's missions is to "grow the membership," why say, "if"
> we attract more people?

The question is whether giving people a nice map portal will attract 
them only to that map portal, or whether we'd be able to attract them to 
the project.

In my opinion there are too many people whose understanding of OSM is 
that it should be a popular map web site where people go to if they want 
to find a route or mark their house on a map. This is not what I am after.

> For example, what are we doing to (a) attract those who are likely to
> contribute, and (b) improve the user experience for those people who are
> contributing, and possibly (c) expanding the methods of contribution.

Look around you and you see all these things happening, by a totally 
diverse group of actors, without central orchestration. (In fact you 
might not see them all because while we are having this discussion, a 
dedicated community member in Sydney might be giving an interview to a 
local paper about OSM, without you and me knowing, and without being 
briefed by PR support staff at OSMF. Someone, somewhere, is writing a 
patch that improves the Android app for collecting house numbers, and a 
third thinks up a novel way of printing maps as a basis for surveys. All 
these things have happened and do happen; "we the project" do them.

>     Our current model requires that if you want something, you will
>     either have to code it yourself or find someone who codes it for you
>     (or pays for it). This creates a hurdle which I, personally, find
>     very welcome; it makes sure that only those who persist, only those
>     who are willing to spend serious effort, only those for whom it
>     really matters, are heard and get their ideas implemented

...

> And, it is completely contrary to the OSMF Mission to make the OSM
> project available to *all*. Apparently, it's available only if you
> follow some not-very-well-published participation hurdles.

The OSMF mission statement says

"To make OSM data available for anyone (for editing and in whole)."

The fact that you have to invest your own time to get a feature 
implemented on the OSM web site or any other web site displaying OSM 
data is not contrary to that. OSM data is available for anyone even if 
we don't have a slippy map on the front page.

>     If we had a lot of money and paid staff, It is possible that
>     strategic thinkers with high-flying plans and buzzword bingo lingo
>     take over the helm and have our paid programmers implement whatever
>     fancy strategic plans they have, and then issue grand statements
>     about how great we all are.

> Yep.  That might happen. It might not. What's a personal dream success
> scenario?

I would like a lean and project-driven organisation that supports 
individual, clear-cut projects - from the small "let's build a system 
that allows mappers to invite everyone in their vicinity to an event" to 
the large "let's build a system that makes sure OSM editing still works 
if the university where our central server sits goes offline", or things 
like "let's try to have one mapping party in each country of the world", 
whatever. Find a group of people willing to do the work, establish how 
much funds are required, acquire the funding, execute the project.

I am unsure how much of a fixed "machine" would be required to put this 
in place; surely you'd want to have some continuity, some fundraising 
know-how, etc., and you would have to be extremely lucky to get that 
wholly from volunteers. Still, since you asked for a "dream" scenario", 
I'd prefer a core organisation made up from volunteers.

> All of these arguments just sound like the lack of an answer means that
> inaction is the answer.

On the other end of the spectrum we have people calling for action not 
matter what - "let's do *something*, i don't care if it's good or bad".

> How does the OSMF measure the organization's self leadership performance?

I thing you are grossly overestimating "the OSMF". Last I checked it had 
neither leadership nor organisational performance reviews. Reading this 
I think the OSMF should probably do a better job at communicating just 
how small it is.

> The OSMF's mission states it is here to "support the project and
> participate in the OSMF’s democratic process."

No, that's not what it says. It says

"The OSMF membership is open to all who want to support the project and 
participate in the OSMF’s democratic process."

> How is calling what
> members are writing, "fluffy words," and calling their actions, "knee
> jerk," supporting the democratic process?

Just to make things clear, I am not participating in this discussion in 
my role as an OSMF board member. If you want an official statement about 
anything, write to the OSMF board.

I used the term "fluffy words" for stuff like "moving the project 
forward". Language like that doesn't help anyone, I'm sure that you'll 
find 100% support in the project for "moving forward". Ask for something 
concrete ("should we spend half a million dollars to hire a strategy 
consultant to help us set up a vision for 2020") and you will get mixed 
results.

I use the term "knee jerk" because I've come used to hearing people say 
"we have this problem and that and that, we need better leadership to 
solve them". It always sounds like "someone else please fix it, some 
leader please descend from somewhere and help us out of our misery". It 
always sounds like "I cannot be expected to work on solving this problem 
because I am not in a leading position, someone else must do it." This 
contradicts our do-it-yourself culture.

Of course there are things you cannot do - you cannot log in to the OSMF 
paypal account and transfer ten thousand dollars to a freelancer of your 
choice, for example - but there are many other things you *can* do. 
There has been, for example, a "strategic working group" made up of 
people who believed that strategy and vision were important. Someone who 
is interested in that could read up on SWG here 
http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Strategic_Working_Group and have a 
look at their meeting minutes and mailing list archive and find out why 
they failed and what one would have to do better next time.

> OSM is approaching its 9th birthday. Having some written goals, some
> written plans, some monitored performance metrics is not unreasonable.

The idea of verifying performance features frequently in your message. 
It's not a bad thing but I don't know if it does any good either. If we 
were a business, we'd be setting clearly verifiable goals: "By end of 
2013, we would like to have 5,000 active mappers in the USA, where 
'active' is defined by the metric X". Then we'd see if it works out, and 
if yes, the responsible employee gets a bonus ;) but in a volunteer 
project, would such goals not be arbitrary and ring hollow?

If goals and performance metrics are deemed a good idea, does it need 
the OSMF? Is it a big difference if the OSMF says "we'd like 5,000 
active mappers in the US" to, say, community member !i! and his cowboy 
mapping team running a mapper recruiting drive out of their own volition?

> Why wouldn't having businesses enter their data help build community? If
> that data provided were: (a) ground truth, (b) verifiable, and (c)
> increased the numbers of users who were at least aware of OSM and what
> it offers, wouldn't that be good & consistent with all of the stated
> desires?

See, that's exactly what I meant.

A business entering their data in OSM will *not* per se build community 
because the business owner will not be interested in anything but their 
own POI. So your reasoning is: Business owners adding their own POI will 
make OSM a metter and more widely-used map and THEREFORE the community 
will automatically grow. I think this is something one has to be careful 
with. There's certainly a chance it works, but faced with a scarcity of 
time and funds, if we were to discuss whether our resources should be 
invested in a programme to make it easier for businesses to enter their 
data *or* a programme to make it easier to talk to mappers in your 
vicinity, for example, the latter might turn out to have the better 
effect on growing the community even though it doesn't raise the public 
profile, or market share.

All things being equal - if some third party ran a program to help all 
businesses add themselves to OSM - it certainly wouldn't hurt, but if 
someone comes to us saying "you should be doing this because it is good 
for you" then the question is, is that really the area where our 
resources are *best* invested to build the community?

> If people could fix bad routing advice immediately, why wouldn't that
> increase contributions?

Building a system that allows a casual visitor of our web site who 
receives bad routing information to fix that immediately would be a huge 
task. It would be nice to have but I'd estimate this to have a 
complexity of beyond one man-year. Again, if someone offers to do that 
for us just like that - great. But there would certainly be things that 
man-year could be used for to greater effect.

> Also, using the term "candy" to describe information many users of maps
> find helpful and interesting is unnecessarily derogatory.

I think that many of these things detract from what I believe is the 
core of OSM. Let us take an extreme example on which I hope that we both 
agree: Aerial imagery. Providing aerial imagery is certainly outside the 
scope of OSM; still many users of map web sites (me included!) find 
aerial imagery extremely helpful. Should we therefore use our resources 
to acquire aerial imagery? No, is my answer, in terms of OSM, aerial 
imagery is candy and adding it to our site would (while "sweetening" it) 
be a waste of resources.

Naturally, the line between "essential stuff" and "candy" will be 
different for every individual.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"