[OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap Future Look

[Frederik Ramm]

Pawel,

On 08.01.2013 20:20, Paweł Paprota wrote:
> Sure, that's always good but note that another thread about OSM's future
> ends in basically no conclusion. Or rather the conclusion seems to be
> that all is fine and the future is secured with the current approach.

You are a software engineer. You have spent 6 months on the Rails port 
and you say that you find it a very complex piece of work where you 
can't just easily "throw in" something, and it requires a lot of effort 
to make things work.

Opinions may be divided on that but let's take it at face value for a 
moment and agree with your professional judgement: It *is* a complex 
thing, and making a change to it does require considerable effort.

I would like to ask you to apply this engineer's sense of a complex 
system to the OSM(F) community/ecosystem/project for a moment. There are 
many people from many backgrounds with many different visions for the 
future of OSM; people from different countries, people who have lived 
through different systems of government, people who are new to OSM or 
those who remember surveying major roads with their first generation 
eTrex GPS, anarchists and die-hard open source anti-business people as 
well as commercial users of OSM. People with hopes and wishes and dreams 
and experiences, people who have made huge investments in OSM, social 
bonds that have formed (and I'm not talking of the "friend" flag in the 
database); reputations have been built or destroyed, local hierarchies 
have formed, people have achieved fame or, very occasionally, been 
driven out in shame. Very few rules have been written down but many do 
exist in a kind of "collective memory".

This project is a hugely complex, large, living organism. And you *can* 
work on it, you can develop ideas for the future, have them tested, 
campaign for them, get people to agree. You can do political work in 
OSM. But just as with the complex rails port (where you'll have to 
familiarize yourself with it for a while before you can even write a 
meaningful line of code, and even then experienced coders might still 
tell you that you accidentally broke something that was there for a 
purpose; where having an idea about what you'd like to happen is only 
the beginning of a lot of work to actually make that happen), making an 
idea fly in OSM is hard work.

You are giving up too early; you cannot expect to productively discuss 
the future of such a complex organism within a few days in a few 
messages on a mailing list. It is a process, and it requires long-term 
commitment to get anything done.

As I mentioned in another post, the idea that there needs to be some 
sort of strategic planning is of course not new, and I have also listed 
a few of the common reservations against such planning ("white-haired 
guys with no clue of OSM tell us what we should be doing to be 
successful in 2020"). Finding out how to do strategic planning in a 
project like ours, and do it in a way that is acceptable to the project, 
is difficult, and requires finding answers to many questions. When I 
listed these questions in a response to Jeff, he said:

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

When in fact I only wanted to demonstrate just how complex the situation 
is and that it takes a lot of work and the right ideas to get 
*anywhere*, and that there are no easy answers.

I'm sure there are many ways to deal with this. Some - among them Steve, 
the founder of OSM - find the idea of installing authority attractive. 
Simply give someone the power to "decide things", to "lead", and then 
that person or group of persons will cut through all the Goridan knots 
and rescue us. It is a valid model but I don't subscribe to it.

My idea of dealing with this complex situation is to:

* first establish who has the power to make decisions (preliminary 
answer: the OSMF, for a certain range of problems that still need to be 
defined, within certain "constitutional" boundaries that still need to 
be defined, and provided that the OSMF membership is more representative 
of the project than it is now - from this comes the to-do item of taking 
measures to grow membership)

* second, provide better mechanisms for those who rule OSMF (i.e. the 
OSMF members) to actually form an opinion and agree on it (preliminary 
plan: needs something more than plain voting, liquidfeedback.org 
anyone?, also needs much more transparency than we have now)

* third, once such a reliable system is in place, use it to make decisions.

I am working on that but needless to say this involves a lot, and when I 
was elected to the OSMF board in September I was at first distracted by 
other things that I felt required more immediate attention.

I can see how all this may look like nothing ever happens; someone who 
just wanted to buy time to hide the fact that they're not doing anything 
would probably say the same things ("uh, yes, but this all takes 
time..."). It is possible that there is a totally different approach to 
"everything" that works much better than the course I'm pursuing. For 
example, it is possible that before OSMF has matured to a point where it 
can sensibly do strategic planning, a couple of strong local chapters 
who are leaner and meaner and better funded have already made most of 
the decisions for themselves and don't even need granny OSMF anymore. 
Who knows.

I know that I often sound like I was only here to put on the brakes. I 
remember when I was young and my parents used to do that - I had a great 
idea and they told me that it'll take a year and that was the end of it, 
they had killed the fun. Even today, even in OSM, I get my own fun 
killed often enough.

 From my perspective, I'm just being realistic and cautious. I'm sorry 
if that occasionally kills the fun.

Bye
Frederik

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