[OSM-talk] Effecting change in OpenStreetMap

[Michał Brzozowski]

I think that developers of JOSM are another noteworthy exception to add
along with openstreetmap-carto. Even if they break something, they are
quick to respond, and it seems that there's always some work going on.

But yes, I do share your feelings to a degree as well. People from many
core OSM projects seem they would like to continue status quo indefinitely..

The main project that I think is one of the most important, but at the same
time not getting enough attention is openstreetmap-website. There's so much
that could be done in order to facilitate mapper communication and improve
usability. I *could* learn Ruby to implement some incremental improvements,
but I would have to lose a few months on it and it's not a transferable
skill for me (I'm not a web developer, or even a programmer, though I use
Bash, Python and Tcl.). There are many quite sensible improvements that
haven't been addresed for a long time.

I have seen a similar phenomenon in Polish OSM community. There have been a
few tools and data analyses/visualisations made by the "old guard" i.e.
people who were active leaders in our community 7 or so years ago, who now
have work and family wasting their time. But they did not take care to
propagate the knowledge. Often it's a challenge to get sources form them to
build it on your own.

At the end of the day there's much that could be done to improve OSM if one
took a holistic approach, having multiple projects working on some common
goals, but with maintainers caring mostly about their turf and OSMF (by
design) being concerned mostly with funding, licensing and running *WGs
this is not happening.

Michał

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 2:47 PM, Darafei "Komяpa" Praliaskouski <
me at komzpa.net> wrote:

>
> вс, 19 нояб. 2017 г. в 1:11, Christoph Hormann <osm at imagico.de>:
>
>> On Saturday 18 November 2017, Ilya Zverev wrote:
>> > john whelan wrote:
>> > > No you need to build up trust again and it takes time.  Only then
>> > > will your ideas start to gain acceptance.
>> >
>> > Oh come on. I've been a mapper since 2010, I've hosted dozens of
>> > events, I've written many articles and tools, some of which you might
>> > have used, I'm on the Board currently, and still my proposals and
>> > pull requests fail again and again, because there is no trust in
>> > OpenStreetMap. There is nothing you can to to build up trust. Your
>> > ideas will never get acceptance, it's just nitpicking and "unwritten
>> > rules" all over.
>>
>> I hope you are aware that with this you deny everyone who has ever
>> voiced critique on any of your proposals and pull requests to have a
>> competent opinion on the topic in question.
>>
>
> (sorry for my Russian straightness)
>
> Many words, long story short: technology-wise, OpenStreetMap core is dead.
>
> There is no development outside of a limited set of companies, and even
> that is mostly aimed at profit of the company, not the OSM community. All
> of it is done in "consumer" role.
>
> People trying to gain knowledge of developing something in non-"consumer"
> paradigm get shamed all over mailing lists. Or have a look what it takes to
> launch any kind of popular OSM editor, be it Potlatch or Maps.me, in terms
> of amount of hate towards you.
>
> It is impossible to get anything merged into core infrastructure. If
> initial author stepped away from the project, there is a group of ~5 people
> who effectively say no to any change.
>
> This year I got several PRs reviewed and merged into PostGIS, yet even
> simple configuration/limit changes to openstreetmap.org get ignored.
>
> I've posted a -dev mail about reusing nighttime of tile rendering servers.
> Some likes on GitHub, some reviews from passer-by's, no merge, nothing
> about "what to fix to get it merged". For a year. Patience you say?
> https://github.com/openstreetmap/mod_tile/pull/152
>
> /map call is technically 40x slower than it should be, but issue is being
> closed with "we are not complete idiots" comments. No action taken wherever.
> https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/135
>
> "I'm worried about this. I have not performed a technical review." as a
> blocker for PR merge:
> https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/2939
>
> Basically, most of wide ~2011 dev community was hired away, and core is in
> hands of those who weren't hired away by Map* for whatever reason, be that
> lack of social skills or lack of technical skills. You've got no fresh
> blood, and there's no road map for it to improve.
>
> _______________________________________________
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> talk at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>
>
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