[OSM-talk] About OSM social implications and what can/should be displayed on the map (or not)

Daniel Koć daniel at xn--ko-wla.pl
Fri Jun 29 20:16:01 UTC 2018


W dniu 29.06.2018 o 17:27, Carlos Cámara pisze:

> This is to say that openstreetmap-carto is OSM's business card, which
> should serve as an entry point to the project to people from many
> conditions and hence, we have a responsibility in deciding what do we
> display and how we do it

Of course. There's a nice poem of polish Noblist about the matter:

"Even when you take to the woods,
you`re taking political steps
on political grounds."

https://poezja.org/wz/Szymborska_Wis%C5%82awa/1980/[in_english]_Children_of_Our_Age

But it works both ways - not taking part or not doing something is also
one's responsibility:

"Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don`t say speaks for itself.
So either way you`re talking politics."

> (I'm sure we are all more or less aware of that and there are great
> efforts and success in making it a great default renderer -I honestly
> love how fast it has improved in recent time).

Nice to hear that, thanks! Not as fast as I'd like and is possible, but
it needs more active people in my opinion - especially coders at the moment.

> In order to overcome those matters (and if I am not wrong), so far the
> position on this regards is to render everything on
> openstreetmap-carto provided the following conditions: A) there is a
> significant number of uses (don't know how much is "significant"), B)
> someone creates an issue requesting for it, C) someone designs an icon
> or a representation for it, D) someone implements it by creating a
> Pull request that is merged into openstreetmap-carto project.

This is more or less accurate, however B is usually the first step and
C+D is sometimes where it starts. A is usually taken into account
together with documentation, how the tag is used, if there are some
competing schemes and how many people have used that - all of which can
be a source of debate. Usually tags starting with 2000-5000 uses are
pretty much significant, if no other factors are undermining that.

>  Or in other words, it is like European white heterosexual males were
> doing a kind of digital colonization of the world by imposing their
> rules simply because other groups are not participating in the
> decision-making process and hence their needs/opinions have not been
> taken into account.

I would be happy to see more people engaged in decision making in OSM
Carto, unfortunately it seems that only few people want to participate
to some degree. And that is also political will to not engage or not
help, which is powerful tool shaping the reality - don't forget about
it. Even if we try to take it into account, how could we be sure that we
represent them right?

We were asking about writing systems and the response was minimal. We
have a Code of Conduct. We made project overview, tutorials and easier
to use installation system. Diversity is one of our goals. If you know
what more is needed to attract them, please let us know.

-- 
"My method is uncertain/ It's a mess but it's working" [F. Apple]





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