[OSM-talk] An open letter to OSMF board members.

[Jeroen Hoek]

Dear Włodzimierz,

You've written the email I've been trying to work up the courage to 
write myself. Thank you for kicking off this discussion.

I am an occasional contributor to Carto, and some of my contributions 
are part of the style and (hopefully) benefit users and mappers every day.

You correctly point out that Carto is not 'just a style' for the 
community, and that it is the face of OpenStreetMap. Sure, anyone can 
render the data anyway they like, but around the globe many people see 
openstreetmap.org as the canonical representation of OpenStreetMap, and 
use it for all sorts of things.

A local newspaper here in Leeuwarden gratefully uses screenshots from 
the default layer for their articles. On the Dutch forum we have a huge 
thread filled with examples of people using OpenStreetMap for all sorts 
of things, often using Carto as the rendering layer. There are many 
examples of such use around the globe.

While some will reply that there is nothing wrong and that anyone 
complaining is just jealous their favourite feature doesn't get 
rendered: just look at the issue concerning highway=busway for a typical 
example:

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/4226

This is a tag that has broad community support, was accepted as a 
proposal over a year ago, and is used thousands of times. Yet no 
maintainer has stepped up to add it to Carto. The only thing that does 
happen, is a bunch of gatekeeping where irrelevant or long since 
addressed concerns are raised again and again.

Meanwhile, mappers keep getting user feedback about 'missing roads on 
the map', and other mappers keep holding back using it, 'because it is 
not rendered in Carto'. If your local newspaper uses openstreetmap.org, 
this is not a standpoint I can find much fault with. We can keep yelling 
'OSM is only a database!', but this isn't helpful for our users.

(Note: I have submitted a pull request to render highway=busway, so I am 
probably not a neutral voice in this matter.)

For the past few years I've felt that Carto is stagnating (despite the 
appreciated efforts by some of the maintainers). OpenStreetMap is not a 
static project: things change, tags get suggested, amended, improved. No 
one is expecting every new tag to be rendered right there and then, or 
even at all in Carto, but as it stands even small bugs cannot seem to 
get fixed, and minor improvements consistently get frozen by pointing to 
huge five year old meta-issues that 'must' be solved first before we can 
consider rendering any new icon or change some colour, or *do anything*. 
(And those meta-issues never get fixed either.)

There also appears to be no room to actually try to advance the style. 
Not necessarily because of negative (and often not constructive) 
feedback, but also because none of the maintainers seems to have the 
time or the inclination to engage with the community to actually do some 
cool stuff (e.g., 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/4346).

 From my viewpoint, two problems seem to plague the project, having a 
non-negligible impact on OpenStreetMap: a lack of resources (maintainer 
time, support from the foundation) and a disheartening negative style of 
communication that amounts to gatekeeping brandished by a minority of 
the maintainers.

For the latter: search around on the OpenStreetMap channels on Discord 
to get a feel from the community on this.

So yes, something is broken here, and I too would like to engage the 
OSMF board to consider a way forward.

Kind regards,

Jeroen Hoek