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

[Daniel Koć]

W dniu 01.06.2022 o 19:26, Włodzimierz Bartczak pisze:
> I am very sorry that an organization that pays great attention to 
> equal treatment and democratic management fails here.

Thank you for bringing the issue to the public. And yes, this is sad and 
- as a matter of fact - very strange, that community driven project does 
not listen to the community.

Disclaimer - I am an OSM Carto maintainer. And I don't understand why we 
have maintainers not following the community, even when confronted with 
so fluid entity being so disturbed, that it managed to take series of 
actions and speak loud about the frustration. Even now... I wonder what 
should have happened to make them listen?

Although I don't know that, some problems are pretty clear. In general, 
there is where (1) a growing project meets (2) old habits, which were 
not touched for years - if ever.

1) Since OSM is growing, it is not possible to use one size to fit all 
(growing number of users an uses) and it's not easy to provide resources 
to support them (growing number of data). Raster map is never going to 
solve it - it is fixed and if you want a slightest change, you need to 
clone everything. In practice you need to make a separate style with 
rendering, which is costly and hard. The only viable technology that can 
overcome this obstacle is vector tiles with ecosystem of different 
styles, preferably with easy sharing+forking them and visual editor.

It is not trivial with vector tiles, but with raster tiles this is just 
impossible. This might sound like a purely technical problem (new shiny 
vector toys!), but the consequences are social.

2) OSM Carto is an old incarnation of even older default OSM style. It 
has grown in a grass-root way - one person met another one and they made 
XML style for a small grass-root GIS project. 10 years ago that person 
converted it to something more clear and powerful using CartoCSS 
processor. Then he made a team of co-maintainers. At some point after 
that he wanted to left it to do some other things. He passed a 
coordinator job to one of the team members, but, unfortunately, that 
person was not able to do it - and so the project was left in some 
unclear state, and it is like this till now. There was some other 
problem at the same time - the team was doing less changes, so it was 
also failing at the practical level. And in the end maintainers as a 
team also started to diverge from community and I don't hear they see 
the problem or want to fix it somehow, simply nobody talks about it.

This version of history is of course very rough (sorry for that), but it 
shows where did 3 main OSM Carto problems grown from - lack of guidance, 
lack of coding and lack of influence from the community.

OSM Carto is default style, its tiles take most of the screen of the 
default OSM web page. This is a flagship and a public face of the 
community. I guess this is precisely a reason why we have no big red 
button "download database" instead, even if that's regarded as a 
strategic resource. Sounds like a community style then. It also renders 
and is being served using OSMF technical resources. -- But in reality 
the project is still hosted on a personal profile, that person is rarely 
active for years, and even if the code is being created by community, it 
is largely declined or ignored, so it looks like a typical small-club 
hobby, where you can walk in, but the chances that you can join it (or 
even just improve it the way you think is good) are basically non existent.

So the OSM project has grown a lot, but governing model got stuck years 
ago and is not producing what community expects, slowly turning more 
into insiders discussion forum than a map style.

Of course, even if we have vector tiles instead on the main page, there 
could be still conflicts which style should be loaded by default, but at 
least changing it and tuning to personal taste would be much simpler.

I have nothing against small-club projects or personal forks. The 
problem is that until we have something more flexible in rendering OSM 
data, we have still one raster layer there and nobody knows how many 
years more it will take to expand it. So it sounds very obvious to me 
that default style layer should have been driven very clearly by 
community needs. And it looks like small-club is representing big 
community without even following it most of the time.

I'm happy that community was able to talk how frustrated it is with the 
current state of the map (pun intended...). I'm also happy that OSMF is 
now aware of the problem and is thinking about possible solutions:

https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes/EWG_2022-05-23#Response_to_OSM-Carto_Frustration

What worries me, is that OSM Carto maintainers still do not even talk 
about this. They are also still doing the same as usual, as if nothing 
happened and nobody complained. This looks to me like community 
representation is seriously broken here.


-- 
"Holy mother forking shirt balls!" [E. Shellstrop]