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

[Paul Johnson]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2022 at 2:04 AM Tomas Straupis <tomasstraupis at gmail.com>
wrote:

> OSM-Carto is a map style for MAPPERS, not for CONSUMERS (should not be
> used as a background in general public maps).
>

I think you got Carto and the formerly featured Tiles at Home osmarender layer
conflated somehow.  Carto's not *that* useful for me when I'm mapping
unless I really lose track of the frame of reference I'm looking at and
just need to get oriented again.  I honestly wouldn't mind participating in
a rebooted T at H effort, as someone willing to run a slopsucker script to
help render it, but I'm also unsure if that's particularly necessary
anymore given that T at H going away more or less spawned a *way* deeper,
flexible and featureful map for mappers in JOSM's rendering system (perhaps
too much so given how often I'm changing styles just to see what's relevant
to what I'm mapping).


> Maybe if maintainers would push map to mappers/technical direction more
> and completely retract from consumers needs - say make incorrectly tagged
> features very visible (something similar to error layer we had years ago),
> maybe making some important technical aspects very visible, this would:
>
> * encourage creating OWN styles as per individual requirements - this
> would end pointless debate which features have to be rendered, this would
> also end pointless discussion that OSM-Carto is bad from cartographic
> perspective - because it would be stated (and visible) directly that it is
> NOT the point of OSM-Carto (bad naming of style).
>

This is already the case, and such software is already readily available on
most operating systems, if not from the vendor/distributor itself but from
the original sites.  Plus there's quite a few third parties (just off the
top of my head, Mapbox, Esri, Tesla, NAVTEQ (maybe?  I've heard conflicting
information on this one) and Rand McNally, thus putting OpenStreetMap
either in the dashboard or in the car map pocket of nearly every vehicle
from all eras that have either in-dash navigation or have visited a gas
station in the last decade).


> * discourage usage of OSMF funded servers for general apps - reduce burden
> on budget, infrastructure and admins.
>

This is already the case.  Trust me on this one, I'm an incredibly busy
(and I'd like to think, competent) cartographer with this project and I get
rate limited at least once a month when I really get on a sprint just using
JOSM.  Many, many third party apps that use OSM (Pokemon Go, Ingress,
StreetComplete, Qwant Maps, Rand McNally, Thomas Brothers, Craigslist,
Facebook...) definitely do provide their own tiles and style without
impacting OSM's servers beyond grabbing the planet.osm and then keeping up
with the snapshots.


> * MAYBE: this would encourage creation of a new cartographic style, which
> being not oriented for mappers could be refreshed less often (say weekly or
> monthly) therefore would afford doing preparations inevitable for
> cartographic maps.
>

Casually observing from my interaction with the OSM homepage over the last,
what, 13 years? with this project, I personally remember the following
changes offhand since I joined the project back in college (back when
colleges in Oregon were actively deriding OSM as an amatuer project that
will never go anywhere, which was awkward for me since finding this project
caused me to change majors to civil engineering for the sake of having
skills more useful to my hobby and I was living there at the time):

Osmarender getting weekly, sometimes daily, style changes.
Osmarender layer getting dropped after Tiles at Home stopped being A Thing.
(Apologies to Frederick Ramm, I really liked this render project, though I
do agree the end result probably shouldn't be in our showcase because that
was *entirely* information overload if you weren't seriously involved in
OSM at that point)
2010 happened.
Mapnik getting a major, massive refresh that took it from being (to my
American eye, and no offense intended to the Carto folks since I know this
is a touchy subject for them) strongly influenced by Ordnance Survey, to
being more strongly influenced by minimalist web design and especially
Google Maps' default render.
The default, mapnik-based renderer getting more specifically called
Standard on the website and Carto in the github, and more actively
developed.
The Cycle Map from Thunderforest getting featured.
The Humanitarian map from HOT getting featured.
2020 happened (I'm not confident this entry is in the right spot, given
everything that's gone on, everything kind of became a blur after the end
of summer '19, with the duration of time since then feeling simultaneously
like it's been 45-50 years since then and yesterday)
The transport map appeared sometime before this.  (I didn't really care at
the time since what everyone knows as GTFS now I knew as "Tri-Met CSV
format" from back in the days Trimet (modern spelling) was putting PCs and
XTs in weatherproof trip planning kiosks around Portland in the late
1980s/early 1990s; the idea of knowing the stop ID number closest to home
is just something I grew up with, and I'm 40 now).
ÖPNVKarte got started and then got featured.
CyclOSM started and then got featured.

P.S. Remember, "OSM is a DATABASE, not a MAP"


With all due respect, Tomas, please chill and reflect.  To put it bluntly,
you literally talked your way through what the project as a whole has done
itself over the last ~15 years I've been involved in a single email.

There's some promising things going on with Americana
<https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_Americana> that seem to
have it on a trajectory for inclusion as a featured renderer (and for me
this falls into the category of FINALLY! since the only American renderer
with familiarity to anything resembling widely available paper maps, for
me, since MapQuest got a slippymap, has been https://maps.randmcnally.com/
up to now).  If there's something amiss with the renderers existing or in
development now, I strongly advise you to please fork the nearest renderer
and adjust to suit.

Love your energy and fury on the topic, but let's focus that in a
productive direction.  The Standard map seems to be very intentionally a
generic, culturally neutral (as much as it can be) view of the world, and I
highly laud its efforts for taking things in that direction.  I also
understand the need for more culturally relevant and localized rendering
styles, as you suggest.  But please take the nearest style to what you're
looking for, fork it, and develop it closer to your vision.  Get enough
polish on it and it'll either become the basis for your own moneymaking GIS
consuming website, a featured layer on OSM, a great public domain
stylesheet, or all of the above.  I, for one, am curious what your
idealized render of the map looks like.
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