Hi Mikel,

No, you didn’t write anything that I didn’t like! And I did not intend to be compatible at all! Thus the “let’s get to work on this together” at the end.

I don’t agree with everything you’ve suggested, and my intention in replying was to challenge your vision, but this is not The same as not liking what you wrote, or thinking that you’re not coming from a sincere and constructive place.

To be clear, I think your post is absolutely sincere and well-intentioned, and that your vision is valuable. I do feel like you’re missing some important considerations. I’m trying to express—in a constructive way—some other considerations. I echo your suggestion that we need to be critically self-reflective, and it was very much in that spirit that I wanted to reply in a challenging_but not aggressive or combative—way! Like you, I have tremendous hopes and aspirations for HOT and the wider humanitarian Data movement.

If I came off as combative, or if my reply won’t stimulate a useful and constructive discussion, I apologize, and furthermore I will remove the reply (just let me know if I should do so).

I’m not persuaded that putting OSM and its community at the center of what we’re doing is the right approach. I love maps, and I love open data, and I have a great deal of respect, even awe, for the Colossus of open data that is OSM. But I’m more interested in the needs, desires, dreams, and capacity of people in humanitarian contexts.

Rather than familiarity and engagement with OSM being a required asset, I would say that familiarity with humanitarian contexts, needs, and action should be required.

HOT is not merely about maps and data. It is about making a concrete difference in people’s lives. Maps and data do not save lives and alleviate suffering. People save lives and alleviate suffering. With luck, they can do so more effectively equipped with good maps and data. An inward-looking focus on OSM may be useful to improve our data quality, but without an engagement with our users and a clear understanding of what is fit for their purposes, the standalone concept of data quality doesn’t have much meaning.

I certainly agree that we should have a better relationship with the OSMF. But bluntly, that should be a means, rather than an end. The OSMF’s goal, rightly, is solely good geographical data. Humanitarian action is only one of many uses for map data. HOT’s goal is the classic triumvirate of humanitarian action: save lives, alleviate suffering, and restore dignity, along with a broader development mandate to provide good data for people to grow with. HOT is not, nor should it be, merely a specialist offshoot of OSM. Some of the data we gather isn’t even necessarily a good fit for OSM, and is more appropriate to other open data repository such as the Humanitarian Data Exchange!

Speaking of community: the OSMF board elected in 2019 is composed exclusively of white Northern males. With all due respect, this is not a model for HOT, and not a community vision we should strive to emulate (I recognize that this does not reflect the full diversity of the OSM community, nevertheless I reiterate that this is utterly inappropriate for a humanitarian agency—HOT— working primarily in contexts that are not majority white.) Any discussion of community building, and a closer engagement with the OSMF, must acknowledge this.

Let’s keep working together on this!

Thanks Allan,

I came to OSM as a data user, rather than contributor. My first experience of OSM was an unexpected gift of data that saved lives. Specifically my team at Médecins Sans Frontières in Haiti in 2010 was able to identify areas of unusually high cholera transmission—something that was absolutely not possible without the OSM data—and take verifiably effective measures to reduce transmission. I’m not talking about vague feel-good impacts, I’m talking about objectively measurable numbers of people that are not dead because OSM data enabled better public health measures during a disease outbreak.

I am deeply grateful to the hobbyists who created this resource, and even more so to those of you who recognize the responsibility that comes with having done so.

Hi @Mateusz,

Thanks so much for engaging positively with me here; I truly appreciate it. I do believe that you are entirely sincere in wanting to understand the problems people are experiencing. You even stated your interest in helping to improve the situation, which makes your good-faith intent quite clear. Cheers.

Ok, first point: it’s fair to ask to understand what constitutes a toxic environment. A potentially effective kind of approach to asking might be: “Please tell me about the kinds of things you are experiencing that make you feel unwelcome, exhausted, or in a toxic environment. I’d like to understand these things better so that I can help reduce them in our community.” That might get you the information you’re looking for without making anyone feel like there’s some onus of proof upon them. Asking for “evidence” is not terribly helpful.

To a large extent, the evidence of a hostile environment for women (or any other minority) is the experience of the people on the sharp end of it. If women say they feel unwelcome, and your community seems to be really short on women, that’s evidence right there. Sure, we can dig up some examples of hostile comments in threads—as I’ve just done, in this one—but the real question is: “what do the present and potential diverse members of our community hope to experience with us, and how can we get closer to making that happen?”

I’m not saying that there’s no standard of objective truth or that people’s experience is always valid without limit. There are people who simply take offence reflexively; you can’t help offending someone who is determined to be offended. However, in our case there are a lot of women reporting a similar experience, and we can empirically see that there’s not a lot of estrogen (or melanin for that matter) in influential or leadership positions in OSM, so it’s probably not just them being hyper-sensitive.

You point out that this posting makes claims and demands (another way to put that is that it expresses someone’s experience and those of their colleagues and lays out their suggestions for improvement). I think it’s important to separate the two things; I feel that debating how to go about mitigating the problem (the demands) is fair and can be productive, but debating the experience (the claims) is very risky; almost invariably you’ll end up making the affected person’s experience even worse (again, the exception here is the occasional person who takes offence no matter what and doesn’t respond to good-faith efforts, but this is really very rare and I think you should only assume that it’s the case if it becomes overwhelmingly obvious; the consequences of a single false positive on this are way worse than a number of false negatives).

To say that reporting a toxic environment “makes serious claims” can be seen as implying that we should only do something about it if their claims are somehow substantiated. You mentioned that you dismissed a comment as “irrelevant noise” before realizing that it was actually ad hominem; this is exactly the kind of noise that constitutes a toxic environment. Ignoring it says, “You’re welcome to contribute, but you’ll have to put up with people disparaging you personally, which the rest of us will just ignore and expect you to do the same.”

So that’s the kind of thing that we should all be looking out for, and not dismissing as irrelevant noise. If every time someone makes a comment like that a bunch of others say, “hey, that’s not appropriate, please stop that, and by the way XXX person who’s just been treated that way the rest of us don’t appreciate it and hope you’ll continue the conversation even if I disagree with you,” the person being targeted doesn’t feel alone. It makes it easier to ignore the nasty comment and carry on.

As for the suggestions (the demands if you like) I really agree with you that the solutions are not simple or obvious.

While I personally agree with Heather that quotas might help in this case (normally I do not support quotas, and if they are used I think they should be temporary and limited, but I think we’ve exhausted too many other avenues to reject them at this point). I think it’s perfectly fair to argue against them, though in this case I’m personally gonna fall on the pro side of the argument. But either way, they are not the solution; as you say, that is something else. To be discussed.

As for hiring someone and/or making the sign-up form bigger (I work in Africa where a huge proportion of potential contributors are on mobile, and I agree it’s already difficult), neither will solve the situation alone, and carry significant downsides. These are perfectly fair points to make.

We can disagree on what to do about the fact that women—and in my experience some other minorities as well—feel unwelcome, without making them feel like we’re doubting that they do (or should), or that we don’t see it as a problem. If the women on this forum feel that we all really care about their concerns, and are determined to improve the situation, I think that disagreements on exactly how to deal with it will be manageable, if not easy (it’s a genuinely hard problem).

Anyway, again thanks for engaging on this @mateusz. I’m really looking forward to the day we are back to discussing how to make the map better, but I think we need to improve the inclusiveness of this community before OSM can realize its full potential.

Hi @Mateusz Konieczny,

One example of reputation targeting is visible on this thread. Heather raises some concerns about diversity and inclusion, and a commenter posts a link to her OSM profile with the text: “Show the world that you are able.” I’m not sure how you interpret this comment, but to me it’s an unvarnished example of dismissing someone’s argument by suggesting they have not earned the right to speak.

If you want to help, I suggest looking out for such behavior and countering it. Perhaps by expressing support for the right of people whose contributions are not measured in edits alone or by crying foul on hostile messages. You could, for example, join the few of us who specifically called out the above comment, or post a comment along the lines of “thanks for bringing this up, I welcome your contribution, and let’s work on this together.”

“I have failed to notice any outrageous problems” does not come off exactly like an invitation to share the problems, it’s more of a challenge, implicitly saying “prove it,” putting the onus on the person experiencing the hostility to demonstrate that they are not imagining it. A lot of people, rather than investing in this, will simply find another place to put their energy where they are not required to endure hostility or prove its existence in the face of skepticism.

It might be instructive to re-read that mailing list while specifically keeping in mind the potential experience of, say, a female participant.

Better yet, if you want to discover whether women (or people of color, or LGTBQ people, or people from low-income countries, or other folks less represented in global wealth and power) are experiencing hostility, a good way to do so is to ask them. As opposed to asking them to prove it. Which, by the way, brings us to the question of whether there are qualified women interested in participating who have been removed due to lack of space.

Probably not.

These qualified women aren’t being removed, they are self-deporting from this community because it’s not a fun place to hang out when people respond to your suggestions by questioning your legitimacy (i.e. implicitly saying “why should we listen to your concerns when you have so few edits on your profile”) and then questioning if the hostility even exists.

True @mikelmaron, certainly not implying that anyone in OSM has behaved as badly as rms has.

Trying to make three points:

1) lots of important free/open projects and communities starting to realize they need to get serious about inclusion; we are not alone.

2) even pretty bad behavior doesn’t negate all the good someone has done, particularly if they are willing to be part of the change. Future is more important than past, and I don’t wish to judge past behavior by current standards.

3) We don’t want to push the old out to welcome the new. We value the people who built OSM, even those who have not been comfortable with change.

Thanks for clarification; indeed wouldn’t want someone to think I was equating the behavior of anyone at OSM with the worst excesses of Richard Stallman.

Honestly some moderation seems like one of the only plausible avenues to a welcoming conversation here.

I think this is eminently possible. Other free open projects have navigated—or are in the process of navigating—the transition from technocratic to more inclusive communities. Linus Torvalds stepped down for a short while to soul-search and the Linux kernel dev mailing list seems to have improved a lot subsequently. Richard Stallman either jumped or was pushed; the Free Software Foundation is still reeling but the general mood seems more optimistic than I’ve seen for a while. Python has—I think in large part due to founder Guido van Rossum’s unwavering commitment to inclusiveness—excelled in both community diversity and technical excellence (neither at the expense of the other; quite the contrary). There are models to inspire and guide us in this.

Let me be clear: the OSM project—like others going through growing pains of inclusiveness—has nothing to be ashamed of. I am glad that Richard Stallman has stepped aside as leader of the FSF, but I respect what he did for software freedom nearly to the point of reverence. In the case of Torvalds, I am overjoyed that he appears sincerely willing to be part of the change despite the occasional relapse into overly colorful personal criticism (it ain’t perfect, and not everyone is satisfied, but I’d much rather that than a purge; sincerity, not perfection, is what we need here). And van Rossum has pulled off the hat trick of technical accomplishment and community health with grace and generosity. The OSM community has had a lot of toxic communication for years, but nevertheless has accomplished astounding things and created enormous good. That many of us are calling for urgent change does not imply lack of respect for what has been built and those who built it.

To all of you technical titans who built this: don’t see us as detracting from your work. Many of the new entrants to the community couldn’t have built what you did; I know I couldn’t have. Maybe we don’t see the idea of meritocracy the way you have (certainly we don’t see map edits or engineering prowess as the only relevant qualification to be full members of the community), but we know, and respect, what you have done. I promise you: we’re not going to wreck your project. We’re going to make it stronger. Yes, we need you to change some things. You can’t maintain a culture where women are told they should be ashamed of themselves for daring to apply for leadership positions without first meeting your criteria of contributions. You can’t shout people down and accuse others of selfish motivations for daring to demand more diversity. You can’t cite freedom of speech as a justification to make personal attacks on those you disagree with in the forums (note that you are free to make personal attacks, but the community is equally free to mute such speech in their house). But this won’t diminish what you’ve done! It’ll make it greater when more people get behind it.

Maybe we could think about some liaison with similar projects going through this kind of transition. I bet there are folks in the Python community who’d be willing to share insights.

The comment from @philippec directly implies that unless someone is a regular mapper they have no standing to call for change within the culture of OSM.

@philippec, I am sure that you believe in the greatness of OpenStreetMap. I hope you understand that we should not answer requests for a more inclusive community by pointing to what you consider someone’s personal failings as evidence that they have no right to make such requests.

A welcoming environment, far more than quotas, is what is needed to encourage a diverse community of contributors to OSM (which in turn makes the map better). Belittling the contributions of others works against this goal.