I really wished the OSM(F) would find a way to support work like yours in a more long term capacity.

While I would personally benefit from OSMF funding full-time StreetComplete development, I want to point out that in case of OSMF paying people to do work there are several more important projects.

Like making OSM projects GDPR compliant, see @SimonPoole/diary/399367

Or second paid sysadmin. Or more work on iD

Not sure is JOSM requiring any support?

StreetComplete is great, but I would not say that it is the most important project in OSM.

(though if someone or something would be willing to fund my work, I would be enthusiastic - right now it NLnet foundation via NGI Zero Discovery grant program)

Could I use this feature to re-survey an area

Yes, that is the whole point of it :)

task that the OSMF board decided to outsource to a paid contractor?

Has it happened? I was looking at things a bit and I apparently missed this.

From EWG notes that I remember decision that GDPR compliance is not a priority project

In the end, I didn’t see much convincing arguments how we could possibly implement the suggested changes without causing at least some breakage in the ecosystem.

Unfortunately, GDPR may result in significant breakage imposed on OSM by law.

“no breakage allowed” in this case may be requirement that must be waived

thanks to the crowd funding through liberapay, Github Sponsors and Patreon

links are missing so lets provide them if someone wants to fund work by Tobias:

https://liberapay.com/westnordost

https://www.patreon.com/westnordost

https://github.com/sponsors/westnordost

Congratulations! It looks great, though I worry a bit about performance.

I will be able to continue to maintain the app on the side, but development will somewhat slow down of course. It is truly difficult for me to disengage from this project after such a long time to the point where it will actually be a challenge for me

Good luck with your other projects! I hope that you will be able to balance StreetComplete and other projects with everything ending in good shape.

Dual carriageways: dual carriageways are sometimes a sign that a road gets a lot of traffic. However, they can exist due to various historical factors as well: Los Angeles has a number of large medians along otherwise low-importance roads due to the historic routings of since demolished streetcar routes. Medians can also be ornamental, such as along Chicago’s network of boulevards. Therefore, they are not a good indicator of road importance in my opinion.

+1

You can even have dual carriageways with playgrounds in the median. See osm.org/?mlat=50.05839&mlon=19.92848#map=17/50.05839/19.92848 osm.org/?mlat=50.05641&mlon=19.95296#map=17/50.05641/19.95296

and the examples given to illustrate importance are often more suited for rural roads

that is mostly because in cities physical characteristics are utterly detached from road importance in road network

You can have double carriageway which is secondary or primary or even tertiary

You can have road with one lane in each direction qualifying as secondary in the same city.

And if you compare between cities it gets even more detached - tertiary in one city may be easily larger than primary in another.

Some feel that (…) maintainers don’t care about the community instead trying to follow their own agendas

I am one of OSM Carto maintainers, almost inactive. Out of some reasons why I am inactive:

• I implemented most of what I wanted and could improve
• lack of time (though I guess I could drop some time-wasters of lower utility)
• people were unhappy, no matter which decision I have taken (see also the first point)
• people were unhappy also if no decision was taken
• people kept trying to use OSM Carto to force their pet tagging schemes on others, bypassing discussions (to be clear, this one is not about packstations)

“don’t care about the community instead trying to follow their own agendas” is not one of reasons for such inactivity

And to repeat another comment from @Cristoffs/diary/399189 :

I am definitely NOT running out of things to do. Even if I would live for 10 000 years I can be busy entire time without contributing to OSM Carto ever again.

And insults are not effective way of encouraging people to do something they want, at least in my case.

If I can do several projects then “people who me to work on it will/have/are insulting me” is going to be effective way to decide that it is not attractive.

And as result at this point I am not planning to become active in OSM Carto project.

Therefore I decided to remove myself as a maintainer, effective immediately

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/4561 has a PR with a documentation update.

(And if you disagreed about this claim or meant something else - then why you repeated it?)

Most concerning however was the comment from swedneck that one of openstreetmap-carto maintainers revealed information about him that he was not comfortable sharing (doxxing) and that nothing was done. Andy - openstreetmap-carto creator - was informed in another comment and ignored it. The issue was raised on OpenStreetMap discord where Amanda - board member - saw it but claimed that carto’s Code of Conduct does not list that doxxing is explicitly forbidden. This is very disappointing as it damages community’s trust in the project.

1) https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md#reporting-issues contain a clear explanation how issues should be reported, and pinging someone is not a solution

Pinging someone on github is NOT a reliable way to notify someone, as people with more involvement may receive many notifications

See for example https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/167 and https://nolanlawson.com/2017/03/05/what-it-feels-like-to-be-an-open-source-maintainer/

Many people have notifications completely disabled and ignored.

BTW, this was mentioned already in @Cristoffs/diary/399189#comment52526

2) To clarify what happened what that someone posted report of some problem with a screenshot and tried to keep location secret.

But (1) location was trivial to recover from what was posted (2) it located city, presumably where someone was living

I am mentioning this as doxing is rather used to describe release of info previously private which is a detailed personal info, typically things as exact address where someone lives

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing “act of publicly revealing previously private personal information about an individual or organization, usually via the Internet”

To be clear, what happened was not OK and I intervened once I was aware of it.

Since then another maintainer Mateusz corrected that some actions were taken but this generated a comment only after I made diary entry that elicited 46 comments making some noise within the community.

This diary entry had no effect whatsoever on my intervention. I become aware of the problem in a different way.

For disabled quests https://raw.githubusercontent.com/matkoniecz/StreetComplete_usage_changeset_analysis/master/disabled_quests.yaml and https://github.com/matkoniecz/StreetComplete_usage_changeset_analysis/blob/master/collect_info_about_quests_disabled_by_version.py that I just made may be useful.

Seriously, “lets insult people so they will work for free on what I want to have” is not effective, as far as I know.

And to clarify, baselessly insulting your employees is also intolerable, ineffective and unethical. In general, baseless insult are not a good idea, except rare cases like parody or comedy.

But trying to insult others as primary method of getting them to work for you is even weirder.

Sorry for all people who raise a valid complaints, and sorry for partially focusing on the worst insult, if I would be a greater human then I would be able to ignore bad parts and use better part to improve situation.

But frankly, my response will be like described in @Cristoffs/diary/399189#comment52524 and I will simply run away from this topic for next several months. At least.

Seriously, “lets insult people so they will work for free on what I want to have” is not effective, as far as I know.

(responding to comments which already generated notifications in my email and are worth clarifying)

When someone complained about getting doxxed the maintainers and OSMF ignored it.

note https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/4527#issuecomment-1130371816 with my response which I posted within minutes of being aware of the problem

note https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md#reporting-issues - “If you encounter a conduct-related issue, you should report it to the maintainers by sending them all an email.” (it has a link) is there because people are not monitoring every single activity on issue tracker

AFAIK no such email reached me

Imagico claims that he can ignore accepted proposals

Yes, passing a proposal does not obligate OSM Carto to render it.

OSM Carto (or any other data consumer) are free to not render carpet hangers or packstations even if this features have approved proposals such as osm.wiki/Proposed_features/carpet_hanger or other from osm.wiki/Category:Proposals_with_%22Approved%22_status

Maybe I should reread this thread and look for actionable things. But at this moment I associate it with accusation of “pure complacency and laziness” by someone who has no idea what needs to be done to achieve this, has not contributed to this to vector tiles, is not planning to but will happily insult other people for not working on what they want.

And frankly, I will use “unsubscribe” button below rather than looking at other comments.

No idea whether it is deliberate trolling and actions to make discussion utterly unproductive, but it is the result.

I am definitely NOT running out of things to do. Even if I would live for 10 000 years I can be busy entire time without contributing to OSM Carto ever again.

And baseless insults are not effective way of encouraging people to do something they want, at least in my case.

At this point there’s zero reason the style doesn’t render vector tiles except for pure complacency and laziness.

• it is not true

• such comment is a passive-aggressive lazy swipe

• this type of comments is a part of reason why I am minimally active on OSM Carto and other activity has replaced it ( @Cristoffs/diary/399189#comment52488 )

“Maah, if it’s so easy why don’t you do it then!”

Passive aggressive, snide, and dismissive responses like that are exactly why diary entries like this one and so much frustration among users about the current affairs exists.

If you insult people and post false claims that something is not done out of “pure complacency and laziness” is:

• countereffective way of getting people to do things for you

• insulting

• associates other people with the same goal with insulting snide false claims

“if it’s so easy why don’t you do it then!” is 100% OK response to this.

can’t be bothered to take honest, good faithed feedback seriously or without having a holier-than-thou elitist attitude about it.

Your claim was false, misleading, insulting and unhelpful that makes harder to process actual good faith feedback. It is neither productive nor effective nor OK to make such statement.

No idea how you reached such opinion, but please stop using this method and stop making such comments.

So what’s the point to having the repository open anyway?

Even with completely 100% abandoned project (which Carto is not) people can fork it. Some did it.

You can also view how it works and reuse parts of it.

Basically, anyone who has map style and is willing to obtain/donate rendering can have their own map style and osm.org website.

Additionally, given the existing styles on the home page, there seems to be no idea what layers and styles should be there.

See osm.wiki/Featured_tile_layers/Guidelines_for_new_tile_layers

We need to figure out how to lower the bar for new map styles to make it onto osm.org.

See osm.wiki/Featured_tile_layers/Guidelines_for_new_tile_layers

Not entirely sure how hard is to meet

Capable of meeting traffic demands. The proposed tile layer server/server farm must be capable of accepting the traffic volume from the OpenStreetMap website.

Reliable service. The proposed tile layer must be reliable in terms of uptime and availability.

and is it cost of 50 euro/month or 15 000 euro/month for non-default layer.

Note

And so on. I’m a professional sysadmin at Geofabrik. Setting up a custom tile server is not impossible.

in @Cristoffs/diary/399189#comment52489

To expand on my comment:

I am not claiming that OSM Carto development is run well or has no problems.

But “it is not a democracy” is not a problem in this case nor cause of the problems nor a symptom, at least in my opinion.

For start: I am not going to claim that OSM Carto development works well or that it currently works at all.

But in general:

Can you list some software or cartography or sysadmin or config presets projects, used in OSM ecosystem, running as a democracy?

Why in some areas of our community project do we have total autocracy instead of democracy?

That is actually fairly normal. There are various projects, run (or not run) by various people with various rules.

People are free to use that work if they wan. People running this projects are not entitled that people will continue to use them.

Projects on open license can be forked if someone wants and is convinced that they can run project better or in a different way.

Running projects like this on pure democracy is unlikely to work well and I am not aware of successful examples.

Democracy is a good methods to run government, not a projects such as software projects. Or cartography or sysadmin or config presets projects.

Note: I am one of OSM Carto maintainers, almost inactive. Out of some reasons why I am inactive:

• I implemented most of what I wanted and could improve
• lack of time (though I guess I could drop some time-wasters of lower utility)
• people kept trying to use OSM Carto to force their pet tagging schemes on others, bypassing discussions
• people were unhappy, no matter which decision I have taken (see also the first point)
• people were unhappy also if no decision was taken