@MxxCon

This will likely be my final comment on this matter directed to you. Firstly, the Slack link you’ve shared isn’t openly accessible without an account; it can’t be classified as a public resource. As for the GitHub issue, it doesn’t reference any ongoing AWS sponsorship. It seems there’s a disconnect in our conversation: my concerns center on OSM’s reliance on Amazon at all, not on refusing any sponsorship (or any other deals) from AWS.

@MxxCon

Thank you for taking the time to share your perspective with me.

Amazon’s sponsorship

Can you point me to where the details about the ongoing Amazon’s sponsorship were made public? I based my findings on the OWG official website. Most people would consider that a reliable primary source. Saying it was discussed “possibly elsewhere” seems a bit vague. All the information I gathered suggests that the sponsorship is still in the planning stages.

Amazon’s contributions

I acknowledge and respect Amazon’s efforts to support the OSM. Their commitment, in terms of resources, to this open-source project is evident. My intent wasn’t to overlook their contributions, but rather, to express my concerns about OSM’s philosophical direction and values.

GitHub & Microsoft

I’m aware of GitHub’s ties to Microsoft and the ethical considerations that surround this. However, as it stands today, there’s no alternative platform with such a vibrant and active community as GitHub. This is a sentiment that can be mirrored with platforms like YouTube & Google. While I use these services, I consciously limit my exposure by adopting alternative frontends, and ensuring that any information I share is intended for public viewing. It’s a balancing act of leveraging the benefits of mainstream platforms while upholding my privacy values. On that note, I’d like to highlight that all my private projects reside on the Gitea platform.

Spending vs Budgeting

At the time of my initial comments, I was working off the information available to me. As discussions evolved, new details came to light. It’s essential to remember the context of initial inquiries and the state of knowledge at that moment. I have since acknowledged the newly released information, and any assumption to the contrary would be inaccurate.

@Firefishy

First and foremost, thank you for your thoughtful response and willingness to open up a dialogue about OSMF’s infrastructure choices. I genuinely appreciate it.

I want to clarify something upfront: When I first brought up this concern, there was no public knowledge about OSMF’s free AWS credits. The information available at that time suggested that we had not only budgeted for, but were also spending, a significant amount on S3. Now, while I wholly understand OSMF’s monetary constraints, and I respect the pragmatic choices that are often required in such situations, there are core principles I stand by that deeply inform my perspective.

One of my core beliefs is the importance of creating and utilizing software that respects its users. I have a profound aversion to the practices of many big-tech companies. In my eyes, they commodify human beings and often operate in ways I find ethically objectionable. OSM has always been a sanctuary for me in this regard – an embodiment of what the tech world can be when driven by pure intent and community spirit. To discover the organization’s ties to Amazon deeply affected my perception of OSM’s independence.

I’m not suggesting that OSM should immediately invest in its own hardware, though it would be ideal. My primary concern revolves around our reliance on Amazon. I believe OSM should be cautious of anchoring itself too deeply to a company whose ethos might not resonate with ours. While AWS, with its current credits, might seem cost-effective now, there are numerous other solutions available that may better embody OSM’s guiding principles. -Did you hear about the free TVs? Don’t dance with the devil.

Regarding backup deduplication: While I acknowledge the complexities of setting it up properly, I don’t see it as prohibitively difficult. When we’re discussing potential savings of tens of thousands of Euros – especially considering how limited some OSM groups’ budgets are – it seems well worth the effort. Plus, having a deduplicated backup would significantly ease any future transitions, potentially even to self-owned hardware, given the reduced storage demands.

Your dedication and professionalism are truly commendable. I would be grateful for an opportunity to converse further on this topic. Whether it’s a call or another method, I believe dialogue can pave the way to mutual understanding. After all, our shared objective is the betterment of OSM.

-K

@RobJN, and that’s a sign of OSM changing. I have always assumed that OSM does not want to release half-baked features that harm the user experience. The alternative you mentioned is not the only approach. As you can see now, the issue has been resolved; it only required a little more time to be refined.

@Fizzie41, I am not leaving OSM. I will continue to assist in my local OSMP community and maintain all projects, as they remain valuable to many people. My decision is to discontinue involvement in global OSM issues, as I intend to shift my focus towards other matters.

I appreciate both Simon and spatialia taking the time to respond and share their thoughts.

1) I’m well aware of the entirety of the conversations that took place, which is why I would urge anyone commenting here to carefully reread the diary, as it already addresses many of your concerns.

2) While I acknowledge that the thread was locked to ‘cool things down’, it’s worth noting that this occurred at a time when activity had already subsided. It seemed a tad selective in allowing only one side to continue sharing their thoughts, which felt inconsistent and censorship-like.

3) Conversations become truly productive when both sides provide justified reasoning for their positions. I’ve been earnestly looking for such constructive exchanges.

Great work, Dónal! Always inspiring to see such dedication to OpenStreetMap. 👍

@SimonPoole What was the point? I did not get it, sorry.

@SimonPoole This is indeed quite a similar project. Thank you for sharing it with me; I was not aware of it. However, I still believe there are some key differences that differentiate my project. YOLO Crossings is open source, allowing anyone to build on top of it and use it. On the other hand, I could not find the source code for the Zebra Safari project, but this could be due to a language barrier.

Secondly, YOLO Crossings is optimized for fully autonomous mapping, with a very high precision threshold set to avoid adding false positive crossings. While it may not map all crossings, it significantly reduces the amount of work required by mappers by automatically marking easy and medium difficulty crossings.

^ Sorry for poor formatting, something has gone wrong.

What do you even mean by accuracy? I primarily mean the precision metric, but I use simpler terminology better understood by everyday people. Scoring code starts here https://github.com/Zaczero/osm-budynki-orto-import/blob/e899e4c2e14bced34fde4be02c4bb9b674381b25/model.py#L143

What is your IoU threshold? None, the dataset is labeled in a way that answers the question: “is this building acceptable for an import as-is?”. The idea is to automatically import buildings, which from a human perspective, don’t require much modification.

With this approach, the model is able to import about 70% of valid buildings as-is. The remaining 30% requires some modification from the model’s perspective and are not imported automatically. For clarity, 100% would be all buildings which are visible at an orthophoto imagery.

@simonschaufi Yes, I am :-) But the primary goal here is slightly different. I want to create solutions that require little to no human intervention, this way mappers can be significantly more productive, instead of doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again. RapiD still requires complete human attention to make any changes, which is a more universal solution and is very low risk.

@iWowik I think you meant to ask for a confidence interval (based on the +-30% number you added). Percentage is unit-less and accuracy in this case is irrelevant as precision is more informative about the false positive error rate.

This number is a precision achieved on the holdout dataset: containing 600 entries: 500 buildings (True) and 100 non-buildings (False). Using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_proportion_confidence_interval method, the 90% confidence interval is 99.3%-100%. But it’s been some time since I last did it so excuse me any mistakes. This is really not my field of expertise atm. I might be talking completely out of the blue here.

The holdout validation code starts from here: https://github.com/Zaczero/osm-budynki-orto-import/blob/43cce7c88c898939fafb8f24087882ee4f88c0e9/model.py#L115.

@giggie, I’ve just added support for that :-)

@giggie, I am already aware of this issue, and I have plans to address it in the future. Thank you for feedback :-) !

@ToniE, simply pass a “relation” query parameter: https://relatify.monicz.dev/?relation=123. In the future I may also add a &load=1 support (to automatically load the given relation), so if you want to stay future-proof you may also consider adding this parameter: https://relatify.monicz.dev/?relation=123&load=1.

@MatthiasMatthias - Yup! I definitely want to add this.

Hey everyone! The gateway issue should be fixed now. There is a bug within the HTTP library I use (https://github.com/encode/httpcore/issues/642) that causes a connection pool leakage. After some time, it prevents new connections from being made, resulting in a 504 timeout. I have disabled the connection pool functionality, which will most likely resolve this issue.

Hey! Right now you can only edit existing relations, meaning that if you want to add a new route, you will first need to create it in another editor (doesn’t need to be complete). Then you can simply fix it in Relatify. New relation creation is on the roadmap.

@Woazboat, I run my own Overpass instance that updates every 30 seconds from the minute replication server (https://planet.openstreetmap.org/replication/minute/). There should not be more than a one-minute delay on my end. Additionally, there is a fallback to the official Overpass instance (overpass-api.de) in case the returned data is not complete or if my server fails to respond. Related code at https://github.com/Zaczero/osm-revert/blob/72f9c659d1d16591ec5566daa90c08d4d96c6340/app/overpass.py#L93-L96