It’s not so much that there are no standards, more that OSM is incremental. If you just want to add a point, that’s fine; if you’ve got the time to draw in the full dimensions of the slipway and car park, even better. But it’s better to have the basic data than none at all.

That’s absolutely standard practice across OSM - the same is true for shops and churches, for example - and if you have the inclination, replacing simple points with areas is always welcome.

I’ve done a few slipways as I’ve been scrolling around US rivers so it’s great to see more work happening on this!

actual laugh-out-loud at that, thank you :)

I think what would really make the OSM diaries better is lots of people posting 989x2094px images to make a marginal rhetorical point

The bogus entries come in overnight (UK time) and get deleted in the morning UK time, so if you can set the refresh rate on your RSS reader accordingly, you should miss out on the spam wave.

AIUI Frobisher isn’t open source. (As the name would suggest, it’s very similar to the renowed Frutiger, which also isn’t open source.) However, Open Sans is pretty close in appearance to Frutiger and would probably be my first choice for an alternative.

Please stop posting the same thing repeatedly.

You’re not going to recruit people to your cause by posting the same thing to different people’s diaries repeatedly :(

LACDH, I think people are having trouble understanding what you’re saying here. Could you give a concrete example? (e.g. “I added Frog Street in Toadville and now it’s been deleted”) What do you mean by “merged” and “cleaned up”?

This personal style of attack is really not going to help to resolve any issues. Please stop it.

It’s not meant to be dismissive and certainly not ad hominem; more a jokey reference to how bad OSMF board meetings used to be during my time on the board years ago - and seriously, they were. (And as a member of the board at the time clearly I take partial responsibility for that!) In retrospect I should probably have commented “oh, you sweet summer child” which would have been more obviously tongue-in-cheek, but one always ends up having to explain jokes on the internet…

https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=64526

The most surreal and memorable OSMF board meeting yet

Ah, these youngsters.

Nah, it’s great. Any halfway competent cartography will only choose a subset of features to show anyway. The joy of OSM is that you can record everything and then a million different maps can be made by choosing which features to depict.

This is terrific - really beginning to cut through the generalities of the debate to some really worthwhile specifics. I think my two takeaways from skimming the presentation and paper are:

• think about why people want to contribute (your point about “women motivated by intrinsic (humanitarian) reward”). Intrinsic reward has always been a massive motivator for OSM, but portraying ourselves as “worthwhile” has historically only broken through to certain demographics - such as the traditional open-source crowd which is mostly male
• the really stark age difference: this perhaps masks a little-remarked strength of OSM that, in contrast to most open projects, we’ve long been good at attracting older (male hobbyist) contributors as well as younger (male) programmer types.

Don’t use highway=path then. :)

For footpaths through parks where bikes are also permitted, use highway=footway, bicycle=yes. For specially created cycleways where pedestrians are also permitted, use highway=cycleway, foot=yes.

As the author of a cycle routing and mapping website (cycle.travel) I wish highway=path would just die in a fire.

Go to the layer icon on the right (the one with a stack of squares), and untick “Map Notes”.

\o/

Heather and Kate -

As board members, a really good first step you could take is shutting down the osmf-talk@ mailing list.

When people accuse the lists of being “toxic”, this is invariably the one they mean - indeed, for the novice OSM contributor who joins OSMF in good faith, it’s probably the only one they see.

The other lists have generally become fairly inoffensive, inane even, in the last few years, a very far cry from the combative days of the licence change. talk@ is a pussycat these days.

But osmf-talk@ is a disaster area, full of wild accusations, bikeshedding and off-the-planet wibbling. Force-subscribing new members to it might have made sense when OSMF had twelve members who all knew each other, but those days are long gone. Can you imagine any other membership organisation - say, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the National Trust, or examples from your own country - force-subscribing all new members to a policy discussion list? It’s a recipe for trouble and, unsurprisingly, trouble ensues.

My suggestion would be to close osmf-talk@; use either CiviCRM or a no-public-posting osmf-announce@ account to tell people about important foundation news like board elections; and set up a foundation-discuss@ list that people can optionally subscribe to, tell members about it, but don’t subscribe anyone by force. If you could reboot CWG so that members are kept informed of OSMF doings no matter their choice of communication channel, so much the better. But that’s a nice-to-have. Closing osmf-talk@ will solve 90% of the mailing list “tone” problem and you could do it tomorrow.

Richard

That is seriously cool. Well done.

Ah, right, I see!