@CjMalone while some parameters of the micro grant scheme may have changed with the new board, I think it is still safe to say that it was never intended to be vehicle, or as a replacement, for regular employment by the OSMF. If there is ever is a situation where we are looking for that kind of solution, where and for how much people are employed is going to be a difficult decision. For example I don’t see why we should be paying an order of magnitude more for development work in the US or western Europe, when we can have the same from -pick-your-favourite-low-wage-country-.

Matter of fact the bulk of the applications show that the micro grant scheme is likely the wrong scheme, at the wrong time, aimed at the wrong audience.

And it is not that I think that none of the proposals are worthy of being funded by the OSMF. For example the request by the Weekly OSM team makes total sense, but it is a reoccurring cost that should simply be part of the CWG budget (harhar). I could even live with one or two of the “save the world” proposals being funded (which -use- OSM, but are clearly out of scope for micro grants, which should -support- the OSM project), again out of the CWG budget as a marketing exercise, with the expectation that they will be miked for marketing to the max.

@ChMalone the short version of that is “”

@SunColbat why surprise? The complexity is determined by the subject matter, and further confounded by that we allow many things that are otherwise restricted by law. If anything the surprise should be that we get away with -less- text than comparable non-open offerings, i.e. Instagram.

Just to document how I got to the 16’000 for Instagram, the number includes

• the Instagram ToU
• the Instagram privacy policy
• the Instagram community policy
• the Instagram platform policy
• the Instagram music policy
• the Facebook terms of use (required by the Instagram privacy policy)

I didn’t include the cookie policy and 9 further Facebook policies that are more geared towards developers and special use.

@gileri nope, nominative use is permitted by law, just as the use of the Instagram trademark in the blog post. The trademark policy simply licenses further use that by law would not be allowed to the community (something Instagram does not need to do).

@gileri so you agree that for example including the trademark policy in the count is very disingenuous?

PS: the serious comment is if you restrict the numbers to “what do I actually have to agree to” (for example the trademark policy is only of relevance if you want to licence use of the trademarks, and not something that you have to agree to, because that is already the law). They are 7’165 for OSM and something around 16’000 for Instagram (using the same criteria), that is not removing some duplication there is in the OSM texts, and not digging all to deep on the Instagram side,

Clearly you are biasing the numbers in OSMs favour.

You aren’t including the GDPR with a couple of 100’000 words, and I noticed that you skipped a few other things that are linked to in various documents. Not to mention other implicit underlying legislation that you will need to read too, so really we are talking about multiple millions of words that you will need to consume before you can start using OSM.

Well historically the WMF has offered bulk APIs for some “customers” :-), I would have to dig up the financials on that to see if they directly sold them or not. But my point would be more if you have a monopoly for something very in demand you don’t need to “sell” it in conventional sense, you can just threaten you will stop providing it if people don’t donate.

Simon

Hi Allan

Wrt the similarities and differences between Wikipedia and OSM, I do think it is important to note that it is not just a question of differences in distribution of the product. WP has also enjoyed a near monopoly for a large part of its history, a luxurious situation that OSM has never had.

There are essentially no replacement products and vendors for what WP does (because they were killed off nearly immediately), and lots, if not all, of WPs marketing (for donations) revolves around that they are not replaceable. So I would take a bit of an issue with the statement that they don’t monetize their content.

Very different with OSM, there are plenty of players at all kind of levels, from local to global, that are offering viable replacements and alternatives.

“out-sourcing” end-customer services and products, has out-sourced the financial investment and risk for the OpenStreetMap project too and allows us to operate without directly competing with all the other players.

Simon

The OSMFToU specifically disallow that, if you have concrete evidence of this happening, please contact us at [email protected]

None of what you write above is actually born out in the text of the diversity statement, which makes the statement on behalf of everybody in the OSM community. Neither is it scoped to just apply to activities in OSM nor does it say anything along the lines of “your contributions are welcome even if you don’t share these values”. In any case you essentially make Christophs and Frederiks point that the relevant behavioral norm is actually that you are willing to contribute to our data regardless of your and any other contributors convictions, skin colour, gender and so on.

@mikelmaron as Frederik has already pointed out the issue is that the statement extends not just to the OSMF but to the wider OSM community. It adds further values you need to adhere to outside of wanting to contribute to a free and open map of the world.

To make things simple, consider countries (not even cultures) for which discrimination is a matter of law, say for example Saudi Arabia (same example the last time this was discussed), are government officials, “the government” in general, allowed to contribute to OSM in the new regime?

@Magick93 there is no local imagery available for the Valais. What is more problematic that essentially all of the global mosaics have issues with very mountainous regions so that even non-cloudy bits tend to not work so well.

Clifford I assume the ~10% difference between total new mappers and messages are mainly SEO accounts? That would line up with what I saw checking new signups over all of the states for a couple of weeks.

I wouldn’t be too concerned about some slowdown in growth rates, we’ve had that on and off the whole time. We actually had the same effect globally in 2019, a small part of it was the tail of the large maps.me influx and to be expected, a further part would seem to be HOT et al loosing some of their attraction.

I sent 1’280 mails vs 1’383 in 2018 so again mirroring the slowdown (no actual SEO spammers in that though), very comparable base populations btw.

Can you explain how a user of the plugin is shown the relevant Facebook terms of use including the privacy relevant bits? I’ve installed the plugin and even with a lot of hunting I wasn’t able to find any relevant information (naturally the terms should be shown on install in any case, but cutting you some slack there).

And, would be totally inappropriate to inquire, who actually financed Kaart the development of the plugin?

Early OSM had nearly no buildings and, given that other things had been mapped, works perfectly well without them (there are actually certain operators of OSM based services that throw them away as their first step of processing). Mapping a hospital as a node with corresponding tags looses no important functionality, just some eye candy.

Why we got to the point in which lots of new contributors and even in the mean time seasoned ones believe that buildings are essentially the first thing you should spend time after adding motorways, is a long and dreary story. And yes I mapped lots and lots of buildings, but fully aware that this is mainly just for looks.

Could please everybody stop feeding the troll?

Maxar has neither indicated any specific region or technical issues as the reason for their issues, and further it is clear that proxying/caching would not solve the issues of bad actors overusing services (see the problems we have with the cache network for the standard style tiles).

And the other part of the discussion https://github.com/MarcusWolschon/osmeditor4android/issues/775

@Stereo we have over a decade with “per editor app” keys (bing) and that has worked reasonably well (at least for those that have bothered to get their own keys).

Longer term probably per user keys are the way to go. Writing a small web app that gets an api key and stores it in the user prefs shouldn’t be a big issue allowing all editors to access it (I’m not holding my breath on that actually happening though).