Have you tried communicating with the people who are organising the HOT projects or with the mappers themselves?

Indeed, I had attempted to reply in a humorous manner that the meaning of this diary entry really wasn’t very clear. I’m sorry that didn’t work, and I’ve messaged bo_hot privately to apologise about that and suggest what might have helped better communication in the first place.

I understand most of the words; it’s just that when they’re joined together they don’t make sense (for example - what exactly is a “future community product owner”?)

I can guess some, since I’ve dealt with salespeople fluent in corporate BS for many years. I presume that:

“… will be sitting down to identify and triage the most pressing issues expressed by the Tasking Manager community”

means “… will fix some bugs” and

“If you have issues, features or enhancements that are either new, or outstanding, I highly encourage you to start getting them shaed and consolidated in the TM github repo”

means “Please log any bugs you know about”.

However, many of the people that I’d hope you’d want to read whatever you’ve written may not be, especially if they haven’t previously been exposed to this particular American flavour of corporate-speak.

As an aside, documents hosted on Google and Slack channels may well not be accessible to everyone. OSMF has a committent to open communications channels; shouldn’t Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team have something similar? Don’t you want what you write to be visible to everyone?

Andy

(for the avoidance of any doubt, writing in an entirely personal capacity)

Is an English translation of this post available?

:)

Thanks for reverting the deletions. If you don’t get a reply from the mapper please send an email to [email protected] so that the Data Working Group can try and grab their attention if they start mapping again.

Best Regards, Andy (from the DWG)

Is there an updated version for this?

There may be - I haven’t looked for a while. It’s available to fetch, modify, and create your own version of though, and the Docker entry-level help covers that in some detail.

If you’re stuck or don’t know where to start ask a help.osm.org question and someone will answer.

Geonick wrote:

I hope you aren’t a troll.

Alas, I think that time has shown that Tomas is little more than a troll, and seems to tke great delight in “conversations” such as these with contrbutions that really don’t add any value. As the saying goes, never wrestle with a pig - you both get dirty and the pig likes it.

@highflyer74 Thanks for commenting (see http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussion-comments?uid=14817502 ). If there’s no reply from Open Paint Maps then the DWG can inquire further to try and find out what the problem is.

Hello,

If you believe that there is a copyright violation problem please email OSM’s Data Working Group at [email protected] and provide as much detail as you can.

Separatelt to this, I notice at https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussion-comments?uid=14817502 that a number of other users have commented on your changesets and asked you questions. Please do answer them - click on the link in the list above, type in your comment and click “comment”.

Best Regards,

Andy (from the DWG)

Hello Feyman Diagram,

There’s not a good way currently of mapping “this place might get muddy after it rains”, the nearest we’ve got are tags that describe the surface (like “surface=dirt”, “tracktype=grade5” etc.).

We do have tags for intermittent water and flood-prone areas, which might work in a few places, but not really “this might get muddy”.

However, tagging things with actual surface is a huge step forward.

Best Regards,

Andy

Under what licence is the information made available?

信息是在什么许可下提供的？

Just with regards to “But someone else noticed places of difference (e.g. OSM, Bing)” - the DWG has had at least one ticket where Bing credits OSM (among other sources), where a path name in Bing was wrong but OSM was correct (it was within walking distance for me to check, and that name had been there for about 10 years). The path has since been deleted from Bing altogether.

Re “Eventually OSM will have the best PoI coverage”, we (the DWG) also regularly get complaints from Facebook/Instagram users saying that OSM’s POI data is wrong, when it’s actually Facebook’s that’s outdated, in the wrong place or wrong for some other reason. Bing seems to have similar issues - in the same area Bing has almost everything mislocated - the labelled supermarket, pub, hotel and coffee shop are all a couple of streets wrong in various directions.

– Andy

If you believe that there is a problem with the direction that OSMF is going in, perhaps you should consider standing in the board elections in 2022 suggesting a different direction?

I suspect that if you want people to vote for you you you might want to not describe some other people in the OSM community as “clueless people” though; I’d suggest trying to understand why they hold views that are different to yours and see things from their point of view, as well as articulating your own views.

Apparently Harman have released an updated AIR runtime - see https://www.reddit.com/r/as3/comments/p9vqd2/building_air_game_for_linux_working_experience/ (thanks to Richard for that link). I haven’t tried it yet, but it may be worth a try by anyone not convinced by having to use Wine on Linux.

Searching the area after the node was added finds this way .

The edit that reduced it from 668 nodes to 4 was this one a few days ago, by a user working for Kaart. If you believe that edit is in error, please comment on the changeset and explain the problem.

“foot=yes” means “it is legal to walk there”, regardless of whether it’s actually a good idea, or even life-threatening, or not. It’s a long time since I’ve been in that area so I’ve no idea whether that applies to Van Ness (e.g. here). There are separate sidewalks and crossings mapped - as previously suggested, perhaps those post-date the “sidewalk=right” and “foot=yes” tags on that way?

There’s a fairly active “local-california” channel at https://slack.openstreetmap.us/ where I’m sure that many of the people who have mapped these things are active, so it might be worth asking there; there’s also https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us (where some people who don’t like proprietary channels such as Slack are to be found)

To reply to Adamant1’s point above, there are insults coming form both sides here, and they don’t place any of the people making them in a good light (as I said 3 weeks ago). However, separately to “basic insults” like those there are:

1. Some people making statements that are simply untrue
2. Some other people making statements that (a) don’t really add anything to the argument and (b) are just flat-out racist bigotry.

I think it’s important to rebut (1) immediately and to challenge untruths directly. If lies aren’t challenged with at least a request for evidence, a previously uninformed observer might get the impression that the lie has some validity. We’re going through an era where politicians of many stripes have found that they can get away with lying simply by stating their “alternative facts” loudly enough and often enough. We shouldn’t let that happen in OSM by not challenging untruths, and I’ve tried to do that in both recent threads, from whichever side of the argument the claims came from.

(2) is more nuanced. There’s an argument that says that statements like this the should be immediately hidden as if they had never been made; another that should be left up so that other people can condemn them, and also as an indicator that the person making them isn’t a serious contributor to the discussion; and still another that the person making them should be asked to make an explicit apology. With a DWG hat on with statements in category (2) I’ve tended to do whichever of those three actions that I thought that the current situation needed. Here the statements that redsteakraw made above have already been roundly condemned, and an explicit apology from them might undo some of the damage already made to their reputation.

I don’t claim to have a monopoly of wisdom on this though - there have been vociferious arguments expressed elsewhere in favour of hiding comments like this immediately to avoid causing further hurt; on the other side of the argument some mappers recently objected to a DWG request that they remove some pretty appallling public statements that those mappers had made because “freedom of expression” allowed them to make them. Following an escalation they removed the statements.

With regard to moderation in OSM more generally, following on from this announcement it’s worth noting that further discussion is ongoing.

I’m sure your aware of the American government requesting paths in national parks be deleted from OSM. … 100% of the time the DWG automatically complies and no one cares.

(whataboutery snipped; Mateusz has addressed it above)

On the “paths in national parks in the USA question”, I absolutely don’t recognise either part of that assertion (that the DWG “does whatever the American Government asks” or “that no-one cares”). Our perspective has always been map what’s there - and get the tagging right. In the case of paths in US National Parks that would mean accurately determining the current status, ensure that access, surface, trail_visibility and other tags were set appropriately. Often that means asking someone “please don’t delete that path if it actually exists; set access to private” or “please add a lifecycle tag to that ‘highway’ tag if it used to exist and doesn’t any more”; sometimes it might be “does that thing that someone added from Strava really exist at all?”. Also (and I’m not going to “out” the culprits here) it means asking app developers to “please fix your mobile phone app so that it shows where people are not allowed to go”.

Separately to that, the OSM community in the USA has embarked on a project around trails; there’s ongoing discussion in OSM US fora about it too. I’d suggest that anyone interested in mapping trails in the USA get involved with that.
@Adamant1 : However, when engaging with a community of other people sometimes you need to listen to their point of view, and avoid grandstanding yours with unverifiable accusations. That will require a considerable change of tone from your comments above.

@渤海西岸 (re the “foreigners/westerners are self-righteous” comment)**

… well over at the other diary entry I wrote

 many/most people have a sense that “their community” or “their society” is somehow “better”, “different” or “exceptional”

I think that you’re just describing a sepecific example of what I was talking about generally :) Everybody thinks that they’re right and the other people in the argument are wrong; the problem is how to progress from there to something that allows a working relationship despite the differences.

**I’m relying on online translators and examples for nuance here, which is a risky approach at best.

I wonder if DWG is still working on the China-Bhutan disputed area case opened >20 days ago? It would be nice if all OSM users can know how things are going.

I’ve not been directly involved in this case (other than commenting on a couple of diary entries), but I think we are due to discuss it. I do know from previous cases such as Western Sahara that there’s a lot of investigation needed - wading through all sorts of different evidence, figuring out how up to date everything is and how reliable various textual sources are takes a lot of time.

The challenge is not just making a decision but explaining it and defending to to people who (as we have seen above) have very different visions of what OSM is and should be. I think the DWG broadly got that right with the discussions around Kosovo and Western Sahara, but could have done a better job when it came to Crimea (and that includes communications at all levels, including with the OSMF board of the time). With Crimea we’re still in something of an “agree to disagree” situation, as evidenced by arguments put forward here, here and here. That last one is particularly interesting as among others it includes the views of a number of past, present and future OSMF board members. One big caveat is that all of these links are all to English language OSM discussions, and in OSM that’s just one language among many.