@apm-wa

You seem to fear among other things that a policy of “non-discrimination” would nullify the organized editing rules and open the door for paid mappers to wreak havoc on the map.

No, the effect i see - and i already explained that in depth - is a political message to the OSM community. There is going to be no practical effect on organized editing because (a) the effect of OSMF regulation on this is rather limited at the moment in the first place and so would any further stripping of said regulation and (b) the OSMF has no effective power over the OSM community without the support from the community so if hobby mappers want to discriminate paid mappers the board cannot stop them. And the DWG would most likely not shoot itself in the foot by trying to punish local hobby mappers for exercizing their local ownership of the map.

And what the political message currently reads as i already explained.

Similarly, if a mapper were to violate the “How We Map” guidelines, that would of course continue to be grounds for discriminatory sanction from the DWG. However, if a community member is from India and not Germany, from Africa and not North America, is female, or transgender, or has darker skin than you and I do, or dyes her hair blue, or professes a particular religion (or no religion), these alone would not be grounds for discrimination and exclusion from the community, and would not be grounds for personal attacks in communications.

If that is what you want to be the meaning then you need to change the statement because as i explained the current text says something very different. If you disagree with my analysis please show me where i am wrong based on the text.

Now, all that said, we do clash, and seriously, on one important point. Your position seems to be that OSM exists for its own sake, and that such a status is sacred. My point is that OSM now has such an impact on the lives of others, it can no longer afford the luxury of selfishness and view the map solely as a means to self indulgence.

I definitely disagree on the characterization of mapping as a social activity without an external purpose as selfishness and self indulgence.

As one of the old-timers told me, “OSM is no longer a Saturday morning mapping club.” He meant by that, that OSM must adapt to new circumstances. You oppose that, and that is what our debate is really about. I believe that we can preserve the community, which is the source of OSM’s strength, and continue to rely on local knowledge, which is why our map is so good, and have lots of fun mapping, while also not shirking that greater responsibility. We may even be able to do it on a continued small budget that avoids financial dependence on outsiders, if that is what the community as a whole wants. But I do not see a way of avoiding the greater responsibility, and do not intend to try.

This is all way too vague and unspecific for me to tell you if i agree or disagree.

My impression is - and this is very close to what i stated before - that you think that the mapping related core values that currently form the fundamental band and constitution holding the project together are not suitable to continue fulfilling this function for the way you think OSM needs to develop in the future. And that you therefore want to substitute them as the base values of the project with an universal non-discrimination principle.

If that is the case i can say that

a) i disagree that the current mapping related core values are unsuitable to carry the project into the future (but that obviously depends on the kind of future you envision) b) i would predict that universal non-discrimination as a new base value is not only incompatible to the current mapping related core values (as explained) but also that it is unsuitable to facilitate any form of self managed cross cultural cooperation. This is of course also not what it is meant to do because it is otherwise deployed together with the whole repertoire of anglo-american organizational culture like professional community managers and behaviour regulation. That would mean more or less the scenario i outlined in @derFred/diary/391636#comment46193.

Under this assumption i would be interested in where exactly you think your envisioned future is incompatible with the current core values.

If that is not the case i frankly don’t see your motivation to push this statement. But i’d guess this lack of understanding is primarily due to a massive difference in understanding of the meaning and effect of said statement - which i think could be cleared up by discussing the specifics of the text and my analysis.

But independent of that i wonder if you realize if we - who have a pretty similar cultural background - have such a massive difference in understanding of the meaning and effect of the diversity statement - what this will mean regarding how it can function as a statement of values for the whole OSM community?

One other thing - the traditional core values i have talked about here were not created and imposed top down when the project was founded. They developed when the project gained international traction out of the practical needs of cross cultural cooperation across language and cilture barriers. Interestingly the time when this mostly took place and where then these values were also at some point written down in the form we now know as “How We Map” was around the same time as when the old guard on the OSMF board stepped down (except for one obviously) and we got a significant push in structural reforms of the OSMF, in particular in terms of transparency and cultural diversity. The board now needs to decide if it wants to continue in that direction after this was essentially stalled for the last few years or if it wants to give in to the strong revisionistic interests which we without doubt have strongly pushing on the board to roll back things and who want the OSMF to retreat into the simplicity of a simple and homogeneous value system where you can easily make the distinction between good and bad, between allies and enemies.

“How We Map” describes just that, how we map, and that includes me, a mapper now for 5 years. However, it does not describe why we map, and further, does not touch at all on uses of the map, or the ecosystem we cannot ignore that has grown up around OSM and now has certain expectations from us mappers.

As i tried to explain How We Map is primarily (but not exclusively) about mapping because OSM as a social project is based on the cooperation in mapping. I don’t think there are any values universally shared among all the OSM community except those. We have no agreement on why we map, every contributor is allowed to map or otherwise contribute for any reason. We have no agreement on the specifics of communication style across different languages beyond the basic ‘assume good faith’. But i would be open to discuss any such supposedly universal value identified by others.

And i don’t mind at all if the OSMF board wants to document the values of software development in the OSM community or in other aspects (and thinking about the iD presets controversy it might actually be good to do so). But it should always be clear that any such values are subordinate to the mapping related core values of the project.

I do not see anything in “How We Map” that is in real conflict with the diversity statement.

This is explained in detail in the diary entry. If there is anything about that which is difficult to understand (in particular in the often not very precise English translation) please say so.

Every time I look for something on the wiki, I am impressed with the sheer scope of what OSM encompasses.

Which is great - but all of this is and should be subordinate to the idea of cooperative mapping based on local knowledge. It does not help anyone in the long term if the OSMF encourages the creation of encapsulated subprojects with their own incompatible value systems which reject our mapping related core values. We already have tendencies in such direction in various fields including the wiki. So at the risk of sounding like a broken record: The basic values of the project deriving from mapping need to be strengthened and not be replaced or downgraded by an universal and absolutistic non-discrimination value.

I must also protest against your statement, “Ich seh das Ganze allerdings in so fern durchaus positiv, dass es potentiell äußerst lehrreich für Alle ist - für die OSM-Community, indem es noch mal allen ganz klar macht, dass man sich keineswegs blind darauf verlassen kann, dass die OSMF im Interesse der OSM-Community handelt.” An accusation that the OSMF Board does not act in the interests of the OSM community is simply false.

I will stick to German here for precision: Ich bleibe bei meiner Aussage, dass dieses “diversity statement” in der jetzigen Form nicht den Konsens über gemeinsame Werte in der globalen OSM-Community wiedergibt und dass die Darstellung als solcher deshalb nicht im Interesse der OSM-Community ist. Ich hab aber auch klar gesagt, dass ich nicht den Eindruck habe, dass hier absichtlich entgegen der Interessen der Community gehandelt wurde, sondern dass der Vorstand nicht erkannt hat, dass es sich nicht einfach um eine harmlose Selbstverständlichkeit, sondern um eine hoch kontroverse Aussage mit weitreichenden Implikationen handelt. Warum das so ist habe ich versucht hier zu erläutern.

Does the Board seek “data perfection”? Of course not.

Please note that as i have explained the citation of that wording is not meant to refer to the exact English language formulation but to the underlying value which this wording means to illustrate. The value in question is not ‘seeking data perfection is bad’, it is that the goal of engaging in egalitarian cross cultural cooperation in mapping as a social activity has precedence over the results of said activity - the data. To put it in a very simple form: If the OSMF board had the choice between saving the mapper community and their willingness and ability to continue mapping and saving the data the choice has to be towards saving the community.

That does not mean improving the data should not be a goal. But in any value statement that mentions it, it should come after and secondary to the goal of egalitarian cooperative mapping based on local knowledge.

With great power comes great responsibility

Like so many American pop culture quotes this is not actually an American invention of course…

We need to accept the responsibility that comes with that power, and to nurture and grow the source of that power, the OSM mappers..

That is a very strange application of that principle i would disagree with. The growth of the OSM community is desirable because OpenStreetMap is a valuable endeavour that brings joy, education and cultural exchange to many thousands of people world wide and allowing more people to participate in that is both beneficial for those who newly join as well as for those who already participate.

In other words: The mapper community should grow for its own sake, not because it provides a source of power for someone.

@Peda - danke. Von Hoffnung hab ich allerdings gar nicht gesprochen, nur von einer kleinen Chance, die sich der Vorstand noch gelassen hat. Natürlich gibt es im Prinzip auch einfach die Möglichkeit, die Entscheidung vom Donnerstag direkt zu revidieren. Aber wie du ja weisst gibt es so gut wie keine Präzedenzfälle, dass der OSMF-Vorstand jemals einen Fehler öffentlich eingestanden hat.

Ich seh das Ganze allerdings in so fern durchaus positiv, dass es potentiell äußerst lehrreich für Alle ist - für die OSM-Community, indem es noch mal allen ganz klar macht, dass man sich keineswegs blind darauf verlassen kann, dass die OSMF im Interesse der OSM-Community handelt. Und für den OSMF-Vorstand, ihm noch mal ganz deutlich zu demonstrieren, wie sehr man sich bei der Policy-Entwicklung verrennen kann, wenn man sich von kritischer Rückmeldung von außen aus der Vielfalt der OSM-Community abschottet und Gruppendenken sowie die schwerpunktmäßige Kommunikation in Filterblasen-Verstärkern wie Twitter die selbstkritische Betrachtung verhindert.

Meine Hoffnung ist eigentlich eher, dass hierdurch die weltweite OSM-Community einen robusteren und selbstbewussteren Umgang mit der OSMF lernt - und insbesondere die großen nicht englischsprachigen Communities mal nicht nur ihr eigenes Süppchen kochen wie bisher, sondern auch mal offensiv die englischsprachige und anglo-amerikanisch kulturelle Dominanz in Frage stellen. Ich hab zwar oben betont, dass der Verriss ein deutschsprachiges Genre ist, aber ich bind mir sicher, dass man diesen Text auch gepflegt auf Französisch oder Russisch zerpflücken könnte.

@apm-wa - I am going to limit my comments here on matters directly related to the diversity statement. Further practical implications like the de facto English language dominance in the OSMF or the practical difficulties of inter-cultural communication are important but given the limitations of the diary comments for structured discussion i don’t want to spread this out here too much.

When i cited How We Map above i did so not to source authoritive policy on OSMs values, i did so to illustrate the actual values thousands of mappers work by every day. How We Map it is the only relatively comprehensive documentation of this kind we have and i regard it therefore as one of the most important texts of the OSM community. It is by no means perfect - no text written in a single language can even hope to ever accomplish that. But it provides a very helpful starting point to any volunteer newly engaging in the project to help them understand what it is about in essence.

None of the other value documents that exist (including the Core Values you cited) is in any way comparable to that. Most of them are political documents which rather than documenting the de facto values of the community, document a view of what the values are supposed to be in the eyes of those having crafted these documents. In case of the Core Values this is a fairly accurate documentation of what were back then considered the main goals of the OSMF in the eyes of those contributing to the discussion but it cannot be in any way considered to be a comprehensive view of the values of the OSM community.

Interestingly How We Map is frequently criticized or dismissed as being mapping centered. That is because OpenStreetMap is mapping centered. The essence of OSM is the cooperation of people across language and culture barriers based on the shared goal of documenting verifiable local knowledge of the geography of the world in a common database. This is what holds OSM together, what enables people who might not understand a word from each other to none the less work together on a common goal. And the data collection aspect of OSM is - to put it bluntly - a means to the end of facilitating this cross cultural cooperation. And day after day mappers in OSM demonstrate again and again that this unique approach of OSM to cross cultural cooperation is working and that no top down imposed values are required for that.

The “community cohesion over data perfection” i cited is simply the verbalization of this basic premise that OSM is primarily a social project and the goal of cooperative collection of local knowledge stands above any goals to assemble a collection of useful data or any culture specific values that exist in different parts of the community. It is not the English language formulation that matters it is the underlying idea and value.

Now what the board primarily communicates with the new diversity statement is that they (a) do not believe in the basic premise that made OSM the world wide cross cultural project it is today and that facilitates cooperation on a daily basis to continue functioning as the fundamental band and constitution holding the project together any more and (b) that they want to replace it with an absolutist non-discrimination principle with all the internal and external contradictions and inconsistencies i outlined. Now i get (and i already acknowledged) that this is not what most of you intended to communicate but you can be certain that this is the communication that is received by many in the OSM community.

And as i have also pointed out the much better and much more supportive thing the OSMF board could have done is strengthening the basic premise and value of cross cultural cooperation of the OSM community and more actively communicating it to the public - something that has been distinctly lacking during the past years. This includes making clear that those who reject these basic principles are not welcome in the OSM community - which is more or less the opposite to what your statement says now.

Now regarding some of your questions:

Or do you realistically expect Board members quickly to master over 100 different languages in order to communicate with the community?

I would like to see you realize, accept and internalize that you cannot communicate with the community in a balanced fashion in English language only - neither directly with the mappers nor indirectly through local chapters. And this is not only the language barrier by the way, this is also the culture barrier.

What you can do and what i try to do as often as possible is using the means available to you to better understand the parts of the community you cannot directly communicate with - by watching videos of conference talks in languages you don’t understand to get an idea of the way people work and communicate. By machine translating mailing list and forum posts. And of course by talking and listening to people who share a language with you and specifically inquire about their experiences in languages and cultures alien to you. But above all by looking at the map and the data and how people in different parts of the world contribute to the common project - how people map tells you so much about them without the need to speak a common language. Long story short: English is not Alternativlos, it for those who speak it however represents a dangerous lure of wishful thinking that it can solve the cross cultural communication problems.

Does not socio-economic status also include wealth as a factor?

Normally not. And as said - if it did the value of universal non-discrimination would massively collide with the capitalist social order.

Why would wealth need to be listed separately?

Well - i don’t think this kind of list or the top down imposition of such an absolutist value system on the community is a good idea at all. But if you do that none the less specifically excluding discrimination for wealth represents an inconsistency while including it represents a conflict with all capitalist societies. Ultimately i think the idea of non-discrimination as an universal value is not compatible with any ethical framework i can think of.

Why would we want to discriminate against a mapper somebody else is paying versus a volunteer mapper?

Any meaningful regulation of organized activities in OSM would require treating paid and hobby mappers differently and therefore represents a discrimination. The need for regulation of organized activities in OSM i have explained in the first English language draft for such a policy written in 2017.

Impressive. This is the first map rendering framework i know of that offers native support for ground unit rendering - even if only in Mercator apparently.

We tried doing something like this in OSM-Carto some time ago but decided against it because of the complexity due to the lack of native support for this in Mapnik/CartoCSS.

You could afterwards stop by in Freiburg on your way back and visit FOSSGIS:

https://www.fossgis-konferenz.de/2020/

This is exceeding the scope of a diary discussion a bit probably but i will try to address a few things quickly none the less:

The OSM Foundation is by law the governing body […]

The OSMF has been by its own self understanding (see here and here) always in a support role only for the OpenStreetMap project. I am not quite sure if you want to indicate you would like to change that (which would likely not only get opposition from large parts of the OSM community but also from the local chapters) or if you want the OSMF to be more serious, better organized and more efficient in its support role (which most including me would very much support).

I do wonder what kind of bias you perceive in the Foundation membership (“OSMF membership…is highly biased in composition”). What is the bias, and how did you measure it?

Regarding regional bias see here. Regarding social bias - the requirement to pay for membership is a significant factor of course. Regarding language bias - the dominance of English in the OSMF is fairly clear, there is no culture of non-English communication within the OSMF, even the membership signup form is available only in English. AFAIK only the CWG and the DWG have a standing tradition in non-English communication with the broader OSM community.

I must also point out that if the Foundation and Board do not act on issues the community believes are important, because a vocal minority insists that Foundation or Board action is “not the OSM way”, well, that is tyranny by a minority of the Foundation’s members, and that is truly “not the OSM way.”

I am with you here - but my view would always be that the opinion of the majority should not supersede reason. Any majority decision should IMO be preceded by a battle of arguments which of the options of the decision is the best for the project.

WRT your comment, “the board members are themselves often invested in specific interests,” Board members are required to recuse themselves from voting on issues in which they face a conflict of interest.

In this context i used the term ‘interests’ more in the sense of characterizing what unites the members of the different factions: common interests. In the past most board members have positioned themselves w.r.t. these factions and the interests they represent - either by statements made or by the way they argued and voted in board meetings. It is admirable and certainly helpful if you want to try raising above that and regard all the different views with equal sympathy and consideration. But ultimately i think the main source of synthesis in policy decision making should be the argumentative discourse about what approach is the best. That is what i had in mind when i wrote about the more parliament like nature of the board right after the last elections.

I would advise against taking the results of this brainstorming directly as a basis for any decision making. To me so far the results of this mostly indicate what the strongest interests are that are articulated in the OSM community and in what direction these interests would like the project to move. Now if you’d condense these interests and use them as a basis for decision making or as a todo list without first having a discussion on the viability and sustainability of these ideas and if the interests they are based on are even compatible with the basic goals and values of the project you would be very likely to clash with the mission of the OSMF.

I agree that there are in a way factions within the OSM community (in particular within the voiceful part of it and within the OSMF membership) - or like i called it above distinct and partly incompatible interests. There are multiple possible approaches to dealing with that:

• making majority decisions. This means favoring the interests with the strongest support. This comes with the problem that the interests with the most support is not necessarily the most legitimate interest and that the OSMF membership (which you indicated to be who would make such decision) is highly biased in composition.
• negotiating a compromise. This comes with the same problem of the negotiation strengths being based on the representation in the negotiation. And it also bears the risk of resulting in bad compromises being counterproductive for the project (we had quite a lot of those in the more recent history of the OSMF).
• evaluating the legitimacy and merit of the interests based on the goals and values of the project and deciding from that. This is the approach i would prefer but it would require at least a broad agreement on the basic goals and values of the project that is specific enough to allow this kind of assessment. And in the past the OSMF board has not been very interested in positioning itself w.r.t. the project’s basic goals and values (my attempt in bringing this up in the board elections a year ago can be found here) - largely because there is no consensus on that within the board because the board members are themselves often invested in specific interests.

To close on a clearly positive note - a lot of interesting ideas in the brainstorming. Even though it starts getting a bit difficult to maintain an overview i think there are perspectives widening the view of the project and how different people see it for everyone.

I don’t think this is a problem of specific communication channels. A proposal in a very similar direction was not successful either:

osm.wiki/Proposed_features/Default_Language_Format

It is simply that this would be a big change that would impact a lot of people and tools both on the mapping and on the data use side and that would mean a higher level of abstraction in how names are recorded. Skepticism regarding this is fairly natural and understandable - which however does not mean it is a bad idea in the long term.

I can feel your pain and your suggestions are sound as far as i can see.

A long time ago i proposed a more radical solution to the whole problem:

http://blog.imagico.de/you-name-it-on-representing-geographic-diversity-in-names/

which unfortunately did not and probably still does not have sufficient support. So you will for the foreseeable future have to try parsing the name tag to try determining which name or what kind of name combination is put there by the mapper to be able to render a consistently labeled map.

Regarding cultural dominance - i don’t want this to sidestep the main topic here, i already explained in my reply to Andy what my main point was meant to be. However i see your arguments more underlining the existing dominance of American business culture in the world wide business world and the dominance of the business world and its values in our societies outside the domain of business itself. I would like to see OSM be an exception from this - hence my concerns.

Regarding the need for a goal being specified - the German wikipedia agrees with me on that, so this might be a cultural thing. In general i think a SWOT analysis tends to say at least as much about the person making the analysis as it objectively says about the project analyzed. And this effect is probably even stronger when no clear goal is specified in advance. In other words: While the manager will probably regard this as an instrument to rationally analyze a project or business a social scientist would probably more look at it as an experiment analyzing both the manager and the project.

@SomeoneElse - i can’t know for sure, Wikipedia says the origins are obscure. It seems certain that the origin under this name is within the English language domain and given the dominance of the US within the ‘free market economy’ part of the world both economically and in terms of economic sciences at the time this came up an American origin seems likely.

Anyway the underlying concept of looking at inside and outside positive and negative factors regarding a project and its goals is a natural way to look at this that can be understood across cultures i think. As long as you don’t give too much weight to the specific terms used (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) which have their culture specific meaning and implication this is all fine. Especially when trying to translate the concept to different languages going with a generic description (internal/external and positive/negative) instead of trying to perform a 1:1 translation of the terms used is probably a good idea.

First the idea of making a risk analysis of the OpenStreetMap project is a good idea, this should be something everyone involved with any kind of decision making in OSM should contemplate and it is good to do such contemplation also collectively.

There are a few things i like to point out regarding the specific form chosen:

• good idea to do it on the wiki - gives people the freedom to articulate their views in the form they find suitable. Anyone who wants to contribute without revealing their identity can create a pseudonymous wiki account and use it for this purpose.
• to get a broad spectrum of views on this it would be important to (a) also ask and invite answers in other languages and (b) not tie this too strictly to the concept of SWOT which is strongly linked to American business culture and kind of implies that OSM is a business project based on American cultural values.
• it would be of advantage if the different opinions on this would be linked across the four categories, for example by having the points signed by those who make them. The reason is what some consider a strength others might consider a weakness. For understanding the different views on this it is important not to look at the points for each category in isolation but being able to connect how they form distinct overall views of the project.
• it is my understanding that the idea behind SWOT is to look at things w.r.t. a specific goal - in the business world often essentially to maximize profits. You have not specified or referenced any specific goals to consider so the answers you get might significantly diverge because people consider the matter w.r.t. very different goals without actually specifying the goals in question.

So overall: Good as a starting point to get people thinking and exchange some spontaneous ideas but more in depth and structured analysis of the situation is required for actually assessing the risks of the project. There is a strong possibility that some people might attempt to just calculate an arithmetic mean or take a vote (as it has been suggested on osmf-talk already) instead of looking at the ideas and see which of them are supported by facts and reason and which might just be wishful thinking or represent special interests (which are possibly in themselves a risk for the project).

In a way the Soviet military maps were a predecessor of OSM in that they were one of the most notable and extensive earlier attempts for recording a detailed cartographic account of the world wide geography to a uniform standard. There were earlier and less extensive attempts at that - like US mapping campaigns during WW2 but nothing to the extent of the Soviet military mapping program. That they have copied information from local maps for that IMO does not really diminish this important innovation.

Even today the cartography of the larger scale maps is an important inspiration for anyone who attempts to display the variety of world wide geography in a common cartographic design. I can recommend studying the map key of the Soviet maps - an early version is available on

https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/EART/pdf/soviet.pdf

Allan, thanks for the comment. Starting from the back - i have not criticized the board for moving too fast and as you correctly said i have in the past criticized the board for failing to move on important issues without a good reason so this would be kind of inconsequential. I have made critical comments on the idea of the board creating a diversity working group top down - in line with the comments made by Tobias in the board meeting which went in a similar direction.

As i have said repeatedly in the past (see for example here i would always welcome a fact based discussion and argument on matters of diversity. But that in my experience needs to start on a pretty fundamental level and only few people are willing/able to look beyond their narrow cultural horizon far enough to do that. We have had some contributions in that direction more recently (like from Frederik, Manfred and a few others) but also a lot of non-helpful noise in the form of self absorbed and intolerant rants.

My advise to the board on the matter of diversity (which is a fairly ill defined term of course) - focus on the OSMF and on improving proportional representation of the active OSM community in the OSMF. This is an extremely tough subject to get to substantial improvements with but there are plenty of potential practical measures that could help a lot in that regard and that the board would have an actual direct influence on - for example the free membership for active community members that is to be introduced now. The good thing is the new board has the best starting conditions for this - it features a larger linguistic diversity than any board of the past i think. And don’t shoot yourselves in the foot by - as said - founding an English language debate club for wannabe diversity engineers and community managers and leaders.

Regarding communication channels - i think a large variety and flexibility is good in that domain. Diaries are a good medium for fairly compact thoughts on things. Before the last board meeting there was also an attempt of using blog.openstreetmap.org to publish the diverse views of the different members on matters together which i - like others - found an interesting idea worth exploring further. The OSM wiki can also be a place for structured idea collection when used wisely. And as i mentioned in the past having a dedicated OSM issue tracker which can be used without selling your private data and attention to a third party corporation would be good.

My personal preferences for community communication channels are

• barrierless public read access
• public and linkable archive of communication
• open communication standard and availability of diverse clients for different platforms
• open source software
• self management of channels by the community
• no third party controlled sign-on
• non-commercial hosting

The first two are fairly absolute for me - which is why i won’t use Slack for example.

And regarding the procedural rules of the board - i think i clearly said that i like the new procedure in many ways. But still i advise sensitivity and caution regarding a possible language and culture bias. Since all of the board members currently speak English quite well this might not be very visible but that does not necessarily mean it cannot be an issue. And since the board meetings are public public perception is - while it should not be a primary concern - something to take into account. The comparison to programming languages and communication protocols is problematic in two ways:

• it kind of implies that a bias towards people with technical skills/talent is all right.
• it overlooks that Latin script is the basis of HTML/python/java in a similar fashion as the English language is the basis of Robert’s Rules of Order. There is a certain bias in that.

As said - i don’t think this is a reason not to use these procedural rules as a starting point but sensitivity to the potential need to adjust these to the circumstances of the project is probably a good idea. But overall i think i am pretty much with you on this matter, clear rules which are actually followed are a good thing - also as i have in the past criticized the board for not consequently sticking to the self given rules of order on several occasions.

All of the newly elected board members have jumped in somewhere https://mobile.twitter.com/HeatherLeson/status/1205892966428106757

Not sure if Twitter presents a different reality to customers than to outsiders but i am pleased to see neither Guillaume nor Allan lowering themselves to this hateful mob.

https://mobile.twitter.com/allan_mustard/status/1209879368400539649

That is a bit more civilized. Still a truly thoughtful conversation on a matter like this is not something you can really have on twitter.

I fail to see how my words here or at any other point connect to what you write about ”engineering pseudo diversity” or an ”English language debate club”.

I can see that and i don’t think there is much i can do about it. It is my sincere hope that i won’t get the opportunity to illustrate better what i mean with the quoted statements using an actual OSMF working group as example.

That is more or less exactly the reaction i expected from you - and largely the core of what i had in mind when i wrote We should not let the board get off the hook that easily and recruiting an English language debate club most likely mainly talking about how to engineer a pseudo-diversity within the OSMF and propagate that down into the OSM community.

Could you point me to where the board has been discussing things on social media?

My own impression is that there is a lot of (in parts fairly intolerant and discriminating) theoretical contemplation in English language on how to reshape/re-educate the OSM community according to certain cultural preferences and values (i commented on some of that) and label that a pro-diversity measure but so far very little practical interest in actually addressing the core issues of the OSMF like the representation problem. Or as Manfred puts it: Glaubwürdig werden Forderungen nach Diversity aber nur, wenn die Fordernden den ihnen schon jetzt als Communitymitglieder und Foundation-Mitglieder zur Verfügung stehenden Spielraum nutzen und selbst das Projekt mitgestalten.

I am confident that most of the board members are aware that there are practical things of immediate importance that would actually substantially improve the proportional representation of the OSM community within the OSMF - like implementing the free membership for active community members in a way that does not favor English language speakers and that bootstrapping and endorsing an English language debate club is not one of them.

Since i have not explicitly mentioned that in my comments - board meetings are routinely minuted on the OSMF wiki and are generally open to visitors listening in on Mumble.

Es geht hier nicht um Meinungen und persönliche Präferenzen, es geht um sachliche Argumente. Und zu der Bedeutung offener Standards und der Problematik proprietärer Kommunikationskanäle, die Unternehmen wie Facebook jederzeit abschalten oder beliebig zensieren können, muss ich hoffentlich in OpenStreetMap niemanden aufklären.

Und es bleibt im OSM-ci natürlich nicht bei einer Bewertung der Einträge, da wird auch mal gerne zensiert

Das Thema ist aber insgesamt natürlich ein bisschen off-topic hier.

@karussell

imagico: The idea that the participants of this project are in need to be managed, … or otherwise ‘handled’ by professionals is in my eyes an affront to these fundamental goals of the project.

Why?

I explained that already: OpenStreetMap is a cross cultural, multilingual social project with the goal to record local knowledge about the verifiable geography of the world through egalitarian cooperation of individuals. If you install a professional to handle, manage or do whatever else with this community of peers that professional will make decisions either based on their own cultural values or based on the ones of those who pay their paycheck - in either case they will be imposed on the community in an act of cultural dominance.

In any case - the burden of proof would be on your side. If you want to install paid community management in the OSM community you would have to convince people that this is beneficial for the goals of the project.

I know for many people with a technology background try to project their experiences with tech projects and organizations onto OSM and think that solutions and approaches that worked well for those and the technical goals of these projects should also be good ideas for OSM. You should not do that. What OSM tries to accomplish is something very different and unique.

imagico: beneficial for the goals of the project you need to do more than just campaigning for it, you need to present facts

What do you mean here? “community management is not beneficial” or “the community will manage itself” or something else?

I mean that just repeatedly stating a belief that certain measures (community management, behavior regulation) are a positive thing will not convince a lot of people, you need to present evidence (like in the form of empirical data and logical deduction) and will need to defend that to scrutiny.

If you ask my opinion on what will happen if hypothetically professional community management was installed in OSM - it would widely be ignored by people. The powers-that-be then could try to push it through authoritarian rule but the risks of that are high and the only hope for the ‘management’ would essentially be to replace large parts of the current community firmly tied to the core values of the project with more malleable engineered community. And that would mean the end of OSM as a cross cultural social project.

@westnordost: Du bist Dir schon darüber im klaren, dass der OSM community index ein subjektives Rating beinhaltet nach dem Motto Mailinglisten böse, proprietäre Plattformen gut (siehe hier und hier).

I can only repeat what I - as well as Manfred (in point 6.5) already said - to convince people you need to provide evidence that what you want to do is beneficial for the goals of the project. Suggesting that your ideas are good because this is what a lot of tech organizations with an English language and Anglo-American cultural dominance do will not convince a lot of people, especially not outside that cultural domain. OpenStreetMap is not a tech project and does not as a whole subscribe to Anglo-American cultural values. We are a cross cultural, multilingual social project with the goal to record local knowledge about the verifiable geography of the world through egalitarian cooperation of individuals. The idea that the participants of this project are in need to be managed, engaged, lead, facilitated, developed, resourced, advocated or otherwise ‘handled’ by professionals is in my eyes an affront to these fundamental goals of the project.

Still - if you want to accept that is obviously up to you. My advise was meant as a suggestion, Manfred phrased his as an “Appell”. My invitation for a discussion of the fundamentals of cross cultural communication and how to define parameters and guidelines for that without cultural dominance stands but it is an invitation, not a demand.

Have a nice holiday - and maybe take your family out for some mapping to help them get a better idea of what OpenStreetMap is about (unless they are already avid mappers of course).