Danke für diesen Einblick - ist sehr interessant zu lesen und bietet eine ganze Menge neues Material für meinen noch immer ausstehenden Blog-Post zum Thema scholarships. ;-)

Was Du eigentlich eher indirekt sehr schön illustriert hast ist, dass es eine Sache ist, ob die Gruppe der ausgewählten Stipendianten für uns in unserem komfortablen Wohlstand positiv nach Vielfalt aussieht, jedoch eine völlig andere, ob eine sinnvolle und gerechte Auswahl aus den Bewerbern getroffen wurde. Und das Fehlen jeglicher Transparenz über die Bewerber (selbst die ungefähre Zahl haben wir so scheint mir erst jetzt durch Dich erfahren) hab ich schon im letzten Jahr angemerkt:

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2017-December/004935.html

Schön zu sehen, dass Du und andere versuchen, die SotM-WG hin zu mehr Transparenz und zu einer besseren Einbeziehung normaler Mapper zu reformieren. Das Risiko dabei hast du aber schon selbst genannt - diejenigen, denen das eher nicht gefällt könnten einfach versuchen, dann die SotM in dieser Form zu beerdigen und durch etwas für die ‘Interessenträger’ passenderes zu ersetzen. Ich würd mich durch diese quasi im Raum stehende Drohung aber nicht beirren lassen.

Was Deine eigenen begrenzten ‘Street-Creds’ bei OSM angeht - das ist ein interessantes Thema. Am Ende ist das halt nur ein Versuch einen Maßstab für die Qualifikation einer Person für Führungs-Aufgaben zu finden. Und gerade unter denen, die sich völlig unqualifiziert versuchen als Community Leader zu präsentieren sind halt viele, die über keine nennenswerte Mapping-Erfahrung verfügen. Aus dieser Korrelation wird dann versucht, entsprechende Kennzahlen als Maßstab anzusetzen. Aber im Grunde kommt es eher auf Dinge wir Urteils- und Einfühlungsvermögen, Respekt gegenüber Anderen und die Fähigkeit und Bereitschaft zu offener Kommunikation und Selbstreflexion an.

Ob wie Du andeutest eine solche Korrelation auch bei Stipendien-Bewerbern vorhanden ist dazu fehlt mir natürlich jegliche Grundlage, das beurteilen zu können.

Und zuletzt: Wenn ich höre wie Design-Amateure sich für eine Professionalitäts-Imitation durch Adobe-Produkte einsetzen finde ich das immer wieder zum Schmunzeln. Dazu passend kann ich noch erwähnen: Ich hab von der SotM dieses Jahr ein in einer wunderschönen Handschrift geschriebenes Namensschild - viel schöner als alles, was ich jemals gedruckt gesehen habe, egal ob mit Adobe oder mit FOSS gestaltet. :-)

As already indicated on osmf-talk i am deeply disappointed by how the DWG now proceeds in what originally was a promising process. I have already pointed out some of the most obvious deficits in this draft there.

You have essentially whitewashed the whole idea of a directed editing policy to a point where a reader unaware of the context will inevitably wonder why you would want such a document in the first place. The new draft in my eyes lacks any precision in language and clarity of the ideas and concepts presented.

And i frankly don’t see a basis for the claim that this draft is “based on discussions with the community”. Can you point me to any discussion that led you to design any of the rules the way you did?

Since you say you designed this draft in a similar way as you perceive the automated edit and import policies - could you please point me to a number of recent imports where you think our import policy demonstrated to be effective?

It is in particular also saddening that you use Wikipedia as a positive example here because the failure of Wikipedia in creating a productive globally egalitarian and not culturally imperialistic community for many in the OSM community is a strong warning in what direction OSM should not go.

The whole idea is to regulate organized editing activities in a meaningful way in the interest of local craft mappers. This is inseparably connected to the need to step on people’s feet. If you try to avoid that at all costs and primarily try to please those you want to regulate you end up with a meaningless regulation which in return would spawn an irrelevant community of opportunists with no convictions, no values and ultimately no purpose.

The first draft was a good start, in particular because it was actually the result of discussions with and inquiries of the community and learning from the problems we have with the existing regulations of automated edits and imports. Further discussion of this draft revealed some problems which should have been worked on (and which could have been worked on) but this went in the right direction and especially if you now compare it to the second draft in comparison it looks really quite excellent - independent of how in substance you want the regulation to be.

The legal situation of Soviet military maps is complicated - both in terms of copyright an regarding classification of the larger scales. A few links can be found on:

osm.wiki/Soviet_military_maps

Soviet military mapping is by the way also interesting from a cartographic history perspective because it was one of the most ambitious cartographic projects of pre-digital times that aimed to depict the global geography to a uniform cartographic standard at larger scale and as such dealt with a lot of the same problems we have today with map styles for OSM based maps which likewise need to depict very different types of geography in different parts of the world.

I wonder if there’s a way of knowing where the BIGGEST multipolygon bugs are.

That depends on how you quantify a multipolygon bug.

If you mean the most complex multipolygon that was ever broken or that is currently broken that is rendered in maps you need to look at islands probably. The Great Britain MP is >680k nodes.

The most complex multipolygon rendered with a color fill is likely Lake Huron (390k nodes) - but there are a number of other lake polygons with fairly similar complexity. These break quite frequently.

I once called the Merowe Reservoir MP the most broken multipolygon in the database because it at that time contained more than a hundred errors. Most of these were noded self intersections though - which osmium can handle. Have not checked how many of those are still left.

In most cases with difficult to fix broken multipolygon the best advise to give is probably: Split it into smaller parts which are easier to deal with. Large lakes and islands are the exception here since they are by convention always mapped as a single MP. Here the best would be if experienced local mappers keep an eye on those.

That was to be expected. You should expect the possibility that this could happen at any time to any other AWS hosted open data sets from https://registry.opendata.aws/

Anyway your assessment that the Copernicus Open Access Hub is the only way to access the data is wrong - there are plenty of other options meanwhile. Note however if you want a recent image the Open Access Hub will always be the fastest.

You can find a fairly extensive list of alternative access methods on

https://github.com/Fernerkundung/awesome-sentinel

while it can argued that having a non-github like issue tracker would remove the real or imagined bias towards software developers, it is however unlikely that the devs would want to give up the tight integration of the issue tracker with git that github-like systems provide.

Which is why i specifically focused on projects that are not primarily software development projects - just look at the examples i gave.

Should we in the future at some point have such a system established it seems pretty likely to me that software developers would deliberately use it for purposes where they seek input from the broader OSM community and not just developers.

And i think even having one of the various open source github clones set up specifically for OSM use (with as you said single sign on) could already - through a different culture of use and nuances in configuration - be significantly more non-developer friendly.

Right - i tried to make it a bit simpler than it actually is.

Self intersecting closed ways will also not show up in the map any more.

And open ring errors of course do not happen with closed ways. ;-)

That’s a broken multipolygon:

http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=areas&lon=12.92661&lat=57.46135&zoom=10

And yes, splitting this into smaller and less complex polygons is a good idea.

A summary or paraphrasing of communication is always subjective. Just to give you an example: In the original ideas there was

• We should stop (to) look at OSM as a tech project.

You write:

• We should stop to consider the essence of OSM as a technological project.

I do not necessarily disagree with the interpretation but this is definitely not semantically the same statement. If i had written that i would probably like to have it reproduced accurately and any subjective interpretation being indicated as such.

There are also statements i do not find covered in your summary - most obvious the somewhat ambiguous “stop the insulting men”. I don’t want to try giving a full list of ideas you missed because that would be my subjective interpretation of the ideas.

Thanks for the summary of that session.

I am somewhat irritated by the list of ideas presented here and how it differs from what can be found in:

https://pads.ccc.de/WXSlyAqS8t

Presenting a subjective selection of the ideas communicated or paraphrasing them IMO kind of defeats the idea of the whole exercise to collect diverse ideas and to let people express themselves how they feel about things directly. I think it is also a matter of fairness towards those who wrote their ideas on a sticker there to faithfully reproduce what they wrote and not just engross their contribution in a selective summary.

The exact titles of the sections by the way - as visible in the photos - were:

• I will do
• We should stop
• We should start or continue

I know many non-programmer mappers who dislike being forced or urged to use github to participate in OSM related discussions. This might not always have identifiable reasons in usability - it might in parts simply be a psychological effect of visiting a place that is obviously primarily meant and optimized for programmers.

The way github presents and scores the users for example (with contributor activity information, repositories etc.) is clearly favoring developers. Objectively this is not all that meaningful but it still communicates certain priorities and preferences to people.

In your sample rendering the drawing order of the roads looks odd, kind of random.

Regarding styling, i have to say at the moment i don’t really see where it aims at. It to me pretty much looks like an OpenMapTiles/MapboxStreets look-alike in slightly different colors but without a distinct cartographic direction. I know this is still in an early state but i would contemplate the question of cartographic goals before putting too much work into it. Starting with a clear vision design wise can help you a lot.

Thanks for sharing your observations.

I would advise a bit of caution with the emphasis on how many different countries the participants came from. This is a relatively poor measure of the geographic diversity at the conference. It is a bit like claiming to have gender diversity because you also have a woman in your group.

2/3 of the visitors at the conference were from Western Europe or the United States, the vast majority of them from Italy, Germany, US, UK, France and Switzerland. About half of the 56 countries were only present with one person and about half of those were there through some kind of scholarship.

This is all fairly natural for a conference like this and from my point of views is no indication for a particular degree of geographic and cultural inclusiveness or of being representative for the OSM community (see here for some numbers regarding the geographic distribution of mappers).

BTW, @SK53 - we missed you in Milano.

Nice.

It is somewhat unfortunate that you recorded it on Sunday so you could not take the Monday talks into account.

Regarding vector tiles - the problem of minutely updates of vector tiles without a PostGIS database is something that was a topic in the discussion after Thomas Skowron’s talk on the first day. This is an interesting topic. But most toolchains at the moment are based on a PostGIS database anyway.

The idea of a layer-less rendering framework (which you seem to hint at in the discussion) is something i have contemplated as well. But this would be really hard to get people to warm up to since this is so firmly embedded into cartography and graphics design in general (and in fact clearly predates the digital age).

Ah, that makes much more sense now.

What i find fascinating is that you seem to treat the image tiles completely independently - in other words: cut off building parts at a tile edge are treated as if they were whole buildings.

I can see that this affects the algorithm because we see the discontinuities in the results but I wonder how ‘local’ the method is ultimately when you apply the trained algorithm. I mean if you move the tile edge a tiny bit (a few pixel) would the results change completely across the whole tile potentially or would such a move only affect the results near the edge of the tile and leave the rest unaffected?

Interesting results.

My gut feeling after reading is that the reason for the quite significant difference between men and women observed regarding types of features mapped could very well be partly due to men and women in the survey participating differently in organized mapping efforts. Most organized mapping focuses on certain types of features which could explain to some extent the differences in tag use observed if it plays a different role in the mapping of men and women analyzed.

The thing with organized mapping is that since this is usually not fully self determined (there are usually some kind of instructions on what to map with preference) this can kind of distort the attempt to find out what mapping preferences men and women typically have.

Likewise different preferences regarding outdoor mapping vs. armchair mapping could also result in different thematic mapping patterns.

But of course if women participate more frequently in organized mapping (or participate in different kinds of organized mapping efforts) or if they have a higher or lower preference for armchair mapping this would be a valuable observation on its own.

@SimonPoole - you want to finance that?

The main problems of this idea are in parts already demonstrated by Landsat Live from Mapbox:

• If you just blindly show the latest image everywhere you have something of rather limited use for mapping because of clouds and other reasons why the newest image is not the best. If you want to hand select the best image from some kind of recent time frame for every area we are talking about a quite a lot of work on a regular basis that requires significant qualification to be performed well.
• If you use a dumb, constant color processing you get results of very limited usefulness in many areas - see here for some details on this.
• If you offer all individual images separately image selection is a task of significant difficulty for the mapper, in particular in high cloud incidence areas.

There are already services that offer online access to the standard ESA TCI rendering of some Sentinel-2 images. For the shown image you can for example use (in JOSM notation):

https://geoservice.code-de.org/Sentinel2/wms?SERVICE=WMS&VERSION=1.1.0&REQUEST=GetMap&FORMAT=image%2Fpng&TRANSPARENT=true&LAYERS=S2_MSI_L1C&time=2018-06-09T07%3A56%3A11.024Z%2F2018-06-09T07%3A56%3A11.024Z&STYLES=&SRS={https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:proj}&WIDTH={width}&HEIGHT={height}&BBOX={bbox}

Note this WMS is currently not advertised for arbitrary use AFAIK so it is not clear if they are fine with using it for mapping. If you intend to use this you should probably contact code-de (contact details in the GetCapabilities or on the website).

Thanks for the reply to my comments. My main point about the methodology was that i for example have difficulties interpreting the 33% of women have felt hostility from men in their community. Quantitative observations like this require context to be quantitatively meaningful. Without context i can only see that there is a significant fraction of women who have participated in the survey who have experienced hostility. And frankly this is something i would expect since occurrence of hostility in social interaction is in my experience something universal and the question was for any occurrence of any kind of hostility. If i assume most of the women in the survey have been in the OSM community for at least a few years (which i am not sure i can) i would in fact expect the number to be higher. Frequent interaction with a large community with a larger number of people for a year or longer without any incident of hostility seems - as desirable as it might be - unusual to me. And in the other numbers i can see there is a significant difference between self-perception of hostility towards oneself and perception of hostility towards others which is - when considered purely qualitatively - also an expected observation, even without any gender difference.

Regarding the impression that many consider gender inequality in the community to be no problem - without examples it is difficult to specifically analyze that. My own impression when talking to people (obviously mostly men) in the community is that many consider it highly desirable for there to be more women mappers, developers etc. and listen very carefully and with interest and compassion whenever they hear from women in the community about their experiences. Both lack of awareness and indifference towards the existence of gender inbalance and gender discrimination are things i see rarely in OSM, especially if i compare it to other diversity subjects (in particular social, cultural, language and geographic diversity). If and what kind of active measures are advisable to address this is a whole different story of course. Here you have in OSM a widespread view (which is also in the OSMF mission) that growth of the community of any kind should be organic and it is not a good idea to actively bootstrap community where none exists yet. This is a widespread view among people in the OSM community but this is not the same as being unaware of or indifferent towards gender inbalance.

I think this is probably also a subject where there are significant fundamental communication problems (it is difficult to articulate opinions on a highly perception dependent topic like this, especially when you do so in a non-native language) and it is easy to misinterpret statements and reactions in a way that is different from how they are meant.