Good to see you setting a positive example for a start into the board being more active in public communication about their day-to-day work. Looking forward to the board meeting tomorrow.

@Heather - if you want to convince people that uniform and universal behavior regulation in the OSM community is something beneficial for the goals of the project you need to do more than just campaigning for it, you need to present facts, arguments and reasoning for that to those critical of it and defend your ideas against critique from others. This is one of the core ideas communicated by Manfred in his post above.

As i have just mentioned elsewhere i have specifically invited proponents of such regulation to engage in such a discussion based on facts and reasoning two years ago already. I have also more specifically reflected on the topic in public since then. During all that time i have rarely ever had a functional discussion based on facts and reasoning with proponents of behavior regulation - notable exception being Rory - or saw a fact based reflection on this from a pro-regulation perspective that takes into account the goals of the OpenStreetMap project (see 6.5 above) and respectfully discusses dissenting views of others (6.1 and 6.4). By the way my offer linked to above still stands - i would welcome and happily engage in any discussion of the matter with anyone willing to engage in a public discourse based on facts and reason.

And to you specifically i would also suggest to consider point 6.3 of what Manfred has written above. You might not realize that but statements like

Community management and strategy are key to our future

appear very disrespectful and offensive to many in the OSM community. The idea that they need somehow to be managed and that doing so is not only beneficial but apparently more important than the core ideas and values of the project will be rightfully rejected by many and opening with something like that as a claim of fact will not get you much support - neither from men or women probably.

Can you explain to me why you accuse me of “wallowing in their bias and intolerance”

I can’t because that is not what i did. I linked to

@Heather%20Leson/diary/391598#comments

not

@Heather%20Leson/diary/391598#comment46098

and i am talking about “manche” (some peope) - not all of them. Your comment was a perfectly valid, open and respectful question for better understanding of what Heather means but you might have noticed that except for Heather sidestepping your questions to get back to her narrative everyone essentially ignored your comment.

And to be clear - the problem is not that there are some people whose cultural values differ from those of others in the OSM community and who would prefer it is their values would have more significance in OSM. That is perfectly natural. The problem is the intolerance, disrespect and insults to those who do not share exactly the same values and the unreflected musings about how to top down impose their ideas onto the community and squeeze out those who are not willing to subject themselves to this imposed value system and to re-educate the rest.

That is completely incompatible to the core value of OpenStreetMap of creating the best map of the world through egalitarian cross cultural cooperation.

To be perfectly frank: The willingness and ability to accept people with cultural values fundamentally different from your own - including fundamental questions like fairness and equality - is kind of a prerequisite for working in the OSM community.

For those who have difficulties with that i have a long standing open invitation to discuss these questions without fixed premises in an enlightened fashion based on arguments and reasoning. But so far reaction to that has been fairly sparse.

Ist ja mal wieder allerliebst wie die englischen Muttersprachler sofort aus ihren Löchern geschossen kommen, um ihre Deutungshoheit über die Begriffe zu verteidigen und ohne mal etwas länger über das Geschriebene nachzudenken den Verfasser gleich als Idioten abzustempeln, der alles missversteht und keine Ahnung hat.

Kleiner Ratschlag: Wenn Ihr den Eindruck habt, dass der Andere alles total missversteht, denkt vielleicht mal einen Moment drüber nach, ob vielleicht Ihr es seid, die mit einem Brett vorm Kopf herumlaufen. Zumindest sollte man dann nämlich nicht etwas von “being able to listen to the mappers & users” erzählen…

Quite remarkable color quality for a reproduction more than 100 years old.

Interesting fact - these maps were produced before the discovery of Severnaya Zemlya - which was not fully charted until the 1930s and which therefore is not included.

What i wonder: Does the discussion about the fundamental differences in the way we look at the world between OSM and Wikimedia projects - local verifiability (a.k.a. original research) in OSM vs. culture specific major consensus narrative from secondary sources in Wikimedia - play any role in the Wikimedia community?

I can’t say i follow communication of the Wikimedia community with any significant level of intensity so any pointers to reflections and discussions on the matter would be great.

Note from a classic perspective and also from how OSM looks at it glaciation is viewed as part of the land. This manifests for example by peak heights typically including any glacier ice cover and in polar regions the coastline being placed at the outer edge of the permanent ice. The mentioned data set shows the shape of the bedrock which in OSM is only mapped where it is visible at the surface.

By the way this is open data, NSIDC announced availability today:

https://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0756/versions/1

Interesting fact - our knowledge if the shape of the bedrock below the ice in the Antarctic is to a large part better than our knowledge of the shape of the ocean floor.

All comments on my blog require approval - i activated yours as soon as i saw it.

Thanks for elaborating on your agenda for the board. In my attempt to summarize the candidates’ statements i of course needed to reduce some of the more subtle differentiations and the nuances in the different views of insufficient attribution were one of these. Glad to hear this is an important point for you.

Complete agreement on that, thanks for the elaborate writeup. In my voting recommendation i added a note on that.

Practically leaving out a small number of candidates you more or less equally find unsuitable in a list of 12 candidates for four seats is most likely not relevant. It would - as you said - require all the candidates you have included to be either voted for or eliminated. In this case with four left from the list that would mean three elected and five more eliminated before the 9th place could become relevant. But you are completely right that in principle if you have a preference you should articulate it.

My consideration for leaving candidates off the list i find completely unsuitable was more that this would make a distinct statement that is visible in the voting data afterwards. But on the election this has no meaningful effect.

@Mikel - the whole my door is open story is kind of hollow. There is substantial critique that many of your actions (and i am not just talking about the GlobalLogic incident here of course) are bad for OpenStreetMap. This critique has been articulated with solid support through arguments - not only here but on countless of other occasions. If you neither acknowledge the critique as being valid nor present arguments and reasons against it the offer to talk in the form of superficial platitudes (put the relationship […] on much better footing, etc.) is not worth much. In other words: Every public critique of your actions on the OSMF board - whether it is Steve here or Nicolas or me for example - is an offer for an open discussion based on arguments and reasoning. It is you who continuously rejects those offers by - if you answer at all - dragging the discussion to a personal level, telling only your world view without listening to and engaging with what others say or, as you also often do, trying to move conversation away from the public channels.

I won’t comment here on your and the other corporate representatives’ agendas to impose tighter control over the working groups from the board and making the OSMF a more centralized, hierarchical and more secretive organization - that is something for another place. But given the inability/unwillingness of the board to act - on this and on countless other topics (license violations anyone?) i very much applaud the MWG’s initiative and bold stand against a board that is non-constructive on matters like this. The fact that you feel pissed by such boldness to me is confirmation that it is advisable and necessary to do things like that. The MWG would clearly very much have preferred not to present the board with a deadline.

I have only asked for and therefore only received numbers on current paid up memberships.

In general the more specific additional data is the more serious potential privacy concerns are. It is ultimately up to the MWG what to release but i would be a bit concerned about that.

Things that i would find interesting are:

• the post election numbers for the same thing, i.e. who was actually ultimately eligible to vote.
• data on the seniority of members (i.e. how long the members from the different countries have been member) - when rounded down to full years this would probably not be too problematic.

The last one would provide information on how large fluctuations in membership are in an integrated fashion which is less hairy than looking at the rates.

I have not shown if a country accounts for zero or one OSMF members. I had a short exchange with Michael about that after publication and he mentioned that they would have liked to also anonymize up to two members but agreed that it makes little sense to remove the information after it has been published so i kept it. If that is made a general policy i have no problem with that.

By the way - the most work intensive part about this kind of data processing are different forms of country names and matching them. :-(

@dieterdreist - there are a lot of very interesting possibilities of other measures for the mapping community activities in a certain country. In particular i would like to see statistics that exclude all accounts that have less than something like five active mapping days to only consider serious mappers and exclude all the typical SEO spam throw away accounts.

It is always somewhat sad to see small companies go, but i guess that is life in that line of business - eat (and expand and grow) or be eaten.

Good luck with your new job - will you be staying in Belarus or does this involve moving elsewhere?

I don’t understand your question but i will try to explain the membership types and what they imply:

• all members whose membership is current can vote on vote 8 and on the board elections.
• only normal members whose membership is current can vote on vote 1 to 7.
• the free membership that is to be introduced by the vote 8 resolution in the future will be an associate membership - as is the membership based on the current fee waiver due to financial hardship or technical payment difficulties.
• only normal members can become board members.

That normal membership (and the additional rights this entails) is still to be the privilege of those who pay is not nice but IMO not a reason to vote against going the first step for free associate membership.

Thanks. There is some irony in that this is mentioned here on a communication channel that is not listed in said database. ;-)

Thanks for this summary and thanks for your work on the board.

Since you mention the middle way - and i am not sure if you have the buddhist concept of the Middle Way in mind here - i wanted to mention that in Buddhism, at least as far as i understand it, this concept is less a call for making compromises on practical decisions (where the compromise between two extremes in a multi-dimensional parameter space might not in any way represent moderation) and more, as it is usually phased, calls for moderation between the extremes of sensual indulgence and self-mortification or between the ideas of existence and non-existence. Translated into the world of practical community cooperation i would think this to be more a call for a middle way between self confidence (or self-conceit/arrogance in the negative extreme) and tentativeness (or self-denial in the negative extreme). Or - to use your term - a middle way between my way or the highway and treating every decision as a calculation of arithmetic means between different articulated interests.

You mentioned a Community Map of ‘channels’ which i am not aware of - could you provide a link?

A comment on both the original post and the idea of having something like that in OSM-Carto - the problem with the prominence tag for peaks is that it is computable and at the same time in the general case practically non-verifiable except through computation using external data. Therefore it is IMO not suitable to be stored in OSM.

From a cartographic perspective other importance measures for peaks are also much more suitable than prominence and tend to be simpler to compute at the same time. See:

osm.wiki/User:Maxbe/Dominanz_von_Gipfeln

I think you are putting too much trust in an inherent justness and balance of verbal communication. What you call conversation ‘more subtle’ than arguments and reasoning i consider very prone to manipulation and lobbying for specific interests.

As said already i perfectly understand that a communication style devoid of arguments and reasoning can appear to be capable of solving problems you can’t solve based on reason and logic. You can pursue X without pursuing X’ despite fundamental logic telling that X implies X’ for example. But that only works within a perceptual filter bubble or a dogmatic belief system that does not depend on being compatible with logic. And in that case the ‘more subtle’ conversation style would mainly aim to get people to adopt the belief system and reject logic.

I am all for having facts change my mind on things - but as said based on arguments and reasoning and not based on some superficial rhetoric aiming to circumvent reason.

But i am getting carried away a bit of course here. Getting back to the subject of board work: One of my main principles i try to follow when looking at the board’s work is the English saying “The proof of the pudding is the eating”. If the board comes to good decisions with conversation styles more subtle than arguments and reasoning i try not to fuzz about it and accept the good results. But if the board is criticized for their decisions based on fundamental arguments although you say it seemed a good compromise between different views and interests at the time you made it (and there are a lot of decisions where exactly this is the case) it might be useful to consider that the reason for this is a lack of a solid critical discussion based on arguments and reasoning in the process leading up to the decision. If you ignore that you might end up in a kind of filter bubble increasingly encapsulated from the basic reality of individual people in the OSM community. I don’t think that is the case right now but there are definitely significant risks in that direction.

AFAIK right now any member of the OSMF can run for the board. If you are no member you would have to sign up before you nominate yourself.

Note there is going to be a change in the AoA up for vote this year as well that would require a 180 day lead time in the future:

https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/w/images/c/c5/Suggested_AoA_Changes.pdf

I don’t think i substantially misunderstood your position here. This is not about having a static, immutable position on certain practical questions or not, this is about what leads you to change your position. I would want board members to do this based on arguments and reasoning after being convinced by the better arguments and logic in a (preferably public) discussion. For you this seems to be more a matter of negotiation to achieve political majorities under the base assumption of there being no right and wrong. Accordingly the struggle for decisions seems to be a lot about winning and loosing (and optimization in the way of making sure the number of people who win is maximized while the number of people who loose is minimized). Hence also the idea that arguments are mostly about ‘winning an argument’ rather than struggling for the best solution. To me ‘loosing an argument’ on the merits or being argued with under the hypothesis that i am wrong in discourse is not in any way demeaning, it is an honor and a sign of a healthy and productive exchange.

Now i perfectly understand that in the current political constellation on the board your approach might be the only way to actually come to substantial decisions in the short term. But this does not necessarily mean it is a useful strategy in the long term. I firmly believe that board members with strong values and convictions rooted in the shared base values of the project are the best basis for ensuring the OSMF stays relevant within the OpenStreetMap project in the long term - even if that in the short terms might mean more struggle to actually come to substantial decisions on the board because some board members firmly reject the argumentative discourse as a basis of making decisions.

The Crimea decision is a good example here, the decision made was - according to the board’s own statement - designed to minimize strife while refusing to even discuss the long term consequences of making a decision against the fundamental core values of the project. The board might have mended relationship with the working groups as a result of this but it has not done so with the OSM community as a whole and it seems to me the standing of the OSMF board in possible moderation of future disputes within the OSM community is permanently damaged because of that.

Coming back to my original thought - no matter if you agree here or not what you should notice i think that by rejecting the participation of people who want to work based on clear values and convictions (of which there are certainly quite a few among active community members) you would alienate a significant fraction of the workforce that would have the qualification to do valuable volunteer work within the OSMF.

Reading reflection of board members on their views now in comparison to a year ago or when they were elected would definitely be of a lot of interest. And this specifically includes those board members who will leave the board in December.