My August 2020 in OSM
Posted by amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️🌈 on 5 September 2020 in English. Last updated on 6 September 2020.Here’s some of the things I’ve been doing in OpenStreetMap in August 2020.
-
Mapping
- The Irish building mapping project continues to provide ample options for mapping
- I used to think there was nothing to map in Germany. Then I opened up StreetComplete. So many things to map (e.g. changeset 90126382). I tooted on the fediverse, and made a tweet which spawned some discussion.
- I made my 10,000th OSM changeset on 10th August. I was updating Irish pubs in Italy (celebratory fediverse post, tempting tweet)
- Hacking
- Made a small pull request, for babykarte
- I installed the OSMDE’s name translation functions again, and hit a weird issue where
make
would change files under version control, but that’s apparently not a problem. - Someone’s working on making some OSM software, like
mod_tile
packaged for Debian/Ubuntu, so I provided advice, since I’ve installed many tileservers. This software might appear dead, but there isn’t much activity because it currently Just Works™.
- OSMF Board
- I’d like to improve adherance to the OSM’s Organized Editing Guidelines. I suggested, at our S2S meeting in March that the board get more active on this. I confirmed with the Data WG, and they’re fine. I hope we can start a community project on this.
- Continuing discussion with HOT about a trademark agreement, nothing yet.
- The OSMF committed to open communication channels for all essential OSMF communication. The
osmf-talk@
mailing list post, spawned some long discussion, and I think some people misunderstood this, It would be foolish for OSM to not use popular communication channels (both open & proprietary). No-one should be forced to have their OSM interactions on (e.g.) Facebook. I continued to discuss this with OSMF member(s). - The Board’s July 2020 grant of a trademark licence to Cesium continues to cause upset with the great OSM Buildings project, causing a blog post. While the board should have done a request for comment on it first, which would have alerted us to the issue, “OSM Buildings” is such a generic name, that one person cannot own it. I had a call with Jan, and I don’t think there’s much that will change on this topic anymore.
- We had a vidchat check in on 13th Aug
- Aug. 2020 OSMF Board meeting on 27th.
- The OSMF has decided to fund:
- several core OSM projects, namely Nominatim, Potlatch and osm2pgsql (
osmf-talk@
mailing list post) - full time iD developer, after their existing funding abruptly ended (
osmf-talk@
thread). - to hire a sysadmin/Site Reliability Engineer. We have someone in mind, but for the benefit of the candidate, we cannot name names yet.
- several core OSM projects, namely Nominatim, Potlatch and osm2pgsql (
- Misc
- Someone claimed that “OSM is 3→4% women”, to imply that OSMF doesn’t have a problem today. But the sources (#1, #2) were weak, and are just some surveys from ~10 years ago (#1, #2).
- Communications WG
- One of the newst corpoate members of the OSM Foundation, Cesium, took advantage of their joint press release benefit, so we had to write that, the result is this blog post: OpenStreetMap, a map of buildings!
- Members of the CWG are discussing what, if any, form of “conflict of interest” policy the WG should have.
- An OSMF member suggested some (more) OSM swag, but no-one has offered to run that yet.
It takes work to write up & assemble these summaries (1½ hour for this) , but keeping track of my achievements is benefitial.
Previously: July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 Mar 2020 Feb 2020 Jan 2020
Discussion
Comment from Zverik on 6 September 2020 at 14:55
These summaries are easy to read and they outline what happens inside OSMF and the community in general. Thank you! Some things I’ve missed, like hiring an iD developer.
Comment from amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️🌈 on 6 September 2020 at 16:21
@Zvierik: Glad to hear. In case you missed it, there was a thread on the
osmf-talk@
mailing list about iD hiring.Comment from mmd on 19 September 2020 at 17:32
I was somehow expecting a public announcement (not just some random tweet like https://twitter.com/OSM_Tech/status/1287395222847139846), followed by a more formal candidate selection process that includes interviews, etc. Maybe I missed this, or this was all done behind the scenes.
Comment from amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️🌈 on 22 September 2020 at 11:04
@mmd Sorry for the miscommunication, we had a preferred candidate in mind, rather than an open interview process. Were yout thinking of applying?
Comment from mmd on 22 September 2020 at 11:28
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2020-July/006973.html mentioned “We’re looking for a site reliability engineer who can help the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s sysadmin team manage the growth in the demand for its services.[…]”. Typically you would expect an open selection process following such an announcemnt. Having a preferred candiate in kind kind of defeats the whole idea of consulting the membership on any details about this position.
BTW: No, thank you, I’m not a sysadmin kind of person :)
Comment from dieterdreist on 27 September 2020 at 15:11
Actually I did not claim we do not have the problem of having too few female mappers in OpenStreetMap (because we actually do have too few), what I wrote was that IMHO the problem is not having too few women in the OpenStreetMap-Foundation board, because actually women are over represented on the board compared to the number of female mappers.
Comment from amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️🌈 on 28 September 2020 at 06:12
This diary entry & some of these comments made it to WeeklyOSM № 531.
Comment from amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️🌈 on 28 September 2020 at 06:15
@dieterdreist “compared to the number of female mappers” You haven’t provided any decent evidence for how many mappers are male/female/not-male/etc, so you shouldn’t really claim that.
Comment from dieterdreist on 28 September 2020 at 08:08
based on your local experience (not people working professionally in the field, i.e. not counting attendance of employees to international conferences), what is your guesstimate for female mappers (compared to the rest, i.e. mappers that don’t identify themselves with the term female) in your area? From what I see locally, on various mailing lists and fora, more than 5% does not seem likely.