Hi Courtney, these are absolutely great observations!

The tile distribution is a neuralgic point. A couple pf personal observations (neither board nor EWG approved opinions) where the OWG may or may not correct me:

First of all, all discussions I have been aware are on the nuclear containment design end of bike shedding, so they wane quickly.

Second, the resources are to large part being given to us from Fastly. So we cannot just sell things we generously have got for free.

Third, use of tiles is extremely uneven between different sites referring to OSM tiles. A tile service for the next door’s physicians homepage would be so cheap that would be to both us and the physician much more overhead than anything else to put a price tag on that. A physician can see probably around 400 people a month, so 5000 page views in a year would be probably below one US dollar. We may want to offer at least an easy path for these site operators to voluntarily pay a little fee but no enforcement to keep the goodwill instead of scraping pennies.

This brings us to fourth, that OpenStreetMap does profit from an ecosystem of service providers that also sell tiles services, with proper service level agreements and thus starting at much larger scales. The reason again being the overhead. OSM profited and profits from these service providers because many of them provided back a lot of innovation (Disclaimer: I’m no such service provider or in special relations, but I acknowledge things like the Geofabrik downloads, or Andy Allans cycle layer, just to name two that now exist for far more than a decade). Just selling tiles would surely cut into that innovation and inflate the OSMF by many clerks for the billing instead of self-employed innovative people, so ultimately not bring substantially more money into the ecosystem.

Fifth, far more users see OSM data processed by a third party than see OSM tiles. If we put too much emphasis on tiles than we feed the myth that OSM were a tile provided while its mission is to be a community that provides geodata.

Sixth and finally, it is quite hard work to chase those that dodge fees if any. Log file analysis is time intensive, draining resources from productive work.

I’m happy to have more options for voluntary recurring donations. Say, one to three layers between the OSMF personal membership fee and the lowest corporate tier. I’m all for cost transparency, and to tell people e.g.: for 50$ a year you pay for running the current OSM core infrastructure for one hour, or you pay for the delivery of OSM tiles for 2 million page views.

But I do not expect there any sane source of income from a tile toll, because this is a nightmare on overhead cost on any level from technical enforcement and billing up to the community damage and goodwill destruction it produces.

No, it is about the same on both browsers (Chrome, Firefox) on mobile as well as on the desktop (Chromium, Firefox).

BTW, in both cases the development consoles say that 1.7 MB have actually been transferred, out of a total of 7 MB. This is what kills the performance.

It is seven seconds here, on a Gigaset GS5 mobile phone with Android 11 on Firefox in a private tab.

It is slow.

Well for starters the board as a whole seems to disagree with that. The last three boards have been substantially more hands on than previous boards going back a decade.

Speaking for me, this is involuntary. First of all, OSM is still growing and with it the typical operational management problems. The board has not grown.

Simple example: half of the corporate members need their proper, sometimes bizarre process to approve and pay their membership fee, sometimes 40 emails to almost a dozen people, sometimes signatures and stamps we have to collect elsewhere. That is growing amortized linear with the number of sponsors. SotM issues, complaints from third parties and other matters also grow.

Dealing with VAT is a completely new thing that comes from growth, building up some HR capacity indirectly comes from growth from the totally correct decision to have full-time employees. And as an inherently international organization, we are going to pass more thresholds above which one or the other government will inspect us for neither being involved in tax evasion nor undercutting sanctions - both obviously no concern for OSMF, but their bureaucracy sees that different.

So no, the fact that the board is so operational is a fairly direct result from OpenStreetMap growing, and the only viable way forward is to build the organizational structure to be able to do all that work.

If you do not know the id of the object, then you can selective download all ways: * use the expert mode * go to “File > Download data … > Download from Overpass API” * use the following query to get all ways that are not members of a relation plus all connected ways:

way({{bbox}})(if:count_tags()==0);
rel(bw)->.r;
(._; - way(r.r); );
(._;>;<;node(w););
out meta;

Then use in “Edit > Search …” the search criterion:

type:way untagged -child type:relation

This way, the ways without tags and not being part of a relation are marked and the ways necessary to avoid deleting used nodes are present but not selected.

@Pieter: Thank you for asking back: The emails address is engineering@osmfoundation.org . The date is indeed 2021-10-18, I’m sorry for the typo.

Thank you for the feedback. The term “personal passion” has not been meant as “unpaid”. And both are unrelated to Open Source.

If you report a bug to say, Apple or Microsoft or Google Maps, then most likely for a year or longer simply nothing perceivable will happen. Any attempt of communication is diverted away from those that could make decisions. This is not only a common flaw of large organizations, it is rather a design goal of large organizations.

By contrast, in the federated OpenStreetMap model, in all the listed cases you will talk pretty immediately to the real people that are able to change the software.

Support

@tyr_asd: It is a question of relating numbers. There are peaks in the usage e.g. from Philipines and from Malaysia, each around 400 different users. These are ten times more users than usual from these countries. That there is also a large number of users from the US is doesn’t change that enormous increase in other countries with a small user base so far.

@imagico: Of course we would like commercial users to get their own instance and pay for it. But that is not the point here.

To both: there have been 400 users from each Malaysia and Philipines (and a lot of other countries). Should we have the capacities to offer to them good service at first try? Should we give a first impression as a vibrant community with useful data and tools? Or should we accept that the service (and maybe OSM as a whole) appears sluggish to these users at the first contact, because it is most likely that first contact happens during a load peak?

In other words, there are two questions here:

• Do we consider these peak users as people we would like to attract? I would say that people who had a benefit from obtaining geodata from OSM are likely to get back at a later point in time to contribute. Not all, but if 10 percent come back with an intrinsic motivation then we have enlarged the community. It is, by the way, how I myself have come to OSM. The data was already useful, but there have been things to add or to correct.

• Do we want to earmark resources to leave a better first impression to these users, or are resources elsewhere more efficient? Given this event I would say that a second server may make sense.

Concerning the original validation procedure: I you want to download the data in one go or at least larger chunks then you can use the mirrored_download plugin. It adds an extra menu item “Download from mirror …” that allows to fetch the data from the Overpass API instead of the main API. That saves load for the main API and increases as a side effect download speed.

Die Grenzrelation von Gießen lässt sich z.B. wie folgt nutzen:

http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1T2

Generell würde ich benannte Areas empfehlen, da sich Ids auch mal ohne Vorwarnung ändern können. Da es auch einen Landkreis Gießen gibt, habe ich über admin_level=8 gezielt die Stadt gegriffen.