OpenStreetMap
In preparation for the 2015 OSMF board election I am gathering basic info and question responses by candidate, to help people be better informed about their choices.
I’ve added annotations in italics where I felt they would be useful.
Ilya Zverev
Questions
Where do you currently participate in the OSMF?
First, most work is done outside OSMF, even by OSMF members. People write blogs by themselves, explain legal issues without being on LWG, and code without EWG help. There are 5 groups currently active: OWG and DWG, because they have the only power there is in this community: access to servers and a banhammer. And LWG, LCWG and SotMWG, which do organizational stuff few people have knowledge or experience or time to do.
I am not currently on any working groups, though formerly I’ve been on EWG (promoting API changes) and on the Membership WG, which didn’t set off. Which does not mean, obviously, that I’m not doing any work WGs do: for instance, I do communications work in the Russian community, editing a news blog and hosting a weekly OSM podcast. During my involvement in OSM, I tried most things WGs do: explained licensing, wrote code, admined servers, tried to reason with vandals, organized conferences, considered opening a russian local chapter.
Why I don’t sign up to any of the groups? Some, I don’t feel qualified enough (e.g. LWG or LCWG), others are too taxing (I envy these steel-nerved heroes at DWG) or require 24h commitment (OWG, we can’t thank you enough). And some working groups don’t seem useful: why join CWG or EWG, when all the help you need is in IRC channels and blogs?
That doesn’t mean I won’t consider joining working groups later: it’s that benefits of being on them (and levels of commitment) should be clearly outlined. E.g. members of the CWG receive news early and have access to the blog and the twitter. Maybe it should be the other way around: you’re not writing code because you’re on EWG, but you’re on EWG because you are an active developer. Working groups, like the OSMF itself, clearly need improvements and incentives to be attractive to newcomers, and that is one of the matters I plan to work on.
Which contributions to OSM should I consider for my decision beyond your data edits at OSM?
I have a brief list of my projects at osmz.ru (some of which are on github), and a list of wiki contributions at my wiki user page. I write the only russian-language OSM news blog and the OSM Radio podcast (not to be confused with the german Radio OSM). Some of my views are expressed in English at my OSM diary.
Do you use OSM at work for business purposes?
Since this year I work at MAPS.ME, which makes a very popular application for OpenStreetMap (almost 30 million installs). So in a way, I do. No paid mapping though, apart from fixing a few bugs our users tell us.
Conflicts of Interest
Yes, I work for MAPS.ME. And by thorough discussion. I would also represent this organization on the Board, but interests of OpenStreetMap are more important for me. But then, one of MAPS.ME goals is to contribute to OSM growth.
Who should the OSMF serve?
I am primarily interested in OpenStreetMap growth as a geodatabase and a platform. But being on the OSMF Board won’t help me with that directly. The Board has little power, but a huge influence, it being the only official OSM entity. We can try using it to make OSM more visible and to attract more users and developers, and to encourage experienced members to do things besides plain mapping, like helping other users, directly or not. There are ways for the Board to help specific groups of OSM users (e.g. developer grants), but we should promote all kinds of involvement.
Role of the board
That’s a big question. The Board should not get involved with mapping, software development or permissions to use OSM. It should support working groups, and OSMF in general: decide what OSMF is, what it is for, and why join. It should decide where money goes (at least until we have a dedicated working group) and the general direction of the OSM project.
Communication with the community
I’m subscribed to a large number of mailing lists, try to hang in IRC, follow many OSM folks on Twitter, regularly read weekly-osm, frequently chat with OSM folks on Skype, read and post OSM diary entries. It’s a huge volume, and honestly we need to become more focused and strategic from an OSMF perspective. I do like the idea of regularly scheduled “office hours” with the OSMF
Community involvement in OSMF
The automatic system seems to be in place now, thanks to Henk. But it is still the question of why anybody would join OSMF. I shared some ideas last year, some of which still stand. I can’t promise anything, but I hope in the coming year OSMF members would have a better understanding on why they have joined.
Diversity
First of all, I represent the russian community, which is third (or fourth) largest in OSM, but isn’t visible because of the language barrier. Not that it would matter on the Board: I’m concerned with the global OSM community first, and the russian part of it second. I already help members from our community to interact with everyone else, so my being on Board would not change much in that regard. I guess a viewpoint that I would bring to the Board is mine alone, but, of course, is influenced by both russian and english communities.
Paying People
We already do that for accounting, and should be paying more people - of course, where reasonable. We can’t have an evolving project with only unpaid volunteers to do all things. Not sure about marketing and PR though.
Board term limits
Yes, I would. The Board is not fun when it’s the same people year after year, it becomes too closed and deaf to innovation
Transparency
This is an important matter for me, since I do a news blog, and am always very interested in how the Board works. Sadly, there is still little information on that: we can’t even know how people we elected work on their goals. I plan to make the Board as open as possible, but understand that there may be reasons why they aren’t much transparent yet. We need to see individual members of the Board, and to have better ways to influence their agenda. I guess I’ll start with myself: even if other Board members won’t open their votes, I probably could share mine.
License violation enforcement
I don’t think we can do much in technical sense, but we sure have to educate users more. Most license violations happen not of malice, but because few people know maps are even subject to the copyright law. And to answer a common kind of thought, “so what, as if they are going to find out”, we need to be more strict and improve our reverting tools. But this, again, not a Board matter, but depends on DWG and some brilliant programmer. > Just for clarification: My question was primarily about violations of the ODbL by users of OSM data, like OSM based maps without attribution. The question of dealing with use of legally unsuited sources for mapping is of interest as well of course (although not really that controversial). > > Right, I didn’t understand that the first time. Simply talking to violators works most of the time, and that is usually done not even by LWG, but by regular OSM members. I think that is good, and LWG does its work great, explaining possible edge cases of the license. The Board can help by only being a bit more louder. I hope we won’t have to take anybody to a court :)
Imports and remote mapping stance
I had very strong opinion on that in the past, but now I’m ok with any import that adheres to the Import Guidelines. Sadly, I’ve yet to see such an import. So again, we should better reverting tools, and less introvert community.
Commercial and Organized Editing Policy stance
The same rules should apply to anybody, regardless the source of their motivation to edit. If a person doesn’t like editing OSM, but still adds correct highways and buildings, - why should we treat them differently? There are already guidelines that say, use correct sources and draw what’s on the ground, and I don’t think we need more than that.
Discussion