Hi,

I’ve recently got some flak about a mailing list post that I wrote opposing a candidate for the OSMF board election. I felt that this candidate and their employer, Facebook, were getting away with too many things that would be inacceptable from anyone else.

Because the candidate and his employer steadfastly claim that the attribution they provide was in accordance with the license, I saw an analogy with Donald Trump claiming stuff that was obviously not true, like “I had the greatest crowd in my inauguration” or so. And getting away with it.

To make this point as drastically as possible, I used a quote from Trump from before the 2016 election, the infamous “Access Hollywood Tape”. I still remember when that - deeply misogynistic - claim of getting away with sexual assault hit the press. I was sure: This man is never going to be elected; it is just not possible. I was proven wrong. That’s why the quote stuck in my head, as the eternal conundrum of why so many people can vote for a politician who says such deplorable things. (There are other examples in history books; but this one I lived through.) When I wrote the mailing list post, I felt that, in terms of the values we have as OSM, claiming that you can simply ignore our attribution requirements and hoping get away with it, was equally impossible.

… See full entry

In the last year or so I’ve taken an interest in mapping trees. Urban trees, to be more precise; I’d probably not attempt to map a forest that way. I try to record the location, type, and size of each tree. With “type” I mean the species, and “size” I express in height, crown diameter, and circumference of the trunk.

Trees are in many ways an antipole to today’s turbo-charged life. I used to frown when people made a big deal about trees (“OMG they are planning to cut X number of trees for this new railway station”), and I thought what’s the problem, you can just plant some elsewhere. But walking the city with open eyes, I saw many trees that have been where they are for longer than I live, and many that will still be there long after I’m gone. Planting trees is not something for a startup where the venture capitalists demand quick returns. If you plant a tree today, it is the next generation that will be enjoying its shade. And that shade can really make the difference between a livable city and one you’d rather just cross in your air-conditioned automobile.

Why?

In practical terms, if OSM had good data about which streets are lined by really big trees with a dense crown, you could run simulations about city climate with OSM data; you could determine the best routes to walk in the summer, or which pub to go to if you want to enjoy a beer in the shade. (Perhaps I should add an explicit survey date so you can algorithmically extrapolate the tree size.) But going further, if information about trees becomes readily available, people will perhaps appreciate trees more, and think twice before cutting them down to make room for a shopping mall.

But mapping trees also brings me back to the beginnings of OSM. I know nothing about trees.

… See full entry

I have tried, in the past, to explain to people that the board of directors of the OpenStreetMap Foundation is not a group that provides, or should be expected to provide, “leadership”.

There are no people to be led in OpenStreetMap, no worker ants who just wait for a missive from central command to start their contributions. Nor does the board of directors allocate vast amounts of funding to projects deemed worthy of support. The whole OSM Foundation, including its board of directors,is there to keep the lights on in OSM’s server room, and perhaps to fend off the occasional trademark or license violation – but not to “lead” anything.

Which doesn’t stop some people from making a huge cult around this idea of “leadership”. Among the questions asked of candidates to this year’s board election was one that went:

Do you have experience of managing a project or a team of people? Do you have any experience of coaching others to lead (i.e. managing managers)? How long have you been doing these things?

While it doesn’t say so explicitly, it is obvious that whoever asked this question believes that these are important qualities in a board member, and that members should consider this in deciding whom to vote for. And candidates dutifully obliged, listing their previous chief-of-something-or-other postings and leadership experience.

One (European, white, male) mapper was not deterred by this and replied:

No, I’m just a grunt. Despite coming from a relatively middle class background, I wasn’t born to lead the plebs. I’m not a manager, nor have I gone on executive training courses.

This mapper is now on the board of directors.

A mapper from the “Global South”, who expressed unhappiness about the (European/American, white, male) composition of the board, was asked on Twitter if he’d consider standing for election next time, and replied:

I’m not able to run next year because I do not have the leadership skills

… See full entry

Dear Facebook,

you started out as a harmless geek’s wet dream, a site for male college students to rate how sexy they found the women studying with them. You’ve grown up since then, and are now motivated not by adolescent lust but corporate greed. You’ve managed to make headlines as the enabler of genocide[1], the manipulator of elections[2], and posing an unprecedented danger to human rights[3] – among the lesser counts of privacy violation, publishing hate speech, and outright lying to politicians, the press and the public.

Now I cannot know if all this is down to sheer recklessness or just incompetence. For all I know there might be thousands of honest, upright, well-meaning people working for you, all blameless, all just doing their job, and perhaps it is just “the circumstances”, or “a few bad apples”, or “unfortunate events” that lead to all the pain and suffering that Facebook is responsible for.

But I have to judge you as one giant organism. I cannot separate the good from the bad. Facebook is one big black box and it touches things and they turn to ashes.

I don’t want OSM to turn to ashes. So please, Facebook, stop touching OSM. You’ve already done a lot of damage in your bumbling and lying first encounters with us, where you imported tons of computer-generated data and then claimed to know nothing about it. We know you’ve set a couple of untrained college kids to do this[4], given them free rein to disrupt OSM on your payroll. You’ve now switched to using individuals as conduit for your contributions through your “Map with AI” efforts, never giving the wider OSM community a chance to vet this dangerous approach, but nonetheless publicly claiming you were doing this “with OpenStreetMap”. You are not: you are doing this to OpenStreetMap, and you don’t care what it does to our project.

… See full entry

It all started out nice enough, the Knight Foundation paying for a team of professional developers at Mapbox to develop a new, user-friendly website editor to replace the ageing, Flash-based Potlatch. This brought us the iD editor which for roughly six years now has been the default editor we present to new users, and the user friendliness of this endeavour is certainly unparalleled in OSM.

To new users, this editor represents our project and our community. If this editor tells them that they should do something this way or that, they will assume that “OpenStreetMap wants me to do this”. The iD editor is the only editor endorsed by the OSM Foundation in this way, and with great power comes great responsibility.

A responsibility that the iD team is increasingly unable to shoulder.

There wasn’t much to complain during the early years except perhaps the lack of support for one thing or another, cases where everyone including the developers agreed that improvements need to be made. But now that the basic functionality is there, iD developers are starting to believe they have a mandate for more. Rather than just giving users a tool to contribute to OSM, they are directing users to contribute in certain, very specific ways - preferring one tag over another, using one channel of communication with the community instead of another, “upgrading” the work of other users according to rules set out by the editor developers alone, striking deals with commercial validation platforms, loading auxiliary data from Facebook without the user’s consent or any previous discussion, and so on.

… See full entry

You have been