The audacity of OSM’s early participants to map the whole earth lay the foundation for what came after. Those of us who use OSM for our work today owe those early developers and mappers a debt of gratitude. However, we also use it *for our work*, and it sits further to the right on Simon Wardley’s evolution axis that I referenced late in the post. For robot/crisis purposes, OpenStreetMap must be an effective utility. The people behind these uses may not be disjoint sets, but the uses themselves often are: one set of uses focuses on building, construction, and novelty. The other treats it as a platform for higher-level activities like Red Cross’s crisis preparedness or Facebook’s desire to find its next billion users.

I am equally grateful to the creators of other modern utilities like the internet or public transit, but in my normal day-to-day capacity as a user I need for them to just work.

The craft-focused historical leadership of the OpenStreetMap Foundation is underserving OSM’s future potential in two key ways that I address in my post. The license is being inadequately defended/explained for new contexts, and the community’s various gathering places like Talk are being insufficiently managed for the benefit of new arrivals to the project. In essence, the project is welcoming only to those similar to the original creators: curious, passionate, tech-driven, motivated participants with a high tolerance for a vague legal framework and plenty of free time for years-long mailing list arguments. Years of diversity & inclusion efforts in the U.S. technology community have highlighted some of the ways that these characteristics are unevenly distributed.

Thanks for opening the comments, and for bringing back The Map Room after such a lengthy hiatus!

Mr Migurski doesn’t offer any evidence whatsoever that the craft mappers, and the crisis mappers, and the *people* behind the robots are disjoint sets, nor does he demonstrate that there is any incompatibility between them.

But there’ll be a heck of a lot of conflict between me and Mr Migurski if I ever meet him.