Comments on: OpenStreetMap at the Crossroads https://www.maproomblog.com/2016/08/openstreetmap-at-the-crossroads/ Blogging about maps since 2003 Tue, 24 Jan 2017 23:46:29 +0000 hourly 1 By: Michal Migurski https://www.maproomblog.com/2016/08/openstreetmap-at-the-crossroads/#comment-2 Thu, 18 Aug 2016 02:36:47 +0000 http://www.maproomblog.com/?p=2582#comment-2 Hi Jonathan, thank you for the insightful response! I agree that Tom found the crux of the issue, between mappers who do it for professional reasons and those who do it for personal / hobby ones. I’m grateful to Elder Lemon’s mention of the historical picture in the comments above, and I think that my post is compatible with his perspective. Many projects necessarily start out as craft. Some project successfully move past it.

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!

]]> By: Elder Lemon https://www.maproomblog.com/2016/08/openstreetmap-at-the-crossroads/#comment-1 Wed, 17 Aug 2016 22:39:10 +0000 http://www.maproomblog.com/?p=2582#comment-1 Mr Migurski has wilfully ignored the timeline and the arrows of causality. If it wasn’t for what the craft mappers did in the early days – not just mapping, to demonstrate that it’s gonna happen whether the agencies like it or not, but also lobbying – there would be no present-day open datasets to feed the robots, and the crises would be unmapped.

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.

]]>