Comment by emacsen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by emacsen | Hacker News Reader

I've been out of the mapping world for quite a few years now, but at one time I was a prolific mapper in OSM.

I wrote a post on my blog about my concerns for the project, and some ideas for improvement:

https://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2018/02/16/osm-is-in-trouble/

It was not met well. I was (and still sadly am) subject to personal attacks by certain members of the OpenStreetMap community.

I don't know much about Overture Map, but standardization of tags, and a more sophisticated data model would both be very welcome, and make a map built on this data easier to work with.

More to the point, it's never been the technical issues that have held OSM back. Instead, as my post tried to point out- the technical issues stemmed from issues with leadership.

The post here mentions issues with the OSMF. At the time I wrote my post- the OSMF was largely symbolic, and certain community members simply held the key to certain aspects of the project- everything from servers, to software used, and more.

It was a huge mess, and I'm cautiously optimistic in seeing something new come around.

I remember reading your blog post a year or so ago when I was really starting to dive into OSM contributions and community. I guess I don't have much to say other than thank you for caring about the future of OSM (as many do) and writing your post. I'm sorry to hear you've been attacked!! I'm hopeful too that much needed political and technical changes will come eventually, even if late. Thank you for your contributions to the community and data.

There are reasons why the community leadership was poor. It had to do with both the culture of the project (being a grass roots project) and then a fear of change.

That fear came from lack of vision. Without a vision to to work towards, forces tended to see the best path forward as "No change", since no change is safest.

I hope that this new entity can do something good with this data, and use their vision to build something really great!

> a fear of change

Very common, in any human community, but pure poison, in a technical one.

Insistence on structure, is often derided as “fear of change,” but it’s a very different animal.

Sorry to hear about your experience, but I have dealt with similar behavior. In my case, I’m actually a fairly cantankerous, stubborn bastard, and bulled my way through.

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