On Dec 21, 2020, at 2:10 AM, Anders Torger <and...@torger.se> wrote: > I'm sorry if you experience it as that. Maybe I'm a bit too confrontational, > and maybe I should express myself with a softer tone, I guess my style has > become a bit shaped by to how we communicate engineer to engineer in > programming projects.
Anders, I’ve been an employee at Apple, Adobe and many startups (in Silicon Valley and my university city nearby on the coast), as an engineer, to other engineers. I have been a team leader, a manager and a director — on dozens of programming projects. I DON’T “guess” at your style and if you worked with me I’d give you as stern a talking to behind a closed door, just the two of us. That’s not as I do here on-list, precisely because YOU chose the more public venue, but also because you don’t answer my polite, private email. > That is the jargon can be quite "hard" with many strong opinions clashing, > but it's nothing personal. Your jargon isn’t what I experience in professional software engineering settings, it is what I hear from smart-aleck, spoiled children or teenagers. I don’t take it personally, that’s a mistake on your part. I find it wholly ineffective. Because it is. > I've seen others in this list use the same "tough" way to voice their > opinions so I thought it was okay. As long as one focus on the merits of the > arguments, have an open mind to change opinion, is open to solutions one > didn't think about, and don't go personal it usually works well. While on occasion here, I have seen a certain swagger and displays of, let’s say, “attitude,” I haven’t seen the constant, aggressive, highly negative “toughness” that you bring. It is relentless. What others do is ask questions. By contrast, what you do is complain and say what is wrong with how we already do things. We’ve gotten a lot done and have much to do yet, but we partly do that with dialog, not by giving cookies to children. > I can try go softer in jargon, but it won't change the fact that the reason I > get on this list is when things either don't work or I don't find an answer > to some question. So it will be "complaints" in some way or another. I think > I do provide some solutions too though, although some may not be easy to > realize or is not likable by everyone. The problem isn’t jargon. I understand jargon, the list understands jargon. (And if or when we don’t we ask for clarification, usually getting it. That’s part of how good dialog works). The problem is that your complaints to this list are nearly completely lacking in “good questions” that any of us can field (or, given your poor attitude, really want to). They are as I have described them. Only very rarely are they well-posed questions. Please endeavor to remedy that and I virtually guarantee that you will find people who reply with thoughtful answers, or at the very least helpful direction. But plain and simple, nobody likes a complainer. > That there are many "complaints" coming from me now is because I currently > map *a lot* and mainly nature (which wasn't an original goal for OSM but > something that has come later, so it's understandable that there are issues) Please be careful about assumptions that you make and how they affect you: this is part of what is ineffective with your interactions with this list. OSM doesn’t need you to make excuses (like that you or anybody “understands that “there are issues”). > and therefore come across many issues which have no clear answers. To you, now, when you haven’t clearly and politely asked your question. Try this: before posting your “issues,” distill them down to one or two well-crafted questions that someone on this list MIGHT be able to answer succinctly. Before you actually write it, consider some possible answers. Ask: might it be X, is Y even possible, does Z seem like a feasible direction to explore if this has never been done in OSM before? Like that. It works! > This is a list for tag discussion, strategy and related tools. Issues bubble > up to here. If I had a clear answer I wouldn't even need to post, and there > are many of those too (ie where I've found working solutions on the wiki or > through OSM help). I understand how that works, you are correct. This IS a (good) place to turn when the wiki or other sources do not satisfy your craving to know how to do something in OSM. It is HOW one does that questioning here that (partly) determines how likely you are to get an answer. Well-crafted, judgement-free, lacking-in-assumptions questions do well. Non-questions that are judgmental and assume (a little, a lot) do poorly, as you have discovered. > The reason I don't have a clear answer is that there is several issues with > the current approaches, which I described in my post. You can describe these “issues” in the course of the dialog with someone who engages you here if and as they actually provide a blockade to forward movement. Doing so beforehand is putting roadblocks in your own way, sometimes needlessly. Haven’t you ever been surprised at discovering that what you think is wrong or broken about something isn’t even true in the first place, due to wrong assumptions on your part? I have. We all have. This is part of a learning process that refines our thinking to avoid assumptions. Of course, we must assume some things to posit something new. Mostly, these are things which have already revealed themselves to us as “already true,” so “safe to assume” about. More than a few of your assumptions are specious. Please learn to assume less about “things OSM.” It’s OK to assume about what you are certain you already know about mapping, or math, or computer or data science or mountaineering in Sweden. > If OSM intends to be for all globally, there is a need to consider local > needs and respect local knowledge, not only consider a feature relevant if it > is has global spread. Maybe these natural=fell issues are specific to > Scandinavia (although I think Great Britian has similar), but they are real > here. Good, now we’re talking. I think natural=fell is widespread around the world. OSM must accommodate nuances about this if there is “more to it” than we now document or use in the map. We have methods to do that, we have for many years. For especially-local or even hyper-local map features, OSM does have plastic tagging that allows us to coin new tags for such things. This happens. Sometimes mappers who do this make a quick (and rough) job of it and this needs refining. This happens, too. Better is a thoughtful (and not as rough) job of it and it needs little or no refining. This is called “design,” and there is poor design and good design. > I try to make a case that it would be wise to render natural=fell, and > describe why. There's a closed issue report on OSM-Carto github about this > (yes I actually do some research before I post), and my arguments were shaped > by that thread, to proactively meet what came up there so we don't need to > have exactly the same discussion all over again. Thank you. I truly appreciate your diligence. It can be helpful to link such things, as people do here with * and [1] tags that link such things. This gives background and context to a thread that lets others pick up the pieces and jump in as fully informed as they might be (you’re helping them do so, so offer the help they need, please. We are not mind readers). > However, that I have a suggested solution doesn't mean that I'm open to other > suggestions, maybe an alpine tag for indicating nature above tree line for > example. I think it's however very difficult and not worthwhile to go very > specific for our fell habitat, which I also described in the original post. There is an effective way to strike a balance in offering what might be an overwhelming amount of background (especially of “what you know to be true” and “how things ought to be”) and simply presenting a question about how you might go about doing something better in OSM. If you find (here, via dialog) someone who can engage with you on your well-presented topics, well, "you’re off to the races” (productive dialog begins). If not, you are having what is effectively a one-sided conversation. Engage first. Please. > Heath below the tree line is quite easy to identify, as it's surrounded by > forest. Heath above the tree line is pretty chaotic, speckled with bare rock > and scree. Hence a generic tag "fell" would suit perfectly well, and is > already in existence, but it needs rendering in OSM-Carto to show mappers > that there is backing for this tag. "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” I have wishes that Carto renders this, or that, or in a particular way. But wishing that renderings are this or that really isn’t what OSM is about. Entering true-to-the-ground map data is. Rendering is a bonus you might or might not get to your heart’s desire. If it is, that’s pretty neat when it happens, isn’t it?! If not, complaining here is not the solution. Thanks for answering and your attention. I really do appreciate good dialog. SteveA _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
