Greetings, everyone, I am Fazle Rabbi from OpenStreetMap Bangladesh Foundation (OSMBDF), the representative of OpenStreetMap Bangladesh community. I'm also a member of the core team of the community, commonly known as "BHOOT" to the global OSM community.
For some time, there has been a lot of discussion and debates on how – or rather, if – we should localize names for Bangladesh (Bengali). Recently, we have seen a lot of changes from a few contributors who changed the `name` tag from English (Roman) to Bengali. We agree with the policy that names should be localized, but which tag we should use is up for discussion. We, the community of Bangladesh, have been following a style for more than 4 years now to map Bangladesh with English (Roman) for `name` tag and Bengali for `name:bn` tag. The community have come to this conclusion after many trials and errors and thoughtful consideration that `name` tag should be had the name in English (Roman). But we made a mistake. We did all the discussion internally as all the initial contributors used to sit together in a small room. What we should have done is discuss it in a more appropriate manner where anyone – past, present, future contributors – would be able to raise their voices. We would like to apologize for our mistake and take steps to fix that problem by starting a discussion here to make a string tagging guideline for Bangladesh. The OSM community in Bangladesh is one of the strongest communities in the world, and community members have gathered under the wing of OSMBDF, the legally registered entity in Bangladesh, and waiting for the local chapter recognition from OSMF. The members of our community are mainly connected via a Facebook group. Though this mailing list was set up at a very initial stage, it was not very active. Recently, on the State of the Map Asia 2019 held in Bangladesh, we decided to make the mailing list more active and the core communication channel. We would like all of our community members to engage in the mailing for this kind of discussions rather than using the Facebook group. The OSM community and, as a part of that larger community, we, the members of OSM Bangladesh community, strongly believe that the main site at openstreetmap.org is a geo-spatial data repository which is used by many other apps, websites and service providers, but not as a map. I would like to draw your attention to two sentences in the [About Page of OpenStreetMap](https://www.openstreetmap.org/about): - "OpenStreetMap powers map data on thousands of websites, mobile apps, and hardware devices" - "OpenStreetMap is built by a community of mappers that contribute and maintain data about roads, trails, cafés, railway stations, and much more, all over the world." It is a data repository, not a map. The reasons we have agreed upon using English name in `name` tag are: - The rendering problem with Bengali makes a horrible UX experience. The rendering style used by OSM main site is openstreetmap-carto that had a problem with rendering Bengali. The problem is fixed recently which is a great news. While it is convenient to use from a desktop or laptop at home, unfortunately, it is impossible to use on the go. Most of the people use mobile apps to navigate on the road, but the large array of the most-used mobile applications like OsmAnd, Maps.Me, Magic Earth that still can't render the Bengali characters make it unable to use for the users. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) made a map for disaster response that is available in OSM main site as an additional layer, which also can't render Bengali. And that makes it a challenge in times of disaster response. Screenshot for reference: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Zj9rwFsG76H3ZPReA - Aid agencies like UN, MSF, Red Crescent have run many projects to map large portions of the country and given those data to OSM, which makes them big contributors and users of the OSM data. But this data becomes useless if all `name` tags are replaced with Bengali. As per, it came to us, WFP recently faced the issue while they tried out using the dataset in one of their projects. OSM is an open community where everything gets done by discussing, and we have tried to follow that convention. When we noticed the `name` tag problem, we requested the editor to change it by putting the Bengali value in `name:bn` tag. We are very disheartened to see when they changed OSM Wiki to justify theirs without community consent or even discussion, which is not appreciated in an open community. Moreover, the English names were deleted altogether, which is problematic, because there is no fall-back policy for applications that can render `name:en` tags. When we asked them about the rendering problem of the `name` tag in the changeset comments, they replied that it is not their concern and the developer of those apps should be asked to fix it. A very valid point! But a large number of users are foreign people, so we can't just ask them to learn Bengali all on a sudden, can we? Imagine that to see the map of Denmark you have to learn Danish. Not so convenient, is it? To maintain a more transient conversion we requested to use English in changeset comments which was ignored altogether. We are strongly recommending that the language of the communication should be in English for better transparency. Today we are inviting you all to take part here in this discussion in shaping the tagging policy of Bangladesh. We also have a close communication about this issue with OSMF data working group and will also follow up with them about it. On State of the Map Asia 2019 (SotM Asia 2019), the Bangladesh community has made a decision that, in the true spirit of openness, everything related to OSM in Bangladesh should be discussed in this mailing list. Anything without prior discussion in the mailing list would be treated as vandalism and strict actions would follow. We will request you all to invite other contributes and stakeholders to subscribe to the mailing list and, for instant messaging, join our Telegram group <https://t.me/OpenStreetMapBD>. Thank you! Regards Fazle Rabbi On behalf of, OpenStreetMap Bangladesh Foundation (OSMBDF)
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