Alex, the LWG would love to work with you on fixing any confusing if you're
interested in resuming work on the guideline - currently it lies abandoned with
the feedback needing to be integrated.
On Oct 22, 2014, at 05:33 AM, Alex Barth <a...@mapbox.com> wrote:
Steve - would love to work on fixing the license with you so addresses in OSM
make sense in the first place. Right now you practically can't use OSM for
permanent geocoding. See also:
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2014-July/007900.html
On Wednesday, October 22, 2014, Steve Coast <st...@asklater.com> wrote:
Why are we here on these mailing lists? Why do we spend so much time making
maps? I think ultimately because it’s fun. It’s a neat hobby and we’re making
the world a slightly better place.
You need the right environment for things to be fun. Someone has to install the
toys in the playground. Someone needs to pay for the slides and install the
swings so that the kids can run around. Then someone else needs to fix them
when they fail and make sure you don’t break your neck unexpectedly.
In the past I’ve tried hard to make OSM a fun playground, by doing things like
taking all the warning labels off and letting people do whatever they like.
Things like open tagging or letting anyone edit, which were crazy ideas in
2004. I’ve also at times been responsible for it not being fun. Partly because
I was a kid learning the hard way and partly because sometimes you need to make
decisions.
I agree that in some ways OSM isn’t a fun playground right now. But that
doesn’t mean it can’t be again.
We had a lot of fun with our swings and our slides. But now there are a lot
more people to join the fun from far away places and we’re older. Maybe we now
prefer bumper cars and video games to the old swings and slides.
We should keep the swings and the slides. People new to the playground will
still enjoy them. But we should also build a bumper car arena and maybe a video
game arcade. Sometimes we might go back and play on the slide too. We need some
new skills to build these new toys.
Together, we need a mission and then a couple of course corrections to make it
happen.
I think addressing should be our mission. We built the worlds best display map
already. We won. If you print out any OSM map of practically anywhere, it’s the
best. But we can’t find anything on it without comprehensive and global
addressing information. It’s the hidden data behind the map we now need to go
after. All the other things we need to do are also good things. Diversity in
all it’s forms, faster servers, better tools, easier documentation and more.
A clear mission provides a framework and guidance for achieving those things.
“Map more stuff” got us very, very far. But now, we should focus on what’s
stopping us replacing proprietary maps. And that is addressing.
How would we go achieve that?
There are two basic fixes. Make the board functional and give the board
bandwidth.
The board is too big. It grew for good reasons but now it’s just hard to
achieve anything. Seven people mean that if everyone speaks for five minutes in
a conversation on some issue, you use over half an hour. In an hour-long
meeting that means you can barely discuss two things. Ignoring all the other
issues, just the pure mechanics shows you how hard it is to talk through
something let alone achieve a consensus. The board needs to be 3 people. 5 at
maximum.
Being on the board is a difficult job, especially as a volunteer. Most people
aren’t used to such roles. They may think like I did that they need to please
everybody all the time. They aren’t able to attend meetings because they have a
day job and other life commitments. The board needs to meet in person regularly
with a facilitator and also have guidance about what it means to be on a board.
We can’t expect volunteers to naturally figure all this stuff out by themselves
and then also devote the time to also achieve goals.
The board needs paid staff. There are a variety of things those paid staff can
do which the board can decide. It’s clear that there are things that volunteers
don’t have fun doing and therefore they don’t happen at all, but are still very
important for a functioning organization. Having paid staff isn’t about
deprecating volunteer involvement, it’s about plugging the gaps. It’s not a
perfect solution but the alternative is to rely on companies to do many of
these things, and that really isn’t perfect either.
In terms of the mechanics,
1. Change the mission statement of OSM to be something like “The world’s best
addressable map”
2. The board figures out how to voluntarily shrink to 3-5 people, and, meets in
person 2-4 times a year
3. Consulting with the community on exact roles and remit, hire 1-3 people [*]
Together, we could do this in 6-12 months and finish addressing in 1-3 years.
At that point we wouldn’t have just made the world slightly better, we would
have put a big dent in the universe. Nobody would use a closed map ever again,
and it would be people like you that made it happen.
So why don’t we go do that?
—
A digression.
In Peter Thiel’s book “Zero-to-One” he catalogs the fate of HP’s board. HP used
to be a very innovative place and then it wasn’t any more. Thiel posits that
there were two board factions at a critical time. On the one hand there were
people who wanted to chart out things to build and then go build them. On the
other hand there was a group who felt the board wasn’t competent to do that,
and they should focus on making sure all the rules were being followed. The
latter apparently won.
What happened next is that HP's board blew up over wiretapping in search of
someone leaking things to the press. HP collapsed in value making sure all the
rules were followed while people who build new things did very well, like Apple.
Let’s not be HP. Let’s be Apple.
Steve
[*] - I could speak at length on funding, but I don’t think finding money will
be a hard problem.
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