Hi Brian,
I appreciate all the effort you underwent with the "river tagging
scheme. I do mean it. And I support it. Now, the process to achieve it
seems ridiculously hard. You say people "reached out across many
channels to discuss the proposed changes", "I had to discuss the
specifics of river tagging with many many people. Those people talked to
other people." They "generated statistics, procedures, and
visualizations of our progress". And in spite of 99% completion I
personally could just go out and tag the old way with anyone having the
right to "correct" it if I was willing to fight for it. This is why the
process is dysfunctional. It is dysfunctional because there is no
established path which people you need to talk to, which software
support you need and how to do it, how many people you need to convince,
etc.
Sometimes you can be lucky. People like you can make a huge effort and
what is proposed is overwhelmingly convincing. I won't deny that in
those cases things can happen. At least from what I see here, if this
isn't the case there is no way to reach any decision that really means
something.
I still don't understand why we are not able to create a space where all
these people you mention can come together, discuss a scheme and the
community finally adopts it - or not. It would be exactly the same as
what you have done but in less time, with less effort, more transparent
an inclusive. A space where regular mappers, software developers and any
other stakeholders know that THIS is the space where we come together to
add, improve, modify things, a space where decisions are made and
everybody can be heard. And most importantly to finally reach a
conclusion on how we want to do things.
Regarding standardization: First of all, I hope we all work on the basis
that we want to improve things. Can you move a ton of sand with a spoon?
Sure, but it will take you days and with an excavator you are done in 5
minutes. My point is that you CAN do something or that somethings WORKS
doesn't mean we can do something or make that somethings works better.
Some time ago I asked Alexander Borsuk (Organic Maps). The context was
the debate on the "contact" controversy but it can be extended to other
less heated topics... (The conversation was in the open OM Telegram
channel and can be found by everyone, so I am not disclosing opinion,
subject to privacy)
The key sentences for me are:
"A bigger problem is different public transport schemes, where it's way
harder to write a "converter" from one into another. For example, subway
map in Vienna was missing because local community decided that it's ok
to have two different level platforms in one stop_area. That is really a
pain."
"...the proper way would be to merge into multiple values for one chosen
tag (and filter duplicate values, of course). That's a bit of a hassle,
but it is solvable."
"Of course it is easier if all tags have the same scheme. Then we don't
spend our time on the scheme differences, focusing on a better product
instead."
Let me ask you then: Can you provide evidence or a few examples in which
tag standardization is harmful or represents any disadvantage?
Cheers
Am 06.11.2022 01:00, schrieb Brian M. Sperlongano:
On Sat, Nov 5, 2022 at 6:45 PM Robin Burek <robin.bu...@gmx.de> wrote:
And if we now get to the point of just "throwing away" the consensus
of 12 years ago.
do we still need the proposal process at all? Because the result from
12 years ago is also completely ignored by you.
it was already decided to deprecate in 2010, but no one has finally
implemented it.
What you are discovering firsthand, are the limits of the proposal
system. Indeed I encountered the same challenges. A proposal compels
nobody to do anything. A proposal is nothing more than a communication
tool to demonstrate support for an idea to other players in the
community. It's a signal to other parts of the ecosystem. In other
words, if the participants thought something was a good idea a decade
ago, but the rest of the community (mappers, renderers, editors, data
consumers) didn't adopt the change, in reality, then the persuasive
value of that approved proposal from 12 years ago has faded
significantly.
In this community, we seem to be moving further and further into a
system where improvements to the system are massively prevented and
established double tagging is simply left in place instead of finally
being cleaned up.
I don't agree this has "moved" at all! The project has always operated
this way. Eliminating duplicate tagging that has been supplanted by a
newer approved tag is obscenely difficult. I led an effort to resolve
duplicate river area tagging to 99% completion[1]. which was also a
change that was the subject of an approved 2010 proposal. Despite the
approved proposal, it was still controversial, with some community
members disagreeing about exactly what was approved due to how the
proposal was worded and debating whether the old approval was still
valid or even a good idea.
The river project accomplished its goal because enough mappers cared
about it to have community discussions about river tagging in countries
worldwide. They reached out across many channels to discuss the
proposed changes and the value it brought. And even with that, some
people disagreed, and we had some rough spots early on in the process.
The retagging was followed up with proposals and PRs to change software
support across the project's tooling to drop the old tag.
I was the biggest advocate for the change, but it only happened because
I was met with strong agreement. Building consensus is hard. I had to
write really clear and persuasive documentation. I had to discuss the
specifics of river tagging with many many people. Those people talked
to other people. Other mappers generated statistics, procedures, and
visualizations of our progress. At one point, I even gave a "Mappy
Hour" talk[2] on the project.
If that sounds like a lot of work -- it was! And just for a single
tag! But THAT is the scope and scale of effort that it's going to take
to change tagging that has tens to hundreds of thousands of objects
tagged. You need overwhelming agreement AND enough support from
motivated community members to make all the pieces of the ground game
come together. Is this an indication that our community is
dysfunctional? Maybe. But it's 100% the reality that we live in if
you want to accomplish wide-ranging change.
This, by the way, is one reason why certain companies refuse to use
OSM data. The data structure is unnecessarily inflated and complicated
by such duplications. If we don't stick to our own conventions and
enforce consensus, perhaps the consensus process should be abolished
altogether?
This point would be much stronger if you could point to a specific
company that refused to use OSM data. I've asked for concrete examples
about why our free-for-all is a problem, but I always seem to get
hand-waving instead about the general benefits of standardization[3],
which is the reason I've submitted a question to the candidates in the
OSMF election to see where they stand on it[4]. While I don't like
duplicate tagging, I have so far not seen a convincing argument that
it's particularly troublesome, and this is speaking as someone that's
built and operates a service that uses OSM data.
If you want to propose tagging for something that's never been mapped
before, a proposal is a great way to ensure that the tag you're making
up is reasonable. If you want to make a change of significant scope
and scale to tagging on the project, you must understand that a
proposal is only a single tool to generate support for your idea, which
must be part of a broader effort towards consensus-building and
community action.
[1]
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Waterways/River_modernization
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5YwXDKGr2Y
[3]
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2022-October/066238.html
[4]
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Foundation/AGM2022/Election_to_Board#Question:_Tagging_Standards
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