Mapper 1 (to DWG):

Hey Data Working Group, this guy Mapper 2 is reverting almost all edits on his home turf and doesn’t respond to questions. We’ve discussed him in the forum and others have the same problem with him.

DWG (to Mapper 2):

Hey there Mapper 2, is it true that you’re reverting all edits in your area?

Mapper 2 (to DWG):

Yeah but they’re all idiots who don’t know the area and local practice. I told them they’re doing it wrong but they won’t listen.

DWG (to Mapper 2):

But what’s wrong about these houses that you have reverted here?

Mapper 2 (to DWG):

Ah, they’re breaking so much of my mapping, I can’t be bothered to look at the details.

DWG (to Mapper 2):

Please stop these wholesale reverts, and engage in a discussion with the community. Maybe they’re not the idiots you think they are. Here’s a forum thread that you could participate in.

(time passes)

Mapper 1 (to DWG):

Hey DWG, Mapper 2 is still reverting stuff without talking to us.

DWG (public blocking message to Mapper 2):

Dear Mapper 2, please stop wholesale reverts of edits in your area, and engage in discussion with the community if you have issues.

Mapper 2 (to DWG):

This is outrageous! You’re publicly criticising me! You’re taking sides! You don’t understand anything! I’ve had it with OSM, I’m leaving, good bye.

Of course we use a lot more words in reality, and try to talk them out of leaving in a huff, but we have indeed lost a couple of people that way. The sad thing is that these are often good and diligent mappers with excellent first-hand knowledge of their local area; they watch everything that goes on in OSM and they are really concerned about the quality of the data in their region. These are the kinds of people that can really boost our data quality – if only they could be made to play well with the rest of the community!

These people are protective of their work – too protective. And they believe that they are right. When they leave, they are frustrated; they fear that without their continued watch OSM is condemned to mediocrity.

There is probably a grain of truth in that. It is quite possible that in the immediate aftermath of the power mapper leaving, data quality in the region suffers. But new mappers – more mappers! – will join, and instead of a rigidly curated and over-protected landscape in which they daren’t touch anything, they will find a living project that invites them to participate. Maybe there is mediocrity in that, but it is sustainable – in stark contrast to data curated by one person alone according to their own rules.

Making everyone see that is one of the continuing challenges faced by the Data Working Group. We don’t want to lose good people; we want them to understand that there’s more to improving OpenStreetMap than mastering tags and relations. OpenStreetMap is a social project too, and we will have to continue to remind people of that.

Having said that, even among experienced OSM mappers I sometimes detected a hint of despair: “We’re never going to get all those house numbers, not without an import anyway.” – This struck me as atypical for a project with a “yes we can” attitude like ours. So I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation for Germany. There are probably around 40 million addresses in Germany, and we’ve got 40k people who have edited the OSM map here. Now if every one of them were to add a thousand addresses…

Until now, I had mapped addresses only occasionally; now I decided to put in a litte more effort. How hard could it be? Like in the old days when we still mapped missing streets with a GPS, whenever I went somewhere on foot or by bike that didn’t yet have house numbers, I prepared a little printout, maybe a small deviation, and pencilled in a few. And like in the old days, after a while my standard places were complete and I was excited if an errand led me to a place that I wouldn’t normally go to and that was lacking house numbers. (I also cheated a bit, and printed out maps for some areas where I had friends and family, asking them to fill in a couple numbers.)

I had expected it to be a rather boring affair but it wasn’t really. Most streets do have some little secret they want you to discover: house 7a in the back here, house 126 with the side entrance there, or house 26 which looks like it belongs to a different street but doesn’t.

It took me three weeks of that kind of casual house number mapping to collect “my” 1,000 addresses. (Of course that’s only because I was “standing on the shoulders of giants” – all of the streets and most of the buildings were already there so I really only had to fill in the details.)

I still don’t think that addresses are of paramount importance. But I think I’ll carry on recording them on the side, and occasionally involving friends and family as I did, and I hope that a few others will join me in that endeavour – if only to prove wrong the sentiment that “we can never get enough addresses through crowdsourcing”.

It’s like in the old days really, when people said that OSM is never going to work.

Have you got your 1,000 house numbers already?

I’m not anti business. I confess that my output on mailing lists and other forms of OSM project communication may be large, but anyone with a pair of eyes will find that, for example in the license discussion, I have often argued for the business side. For as long as I can think, I vehemently fought the idea that “nobody should make money from our work”, an idea that was and still is occasionally voiced by community members, notwithstanding the fact even the old CC-BY-SA license allowed commercial use.

The one thing that I do regularly say, and where this “anti business” idea might come from, is this: OSM is not a business (and neither is the the OSMF). We are a movement, or a mass membership organisation. In my eyes, the main difference between us and Google Map Maker is not that they have a proprietary license and ours is open. The main difference lies one level deeper: They are ultimately driven by the stock market and we’re not.

Making this distinction is not anti-business; it is just about saying things as they are. Organisations driven by the stock market have other kinds of goals, are optimizing for different time frames, have other forms of management, a different type of competition, a different constituency, a completely different set of rules and values. There’s also more at stake – if Google goes bankrupt, lots of people lose their jobs, but if OSM breaks down then a different group of people will just carry on where we left off.

I’m all in favour for working with businesses who can help us make OpenStreetMap better known or more widely used, or give us access to data or help us write code. Any such cooperation will only profit from getting the basic facts right: You are a business, we are not; your goal is to make money, our goal is to make a map – and now let’s see how we can do something together that helps us both! It doesn’t help anyone if OSM tries to act like a business. Dealing with OSM will always be totally different from dealing with a commercial map data provider. Our best way to be business friendly is to explain to businesses how we work – to make them understand, and ultimately embrace, the ways in which OSM is special.

The first thing I noticed is that there’s no established culture or mode of email discussion and decision making. I had, perhaps naively, assumed that board members would of course discuss all the important issues facing OSM(F) on the board mailing list and hammer out board positions together, with one guy suggesting A, the other preferring B, a third suggesting a compromise, and so on. I had expected email, and the board mailing list, to be an important tool of board decision making but it doesn’t seem to be – those who occasionally read my mailing list contributions will perhaps not be surprised that I have already been asked to use up less bandwidth on the board mailing list. The best we’ve managed so far is to agree that we shouldn’t rush something and rather discuss at the next board meeting. As soon as anything sounds remotely contended, the knee-jerk reaction is “let’s discuss that at the face-to-face meeting” (which will take place early November in Berlin). It’s going to be my first meeting of that kind so I’ll give the old-time board members the benefit of doubt; maybe those meetings are really the magic pill that makes any future discussion unnecessary because we’re all on the same page. We’ll see.

One issue that has popped up and that I can’t quite get my head around yet is confidentiality. It seems that not everyone on the board is sure whether they can trust the full board with sensitive information because technically none of us has signed any agreement saying they’ll not publish the lot. This has even led to the strange situation that I, the organisation’s secretary, have not been given access to the list of members when I requested it.

If you read back on the election manifestos of the current board members, transparency or accountability has featured in most of them. I feel very strongly that the board must have a close and trusted relationship with the OSMF members, and the OSM project community as a whole. Such a relationship cannot flourish if information only flows on a “need to know” basis; a terse list of meeting minutes once a month is certainly not enough to know what the board is up to, or to judge if those board members that you have elected are actually living up to your expectations. So we need to find ways to let the community follow our work as OSMF board.

I think there are many good reasons for making all board work public – mailing list, internal documents, transcripts of all meetings. In my opinion, many of the less fortunate board decisions in the past could have been avoided if those who drove them had known that the project would be pointing the finger at them for what they said later. I tend to be especially sceptical of any kind of secret negotiations between OSMF and external entities; I think that the first thing you have to understand about OSM is that it is a mass movement and you cannot negotiate in secret with a mass movement. It should be OSMF’s role to educate people about this, and not take part in some press circus where information is carefully shaped for greater effect.

On the other hand, I’ve read through a number of statutes, articles, and rules that govern various organisations I consider similar to ours, and most of them actually swear their boards to secrecy. Even in organisations like Wikimedia that support open projects, all “board stuff” is confidential by default. And I can see confidentiality being required in a delicate case, for example where privacy is involved. Or during initial contact with a business who might come to us asking not to be identified. (I think any detailed negotiations with unnamed third parties must be avoided but as long as we just spend a couple minutes writing an email back, maybe that doesn’t mean we need to publish who they were.)

Secrecy and confidentiality do have their place in OSMF board work, but they must always be weighed against the cause of transparency. Anything we keep secret from our members and from the OSM project increases the distance between us, and therefore we must only keep things secret if there’s a very important reason to. Confidentiality must never be used to cover up a blunder or to keep our membership from asking uncomfortable questions – it must be the exception, not the rule.

Some people would probably favour blanket board confidentiality rules that would make even this blog post impossible, in which I have said a few things about board work. Others would like all board work to be public. In my election manifesto I said that board would do well to give themselves some rules, and I am in the process of drafting just such a document, one that would also try to strike the necessary balance between transparency and confidentiality. I hope it’ll be ready in time for discussion at the Berlin meeting.

I think this is exaggerated. But it is an interesting opportunity to discuss who should be running OSM(F), and how.

There was an event called WhereCampTB a couple months ago, from which someone sent this tweet, potentially a quote from one of the talks given there:

I quite enjoyed reading a recent article by Joel Spolsky, a software engineer and writer and one of the guys behind Stack Overflow. It is called The Management Team and it’s about managing IT startups. Even though I’m usually adamant that a nonprofit like OSM is a completely different kind of organisation than a business startup, I found some marvels that I believe apply to OSM:

Thus, the upside-down pyramid. Stop thinking of the management team at the top of the organization. Start thinking of the software developers, the designers, …, as the top of the organization.

The “management team” isn’t the “decision making” team. It’s a support function. You may want to call them administration instead of management, which will keep them from getting too big for their britches.

Administrators aren’t supposed to make the hard decisions. They don’t know enough. All those super genius computer scientists that you had to recruit from MIT at great expense are supposed to make the hard decisions. That’s why you’re paying them. Administrators exist to move the furniture around so that the people at the top of the tree can make the hard decisions.

This is a little how I’d like to see the OSMF (minus the “paying” bit maybe) – as administrators, as moving the furniture around so that the brilliant people who do all the work don’t have to bother with that.

I’ve been thinking that OSMF should be more like a talent scout, a catalyst, or a matchmaker. I think that there are lots of great people in OSM and on its margins, people who each have part of what is needed: Some have a machine with connectivity, some have an interesting problem, some have brains, some have money. But despite the many means of communication we have in OSM, they often don’t find each other – or they suffer from the misconception that they somehow need to go through OSMF.

Jochen and I have gone through a time where almost everything that was done in the German community went through us, one way or the other, because people had come to expect us being involved, and if we were not involved then it probably wasn’t the good/right/proper thing. At one point we decided to stay out of lots of things on purpose just so that people learned that it was perfectly ok to organise a hack weekend without asking us first. Of course we felt honoured to be considered important, but there was no way we could do all the things that were necessary, or even coordinate them.

If someone is unhappy about an aspect of OSM and their thought process goes anything like “OSMF board needs to X”, then they’re either to lazy to do it themselves, or they hope that board’s blessing will absolve them from responsibility vis-a-vis the community.

We can’t expect OSMF board to lead or even manage the project – that would not only be beyond the capabilities of a bunch of volunteers who have day jobs, families, and maybe even other hobbies besides mapping and coding for OSM, it would also be beyond OSMF’s mandate. But what OSMF can do is help create an atmosphere in which people feel confident to just do things, and help people find each other – match the guy with the clever idea with another person who has the hosting capability. Hook up the company wanting to spend a little of their sponsorship budget on OSM with a couple of enthusiasts who build something that benefits us all (and tell the corporate guys that yes, it’s ok to work with the community, you don’t need to go to lunch with OSMF board execs before you can do something for OSM).

If you’ve read this far then you have understood that I’m a proponent of “small OSMF” – an organisation with very little power and very little resources, just (to borrow another old OSM mantra) “the simplest thing that could possibly work”. I abhor the idea of large and powerful organisations controlling volunteer work; and I mostly do so because of the question of governance. As long as you have a small organisation with little clout and a small budget run by volunteers, there’s not much use in fighting over control of it. If you are a member of OSMF board today, then even if you were a crook, your options of manipulating OSM into doing something, or furthering your own business, or of creating a nice and well-funded post for yourself are rather slim and it’s unlikely to be worth the effort.

Now you might say, and I know that many of my countrymen will, that even a large and influentual OSMF could benefit the project if properly overseen and run in a democratic fashion. Have an elected board, get some funding, hire an executive director and a few technicians, and off we go. If OSMF is more or less just the “voice of the project” determined by democratic processes and elections, then what can possibly go wrong?

Robert Michels, a German sociologist of the early 20th century, wrote down the answer to this, and called it the Iron Law of Oligarchy. What this essentially says is that, even if you have the best intentions, any large organisation will sooner or later become encrusted in bureaucracy and controlled by an entrenched elite:

Michels stressed several factors that underlie the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Darcy K. Leach summarized them briefly as: “Bureaucracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts.” Any large organization, Michels pointed out, has to create a bureaucracy in order to maintain its efficiency as it becomes larger – many decisions have to be made daily that cannot be made by large numbers of disorganized people. For the organization to function effectively, centralization has to occur and power will end up in the hands of a few. Those few – the oligarchy – will use all means necessary to preserve and further increase their power.

Michel’s work is a century old but I’ve seen his “iron law” alive and kicking in more than one organisation that I was involved with in the past. I think that diversity, plurality, and openness are what have made OSM great and I wouldn’t want to see it ruined by a band of “leaders”. OSMF should remain the small-scale organisation it is today, and be very clear about the fact that OSMF is a tiny little part of the OSM universe, and in no way “leading OSM”.

The reason is that the amount of building data in OSM is exploding, mainly due to building imports.

Building imports are relatively easy to do – you don’t usually have large objects where multipolygons have to be constructed, and they are not usually interconnected with other, already existing data. Buildings make a map look nice; everybody wants to have them shown. There seems to be a wide-ranging consensus that mappers should not be bothered with something as mind-numbing as drawing buildings, so an import is the only solution. (I’ll come back to that later.)

I’ll take France as an example because they have imported a lot of buildings and because they’re next door from where I live. The France dataset has 210 million nodes and 30 million ways in OSM. Of these, 144 million nodes and 27 million ways are used for buildings; that means that if you download French data from OSM, 80% of it will be buildings, and 20% will be “other stuff”, like streets, cycle routes, or POIs. This has knock-on effects on everything else of course. Simplifying only slightly, this means that of all the time the OSM severs spend on rendering the map of France, 80% is spent on drawing buildings. It means that if you have to wait one minute for your editor to download an area in France you want to edit, 50 seconds are spent assembling and transferring buildings. It means that if you carefully selected a small area for editing because otherwise your editor gives you an error message saying “the area you selected for download contains too much data”, you could work on an area six times as large if it weren’t for the buildings.

I’m not saying we should get rid of buildings. But I want to draw attention to the fact that they are, for the most part, expensive eye candy. We want our data to be the basis for beautiful maps, so eye candy must be permitted, maybe even welcomed – but it comes at a price, and it is transforming OSM. Currently we don’t differentiate thematic “layers” in OSM. The planet file, the API “map” call, the export tab, the data layer, and Geofabrik’s download service – in all these places you get “everything”, and if you want layers of any kind, you have to sort things yourself. But this will not make sense or be possible for much longer; too many use cases do not require buildings, and it is a waste of resources to force-feed 80% building data to everyone who is only interested in the other 20%.

(If you’re now saying that buildings are more than eye candy because they can carry addresses and therefore they are useful for navigation and finding addresses, then yes, you’re absolutely right in theory. Of the 27 million buildings in France, only 0.16 million actually have a house number though. So I revise my figures; not 27 million eye candy buildings, only 26.84 million.)

Of course this issue isn’t new; unless you use a specialized, filtering download service like XAPI or Overpass, you always get more than you’re interested in. But it has never been as massive as it is becoming with building imports. I’m saying imports because imports allow people to produce much more data in a shorter time than traditional mapping. In many places, buildings are meticulously traced by hand from aerial imagery, and in those areas the volume of building data rises too – but it doesn’t explode. France has an active community of about 1,000 mappers; for them to contribute 27 million buildings, even if they’re industrious, would take several years.

Where changes are gradual and happen over a longer time, the ecosystem has time to adapt, and such adaption will come naturally. We haven’t yet adapted to the new world of OpenBuildingMap. I don’t like imports; I think that in areas where we don’t have mappers who care enough to trace buildings from an aerial image, we should be honest about it and not paint our map with some government’s building data. But I fear that this battle is lost, and so we’ll have to find ways to cope with the influx of such data.

Before I begin, a quick definition of terms for those not familiar with the Wikipedia universe. Wikipedia is a project and an encyclopedia web site at the same time, and it is part of a greater endeavour called Wikimedia which also encompasses things like Wiktionary or Wikimedia Commons. The whole Wikimedia endeavour (sometimes also called a “movement”) is supported by a charitable organisation called the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF).

There are about 30 national WMF chapters and hundreds of Wikipedias in other languages than English, and they may use different structures to accomplish their work. In this article, I’ll talk about WMF and the English Wikipedia only.

The Wikipedia project

The heart of Wikipedia are the editors; people who actually contribute content. The editor community (which I will call the “Wikipedia community”) once started out following the rules laid down mainly by Larry Sanger who founded Wikipedia together with Jimmy Wales, but meanwhile a very complex set of rules and procedures has emerged. These rules are not absolute and not created in some kind of law-making process. Rather, they are like our “We don’t tag for the renderer” rule – more a creed perhaps than a rule.

The Wikipedia community is mostly concerned with content and the procedures that guide its creation. Most of the rules, therefore, deal with what content is acceptable and what form it should take, and with resolving disputes that may arise during content creation.

Resolving disputes is probably one of the most important activities in the Wikipedia community. When there’s a dispute, there’s an expectation of a sensible and factual discussion which will usually be closed by a “closing administrator” after it is felt that all arguments are heard. There may be polls but it is not the mere count of votes that decides; it is also the strength of the argument that decides. The “closing administrators” therefore have considerable leeway in deciding the outcome, but are not expected to exercise any power themselves in such decisions; they are there to help the community come to a decision. Over-reliance on rules will result in the accusation of Wikilawyering, the name Wikipedians have given to the practice of trying to defeat ideas on procedural terms alone.

Such an absence of strict rules may sound like an open and creative environment at first, but in his 2011 article on “Wikipedia and Authority”, Mathieu O’Neil writes:

Dismissing codified solutions as “rigid” or “bureaucratic” guarantees stasis, as there is no universally accepted way of changing the way things are and few avenues for legitimate critique. Finally, the approach’s long-term viability is open to question. As Wikipedia operates following the constant reform and refinement of social norms, the issue of changing policy with an ever-increasing number of participants grows more complex.

There are about 740 administrators (not to be confused with system administrators) in Wikipedia, and several possible layers of escalation comprising a group of about 35 so-called “bureaucrats”, an “Arbitration Committee” with about 15 members and ultimately co-founder Jimmy Wales who, while having given up a number of his “founder privileges”, still theoretically retains ultimate authority in some points.

Everyone in Wikipedia – editors, administrators, bureaucrats, Arbitration Committee – is a volunteer; nobody gets paid for any function they perform in the community.

The Wikimedia Foundation

In parallel to the world of the Wikipedia Community, there’s the Wikimedia Foundation. WMF was founded to primarily take care of servers, domain name, and trademarks. WMF was never a membership organisation, but presided over by a board of trustees who were initially appointed by Jimmy Wales. Today, the WMF board comprises ten people, of whom three are elected by the community, two selected by chapters, four appointed by the board itself, and the tenth is a permanent seat for Jimmy Wales. The board is the ultimate corporate authority of the Wikimedia Foundation, and its members serve as volunteers (but may be reimbursed for expenses). The board aims to have quarterly regular meetings (usually in person at varying locations), and extra meetings for things like budget planning (usually online).

WMF has about 100 employees. In the second half of 2011 (the latest figures available), WMF had an income of about US$ 27 million, and spent US$ 15 million. About half of the expenditure is for staff, recruiting, and contract services. Less than US$ 2 million were spent on hosting and equipment. As of December, 2011, WMF had US$ 30 million in their bank account (the amount I mentioned in the intro). The bulk of WMF’s income is from donations; while a few large donors contributed over the last few years (a total of US$ 4.5 million from the Stanton Foundation; US$ 3 million from the Sloan Foundation; US$ 2 million each from Google and the Omidyar Network), the mainstay of donations are those from community members and users, and WMF intends to keep it that way because they believe this model is scalable and reduces the danger of large funders influencing the organisation.

Mayo Fuster Morell writes in “The Wikimedia Foundation and the Governance of Wikipedia’s Infrastructure: Historical Trajectories and its Hybrid Character”, about the phase of “professionalizing” WMF in 2007, when hiring paid staff started to become the standard mode of operation:

These changes represent an ambivalence regarding the foundation’s relationship to the community. In one sense, it lost “organic” contact because it no longer followed the community’s organizational form and because half of the foundation staff and some board members were not originally part of the community. However, the foundation won contact with the community because of its increased capacity to respond coherently to community requests, release reports of its activities, and increase coordination with the chapters. Some applauded the shift towards professionalization because “things get done” while previously this was not the case. The foundation’s reputation increased, but suspicion and uncertainty also surfaced as the changes generated many questions about the foundation’s expanded boundaries.

The division of labour between the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation is basically such that the community cares about the content, and the Foundation is tasked with making sure that the community can do their job. Initially this just meant running the servers; soon after, legal issues (defending the project when sued) and fundraising (to pay for servers and legal) became part of the job too.

At the interface between the two worlds of community and Foundation we have a group called the “functionaries”. which includes all members of the Arbitration Committee and additional users granted certain system permissions that might affect user privacy. These people, while doing volunteer community jobs, have to be approved by the WMF. It is also the WMF who technically rolls out software changes or changes to the web site layout although if this interferes in any way with editing there will have been intense discussions with the community beforehand. And while the community doesn’t directly control the servers, they can of course make requests; such a request from the community, the result of a discussion involving over 1.000 editors, led to the anti-SOPA blackout in January 2012.

Criticism of Wikipedia and the WMF

Of course with such a large project, Wikipedia criticism is not hard to come by.

A lot of it focuses on the WMF and how it spends its money. The most important question asked by critics is: is WMF really so different from what they were a few years ago? In the fiscal year ending June 30, 2007, WMF had an income of US$ 2.7 million and expenses of US$ 2 million. That is about one tenth of the half-year values quoted earlier, which means growth by a factor of 20 in four years. Measured as a proportion of expenses, salaries and wages were one fifth then, and make up half of the expenses now. Critics claim that only a fraction of revenue is actually used towards the original goals (running servers etc.), and the rest is stashed away or spent for “staffing bloat”.

Some critics of Wikipedia would also like the WMF to get more involved in editing, setting policies about objectionable content (e.g. how much nudity is acceptable) or enforcing quality standards.

The Wikimedia Foundation has, with the help of professional strategy consultants, created a medium-term strategic plan, outlining how they intend to grow (150 employees and US$ 50m yearly expenditure by mid-2015) and what their most important goals are. These include

• making editing easier
• intensifying efforts to recruit contributors from under-represented parts of society by “conducting outreach” and “deploying catalyst teams” to selected countries of the “Global South”
• improving quality by giving more tools to editors
• try to increase the current reach (of about six percent of world population) through mobile and offline products

WMF is also contemplating to become more active in political advocacy, i.e. using their weight to influence the political process, especially where the legal framework that allows Wikipedia to exist is concerned, and they have already hired professional lobbyists to that effect.

It is obvious from these goals, and also from the job titles on WMF’s staff list, that WMF’s mission has gone far beyond simply supporting the Wikipedia project. By allocating major resources to attract different kinds of contributors, WMF is shaping the project. Developers paid by WMF build new features for the software that the community uses; public relations officers portray the Wikipedia project in ways seen fit by WMF, and global outreach teams bring the benefits of Wikipedia to people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to it.

Shun-Ling Chen writes in his 2011 article, “The Wikimedia Foundation and the Self-Governing Wikipedia Community”:

That the WMF often has to act on behalf of the community when it performs functions in this category [of liaising with press and public] adds difficulties to its enrolment, for the community is unable to effectively cut or weaken the links between the WMF and other entities, and to lock the WMF in the community-designated positions. In fact, the community sometimes relies on the WMF to establish links with other actors. Hence, the WMF has a special role as it may compete with the Wikipedia community to represent the network, and the community constantly attempts to keep it in check. …
Although in the Strategic Plan the WMF identifies its role as supporting the community, this is not a modest role that performs only community-designated functions, but one that is “positively transformative” and may “ultimately, increase the overall impact of the projects on readers and the world”.

And Mayo Fuster Morell in the article quoted earlier:

But then there are several views on other issues. There is a tension over where to situate the Foundation from a more active role to a less active one. Some of the interviewees fear the expansion of the foundation could go too far and ask if the foundation’s working system will expand beyond organizing on a community basis. For example, some interviewees expressed concerns about contracting staff to solve issues that were already solved well by volunteers, such as Wikimedia organizing. … Related is that the community follows a democratic approach in which “who does, decides”, while the Foundation’s board makes decisions and staff implement them – decisions and actions are separate. If volunteers contribute to implementation, they may do so but without necessarily changing the decisions of the board.

Her general message, though, is that what she calls the “hybrid model” – a foundation to deal with some things and a community to deal with others – is a positive development that promises the best of both worlds.

Comparison: Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap

The number one problem in Wikipedia is disagreement between different editors. Wikipedia has a strict policy of neutrality (“NPOV”), and sometimes it takes a lot of discussion to achieve a neutral presentation of the facts. This is less pronounced in OpenStreetMap’s realm – either something is a post box or it isn’t, there’s not much room for discussion. We do have occasional edit wars but those are mostly about language and could be easily defused by having different language versions of OSM.

While I have personally read about many lengthy and tiring debates in Wikipedia, I have a suspicion that there might be a selection bias in reporting; you seldom hear about the many cases were things just worked. I have the impression that Wikipedia has developed a lot of very sensible guidelines and policies, for example “Don’t disrupt Wikipedia to prove a point”, “The rules are principles” (and not laws), “Don’t be a fanatic”, “Avoid instruction creep” or the already mentioned “Avoid wikilawyering”. OpenStreetMap hasn’t reached that stage of development; we do have a few principles (“Don’t map for the renderer”, the “On-the-ground rule”) but we have very little in terms of community conduct. For example, in my role as a member of the Data Working Group, when trying to mediate in a conflict, I often have to remind stubborn editors that they cannot be part of a community when they are not willing to talk to others, a very simple fact that doesn’t seem to be written anywhere.

While Wikipedia appears to be more refined on the community side, I have the impression that OSM has advanced much more on the technical side. It is still hard for many to edit OSM and to use the data, but if you look at how far OSM has come since its humble beginnings, with now over a million lines of code in editors alone and possibly a multiple of that in various tools and rendering engines, and compare that with what has changed on the technology side in Wikipedia in the past five years, OSM seems more dynamic. Even though I have no doubt that Wikipedia have excellent people and lots of work is done “behind the scenes”, some part of me wonders where all the money went. If nothing else, this may be a little warning sign to those who believe that a few million US$ and a couple of hired hands could transform the OpenStreetMap experience; I cannot see this having happened in Wikipedia.

Just so I’m not misunderstood, the WMF operations department has to run over 700 servers and handle top request rates of 140k per second, whereas OpenStreetMap currently runs 25 servers and serves 3.5k tiles peak per second, plus maybe 100 web site or API requests per second. So even if not much technological change is visible to the Wikipedia end user, the operation of one of the global top 10 web sites on the planet certainly offers some challenges.

Comparison: WMF and OSMF

Our OSMF is currently a membership organisation where all members decide who gets on the board. This means that we have the somewhat artificial distinction between “community member” and “OSMF member”, where only the latter have a say in OSMF business.

The OSMF doesn’t have any staff (compared to one hundred for WMF), and is currently very focused; OSMF doesn’t try and shape the project by identifying underrepresented groups and reaching out to them specifically (with the possible exception of a drive to internationalize the web site). But OSMF’s stated aim is to “encourage the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and to provide geospatial data for anyone to use and share”, so such activities could well be on the cards for the future.

While WMF has already published their financial figures up to December 2011, OSMF’s latest available reports are for the fiscal year ending August 2010, and they list a total income of £100k – that was US$ 150k at the time, or 0.6% of WMF’s income in their fiscal year ending June 2010. Financially, in August 2010 we were as big as WMF was at the end of 2004.

With no paid staff, the OSMF board members – currently seven – have to do all the work themselves, or find volunteers to do it. There are a number of OSMF working groups in which a handful of volunteers are organised to do the most important work, and occasionally there’s some friction because, being volunteers, working group members feel obliged to do what they individually feel is right for OSM, which can differ from what the OSMF board feels is right.

The OSM community seems to be less organised than Wikipedia’s, which means that there’s very little counterweight from the community to anything OSMF does; there’s nobody there to watch OSMF or balance their power. This is different in Wikimedia Foundation’s relation to the community; they do undertake credible efforts of including the community in what they do, and they know full well that the community is capable of organizing resistance if they don’t.

Wrapping up

On the whole, I think that the the “hybrid model” of WMF and Wikipedia community works rather well. I don’t subscribe to WMF’s idea of a constantly growing organisation; I think that they must be seeing diminishing returns on every additional dollar that comes in, and that a lean and mean operation could also have worked, but on the whole things are not too bad over at Wikipedia.

Saying “OSM has a foundation and a community too so it’s the same here” is oversimplifying things; with so little community involvement in OSMF affairs, and with a community that has not yet developed skills and methods to define what they want and speak with one voice, there is a danger of OSMF exerting too much influence, of OSMF not supporting, but steering the project; of a few ambitious people on the OSMF board pursuing audacious goals while leaving behind the community that does the hard work.

I can see some people impatiently eyeing Wikimedia Foundation and saying: OSMF should quickly start playing with the big guys now like WMF does, roll in the cash, set up an office, hire 20 staff, and so on. My response to them is: Smoothly does it. At OSM, we still have to find our ideal “hybrid model”; we have to make the community stronger at the same time as we grow OSMF.

There’s one thing I’d like to copy from Wikipedia immediately though which would come in handy in a lot of debates we’re having on the lists, with Data Working Group business, or even occasionally for the OSMF board: They have a rule called Don’t be a dick.

Further reading

If you are at all interested in analyses about Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, check out the excellent Critical Point of View reader from which all the quotes in this blog article have been taken. You might also want to read some of WMF’s board meeting minutes to get an idea of what they are discussing. And of course you’ll find myriad pages about Wikipedia on Wikipedia itself or on meta.wikimedia.org.

I would like to thank Tim Alder and Mayo Fuster Morell who have read an early draft of this article and helped me avoid a number of faux pas.

Of course, this is not new.

Back in 2008, CloudMade already believed to have identified OSM UX as one of the major factors holding OSM back, and they planned to either get the Potlatch editor rewritten or do a new editor altogether. (In the end, both were done; CloudMade’s own editor, MapZen, is dead, Potlatch2 lives on.) Steve Coast pops up on the mailing lists about once a year to start a thread about usability – in March 2009 with site designs from CloudMade staff, in February 2010 with “It’s the number one complaint I hear when I fly all over the world talking to people about OSM” (and asking us to deploy uservoice.com because OpenStreetBugs had “crappy UI”), or in December 2011 starting a design competition on CrowdSpring and taking everyone by surprise. Nothing has ever come of this.

Why is it so hard to improve the OSM UX?

If you hire a designer and ask them to help you improve your UX, then one of the first things you will be asked is: What is the purpose of your web site? Whom are you trying to reach? Who are your users?

Bummer. Guess they won’t take “everybody” as an answer! The reason why it is so hard to improve OSM UX is that we don’t have answers to these questions; or, perhaps, we have too many.

The way I see it, we want to be usable to three kinds of people:

1. active contributors who are editing;
2. curious passers-by who are not active contributors but whom we could make into such;
3. people who just take our data and use it, thereby hopefully raising awareness of OSM and bringing us more visitors whom we could make into contributors.

If someone complains about OSM usability, it is always a good idea to find out which of these three they’re talking about, because each of these target groups requires a different approach to usability, and not everyone sees these three groups as equally important. (Some might even have still other target groups in mind.)

The group I’m least worried about is (3) because that group is most likely to help themselves. Using OSM data may not be easy but it is so damn attractive that we’ll have more and more players in this field building stuff. Big companies like ESRI integrating our data into their supply chain; smaller companies who, as middlemen, make OSM easily available on the commercial market; universities who prove that they’re up to speed by offering OSM-based services; and last not least hordes of hackers who love the opportunities our data presents them with. My own company, Geofabrik, sells OSM data preparation services, but for every client we sell something to, we serve free downloads for hundreds of people, and other businesses do likewise.

So, then, what about (2), the passers-by who look at our web site. What do we want from them, what does “usability” mean here?

The purpose of our project is to make a high-quality, world-wide map database that is maintained by a large community and that is accessible under a free and open license. The purpose of our web site, therefore, must be primarily to explain the project to passers-by and entice them to join our community. We are not a map portal and we have no reason to try and replace Google or Bing Maps; we will always show a map on our web site but this is meant to illustrate he quality of our goods, not to provide a map in itself. Our web site primarily has to show people what we do, and attract those who are likely to make a contribution to our project.

It doesn’t make sense for our web site to communicate the message that “everyone can contribute” because that would be a lie; even with the simplest of tools, a certain level of abstract thinking is required to participate in making a map database. And since we are a community working for a common goal, OSM is not for loners either. I was criticised when I brought this up in my “Barriers to Entry” post on the mailing list last September, but I still believe that we do not have to sell something with our web site – we’re not some Silicon Valley startup that needs to prove to their VCs how much mindshare we can acquire in a given time. We can afford to tell it like it is – we can afford to say that “OpenStreetMap is for you if …”.

Our web site’s usability for the casual visitor could be improved by our not trying to look like any old map web site, but by conveying what we do and how we do it. There’s a lot of potential there – we can let the community take stage, we can tell stories of mapping parties, of brave individuals, and past successes. If you’re not a mapper then our web site should give you a comprehensive and honest picture of the project and of how you could help.

And finally, (1), usability for people who edit OSM. In my mind, this is more a question of usability of the editor software, than one of usability of the web site, because I am a JOSM user and don’t even log in to the web site when I make edits. I like it that way, but times are changing; even though Potlatch2 is a separate piece of software people often perceive it as an integral part of the web site, and the future might even see a HTML5 editor fully integrated with the web site (one is already being built – caution, German slides!). So depending on your personal preference, you might see a different face of “the web site” as your environment for editing OSM, or you might use a completely separate piece of software.

The target group for editors and supporting software (whether integrated in the web site or separate) is people who want to help make the map. Usability, for these people, of course means that things should be simple and intuitive – but I feel that usability is too often reduced to that. Most people who complain about OSM UX complain about how hard it is for a non-technical person to, say, add a node. This is something that can be fixed with good software; for a while, CloudMade achieved that with their iPhone MapZen POI Collector (until more and more POIs were not nodes). CloudMade also announced but never really built a suite of special-purpose editors, e.g. for different sports users, and there are a few successful single-purpose editors around, e.g. on the WheelMap site. But if you are a “power user”, then good UX for you means that you can effortlessly slice and dice public transport relations with 23 variants – an abstract concept that some might find daunting to even visualize in their heads, much less edit, no matter how simple the editor. Usability is not simplicity. Placing a POI is simpler than mapping a bus route, but we must be careful not to lose those who map bus routes or we will become a POI database.

Usability is not pure window-dressing either. Take, for example, the way we express complex areas as multipolygon relations. To a degree, this is an implementation detail that can be hidden away by a good user interface, but that can only go so far and there will always be cases where the ugly reality shows through. Having a proper area data type can improve this situation; it may sound like a minor backend detail but a solid design of the lower layers is a prerequisite for a good UX. There are other areas where established OSM practice and good UX are at loggerheads – the tagging freedom is one of them. Most of our current editors have already relegated free-form tagging to some kind of “advanced” or “expert mode” panel, and a first-time user will only see a very limited selection of suggested “presets”. Free-form tagging is deemed incompatible with the simplicity that one would like to offer to the entry-level user, but at the same time it has until now been a cornerstone of OSM’s success so maybe we have to be careful not to erode that.

Usability for mappers, then, also means that what you map today is not destroyed by someone else tomorrow, or at least that it can be easily detected and repaired if things go wrong; that there actually is a data model that allows you to express what you want; that the server is up and running to accept your edit, and so on.

We can do a lot to improve our usability for mappers, but it is a multi-faceted issue and must not be reduced to “how quickly can a new user map a deli that’s missing from the map”. I would love to have a good editor that lets me master the aforementioned 23-variant public transport relation with ease, or that quickly shows me where exactly the self-intersection in the 14,000 node German border polygon is so that I may fix it. That, however, might not be sexy enough to attract grant funding any time soon.

In a nutshell:

Talking about usability requires that you define your audience and goals. In OSM editing, good usability needs a strong technical foundation, and we must not disregard “high end” editing.

FR: Joachim, you’re in charge of government relations for OpenStreetMap in Germany. How does one get a job like that?
JK: That was a coincidence really. In the summer of 2010 I read a newspaper article about how our government was contemplating to regulate geodata services because of citizens protesting against Google Street View. Before they decided anything though, they wanted to hold a “geodata summit” where all affected parties would be heard. I feared that the outcome might harm OSM, and wrote to the minister in charge asking for an invitation. This landed me at one table with government ministers, members of parliament, data protection officials, and board members of large corporations like Google, Microsoft, and Deutsche Telekom. This led to a number of good contacts with government officials. Other mappers liked the fact that we were now talking, and asked me to continue.

FR: Surely you have founded a proper working group in FOSSGIS or the OSM Foundation to provide a legitimation for your work?
JK: No, I’m not a member of FOSSGIS or OSMF. Of course I’m in touch with people from both and will work with these organisations when required. But communication in the community is through the forums, mailing lists, the pub meetings, conferences or direct emails. My legitimation is that nobody has complained about my work yet and many people say “thank you, and please continue.” If someone has questions or ideas, they can talk to me. And I will often talk to local mappers because of course I cannot handle every contact myself.

FR: But you must have some organizational structure as the basis for your work in the community. You have to manage things; define goals you want to reach, determine the steps that have to be taken, identify obstacles…
JK: No. The only goal we have is an open dialogue that involves all interested parties. I really like the fact that I can help move OSM forward without having a fixed schedule or a set of goals that must be reached in a certain timeframe. Government institutions are usually bound by political missives, and deciding something can often take quite long. In addition, official land survey in Germany is a federal business, with 16 different survey administrations and often contradictory positions. This requires many small steps, not a grand plan.

FR: That doesn’t exactly sound like the most successful of strategies…
JK: But yes, that is exactly the way to do it. That’s how OSM started out in the first place. We have lots of ideas and options to acquire geodata. People used to laugh at us, but more and more government agencies and politicians now take notice, and upon closer inspection find that we have a vast data set that they can use freely within the terms of the license.

FR: Isn’t all that a lot of work? Have you ever thought that it should maybe done by a professional hired by FOSSGIS, OSMF or so?
JK: My workload is not evenly distributed. Sometimes I have several requests in one week, and then nothing for two months. Politicians and government officials are beleaguered by professional lobbyists and stakeholders who act in the interest of their employer. If you’re just a normal citizen who uses spends his spare time on his hobby, you stick out. They notice you – you’re authentic. And I really enjoy evangelising for something I love.

FR: The German OSM community is the largest and most active one by far. With so little organisation, doesn’t it often happen that you talk to some government agency and 10 other mappers have already contacted them with contradicting statements? These activities need to be coordinated, don’t they?
JK: That does happen occasionally, but it only serves to get the point across that we don’t have a central organisation and that it is not unusual for different ideas and expectations to exist in our community. Most mappers who are interestin this kind of activity know me well and we keep in touch about what we do. If at some point in the future I don’t have the time or energy to continue my work, someone else is going to continue. The central activity in OSM – the mapping – isn’t coordinated either, and the results are stunning! One can spend a lot of time thinking about coordination and organisation – but I prefer to say KISS.

FR: Thank you for your time, Joachim!