Country based authorizations

Since you’ve asked this question here I think that it’s important for me to reply, since I was handling the issue at the DWG, and as requested I’ll not go too deeply into the reasons given by the people who reported you to the DWG in the first place, beyond what is already public (including by things you have linked to yourself).

First things first, OpenStreetMap is a community. It is “everyone’s local map”. The wiki page how we map is a good summary - amongst other things that says “OpenStreetMap values community cohesion over data perfection”.

You are aware that Ukraine has been invaded by Russia, and that some Ukrainian mappers have deleted or otherwise tried to conceal some things within Ukraine such as military landuse. You reverted some of those deletions and made it clear in various places (including here) that you did not agree with them, and continued to argue the point on e.g. this changeset.

We can argue about how effective those deletions will be at inconveniencing invaders**; but that is a discussion for elsewhere. What I suspect that we can’t argue about is that the local community was very opposed to your reverts e.g. around Lviv. Likewise (as I pointed out to you in emails) old aerial imagery is not going to be a good source for OSM in a country devastated by war.

It’s unusual, but not completely unknown, for the DWG to ask people to stop mapping in a certain place - sometimes we might ask two mappers who have personal issues with each other to avoid mapping in each others’ areas. Usually we are able to come to some sort of arrangement that allows contributions to OSM to continue from all parties. You flatly refused to compromise, so we were unable to come to such an arrangement here. It is clearly ridiculous to expect every such request to be voted on individually by the OSMF board.

The block is not a permanent ban from OpenStreetMap - as the message says, “if they can agree to avoid future issues of this type then we’ll revoke this block”. In addition, in emails we said (and on the DWG’s OSMF wiki page it also says) that if you were unhappy with the DWG’s decision you had the opportunity to appeal to the Board.

– Andy Townsend (from the Data Working Group)

** in another context this afternoon someone referred to OSM as an “append-only database”, and that’s pretty much true - anything that was there is still there, and can be brought back at some later stage.

Edit: removal of an “elsewhere” to fix a grammar issue.

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