Who is responsible for maintaining all the OpenStreetMap repositories, including the website, the iD editor, and the “standard” map layer (openstreetmap-carto)?
Are any of these maintainer roles funded by OSMF or other organizations?
I’ve checked the OSMF website but couldn’t find this information. If there’s a page with these details, could you please share the link?
Such information is crucial for the community to understand who is behind the software they rely on and to ensure transparency regarding funding and support structures.
Comparatively the OpenStreetMap Foundation is very small and has a limited budget. With greater financial support the OSMF could do more to help the project grow. The OSMF has been trying various methods to get additional funding.
The OSMF board member are all volunteers. Their OSMF expenses (eg: travel to annual board meeting) are rightfully expensed.
The OSMF pays a part time accountant to maintain the OSMF’s financials and a part time admin assistant.
To clarify that a bit more, maintenance of iD has always been paid and there is literally no funding for more than the current position.
At the time when the OSMF took this over it was a conscious decision to maintain independence from the vagaries of the US tech industry for such a core piece of OSM.
At the time when the OSMF took this over it was a conscious decision to maintain independence from the vagaries of the US tech industry for such a core piece of OSM.
In a way. When iD was first developed and released, if OSMF had been in a different position as far as supporting staff it could have been done then. For years, Mapbox supported iD because it was important for OSM, and OSM was important for Mapbox. Mapbox did the same with OSMCha. A substantial investment.
As a company Mapbox did not exert influence on these projects. But yes, priorities change, and investing in these tools became less of a priority over time. Thankfully, Mapbox as a company was very supportive during transition of these tools.
It’s a long story not worth getting into, but in the case of iD it was not a question of funding that led to the switch, rather the need for better involvement of the OSM community in the development of iD.
In general, private sector investment in OSM has been huge for the project. As a project we also need to realize that specific involvement and investment will wax and wane. OSM’s ability to accept support in different forms over time is a great strength. The same goes for individual mappers who’s contributing grows and reduces, sometimes again and again.
That was a) never offered at the time, b) forgets that teeny weeny bit of information that Mapbox would have likely not got to the point it got without being able to kickstart its operations with the funds from the Knight foundation for developing iD.
So while obviously everybody is grateful for the support Mapbox provided over the years, it is dwarfed by what Mapbox was able to reap from the association with OSM.
Correct. Over 10 years, OSMF was not in position to oversee iD development at the start, nor be part of a hand off. I’m really proud that OSMF has been able to develop to the point today, where we do have staff. Admittedly small but significant!
It’s great to hear gratitude. I do think we miss doing that enough. It’s something we prioritize on CWG. That doesn’t mean we don’t fairly point out areas that can be improved. But showing appreciation is a good strategy for a virtuous cycle of expanding support.
You are also correct that value derived from OSM is far greater investment. In part I’d argue that’s by design and a good thing. But also I think I agree with your point – institutional users of OSM data could do a lot more to support the OSMF!
My point was more that “we” (as in OSMF) didn’t decide that, there was at the time the initial work on iD was completed no discussion of the matter with Mapbox (IIRC is wasn’t even clear when the Knight funds had been used up).
While it obviously would have had different results, there is no reason to believe that we couldn’t have continued to maintain iD on a voluntary base, just as essentially everything else in OSM space.
Given that this says “I don’t believe the SDRP has ever been evoked” then perhaps the answer might be (in terms of listening to the community and avoiding conflict) “rather well, actually”
(for the avoidance of any doubt I don’t represent the OSMF, and am involved with neither the SDRP nor the development of any OSM editors).
I would suspect it is more “people have given up”. The main bone of contention has always been questionable tagging decisions (there are still legacy bad choices that haven’t been fixed from the era Housel BTW), these days those decision are mainly driven by aligning iD with SC and I don’t know of anybody who has the energy to go up against the big stick.
Your experience of the wider OSM community is clearly different to mine
As an example, people are still raising issues with OSM Carto here, here and here that only the blindest optimist could possibly forsee as ever happening. The lack of any iD referrals to the SDRP must surely be a positive; at least the explanations of “we can’t do this because” are polite…
I would suspect it is more “people have given up”.
Your experience of the wider OSM community is clearly different to mine
Totally. There’s plenty of tagging work. And next iD community meeting will focus on more robust articulation of process for tagging schema approvals, so it can be even more efficient.
Its the other way around … people are not investing the time to stop very low use or other problematic tagging being added.
Example at hand: waterway=flowline which has already got specific rendering in iD and its going to be added to the iD presets as soon as they stop arguing about the semantics on the relevant PR.
But this is a low use tag that a small group of people are promoting that has never seen any wider discussion.
Quite bit of discussion was had about waterway lines through waterbodies in this topic. The consensus seemed to be that a new tag would be a good idea. Some people have now started using a new tag, it has been documented, and I’ve yet to see concerns raised. Seems to be ATYL working as intended.
The discussion was not very conclusive (and waterway=flowline was 1st mentioned in the 2nd last post), but that isn’t the point. The discussion in the PR on the semantics is a clear signal that it is not established enough to warrant a preset.
PS: adding a preset to any of the default preset sets is the opposite of ATYL.
