Why are we creating a design system for OSM?

[matheusgomesms (Matheus Gomes)]

@SomeoneElse

politics.

The first stage is basically “creating the thing that is better”, the second is creating a track record of keeping that thing maintained, and the third is the politics associated with persuading people that you’ve done those first two things well.

That’s the answer what I looking for. The most important thing is not the solution, is the “convincing people who don’t want to be convinced” (or politics, as you nicely said). This should be stated in the beginning of the Contributing.md file, it would avoid a lot of waste of possible contributor’s time.

@pnorman

To summarize the long thread, the maintainers gave him a good amount of information to move forward

To someone who might not be aware of this behavior, this could be called a case of weaponizing someone by analysis paralysis or if want to go a little further, perhaps concern trolling. Open any PR in the OSM-website repository and you will see this behavior.

In other words, you start saying "hmmm, I support your idea, but I am just concerned about these 500 things first. " And then the person comes with the solution of the first thing from the 500 things list and then you go again “hmmmm, that’s nice you did that, but this is too ambitious, why don’t you actually do just this”. And this goes ad infinitum, until the point the person gives up and you feel good that you didn’t have to say “I won’t support your idea, no matter what you do”.

Bringing to this case, what is the minimum Gustavo could do? He suggested doing an overall redesign of the site. Of course it was too much. Then it was suggested that he tackles just one item of the list, which he just proposed (Creating a new design system). Now, we just discovered that this is still ambitious (like if this was a bad thing).

@SimonPoole

At worst there is some subtle hinting that the projects were/are far too ambitious in scope and baby steps would be a better way to achieve some of the goals.

What is, then, the very minimum he could do, to be remotely accepted by the maintainers? Redesign a single button, one at a time? I’m not a designer, but I believe this is not how a redesign of anything works.

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Like, again, no one here in this thread made a SINGLE criticism about the project. They complained about:

• who created the survey (posting a link with the answer in that same link, in the 3rd line);
• the wording of the diary (“I’m just concerned you phrased like this”);
• the software used to create the designs and that the website is not 100% done yet (even though it’s just a proposal).
• in the Github thread, they complained that just a Figma/Penpot page is not enough, it has to be a website instead, so he did it (and now they complained about it);
• then someone complained that OSM doesn’t need a design system (although he proved, not just stated, that yes, we do need it).

Can you imagine Steve Coast pitching, 20 years ago, the “creation of a free map” to the current OSM dev community?

I could suggest Gustavo rewriting the diary substituting "will’ for “could”, but I understand that, no matter what he (and anyone else proposing something new) does, someone will always be “concerned” about something, except for change.

I’m glad that, despite all of this, people are still being ambitious (this redesign, the OSM-NG, the better-osm script, the Strava browser plugin, the CoMaps fork, RapiD, and all the other things thriving with community collaboration).