always makes me very suspicious when someone wants to ‘control’ the future of how something works without the decision of those who either "own"osm or widespread support of the users
3 Likes
Why would we (as in wider OSM) want websites etc that are not under control of the OSMF but are run by independent hedgehogs look like osm.org? It is bad enough with the widespread use of OSM in product/site names causing confusion, I don’t think we want to make that worse.
And the Wikimedia situation is -very- different, they run numerous different projects with at least a dozen websites and a formal system for a common look and feel makes sense there.
That’s why, while I applaud Gustovaos engagement, the whole reusable and formal bit of the project seems a bit misguided, and IMHO would be better spent on simply improving the usability of osm.org (OK a better working OSMF website theme could be a good idea, but that has always been considered non-core).
4 Likes
As someone who (unlike you) was around at the start of OSM 20 years ago, I find that incredibly disrespectful to the people who have arguably done more than anyone else to build that free map.
11 Likes
There is a New Tile Layers Policy for how to get your map style onto OSM.org. “Default style” is something else.
If you’re map editor suppors JOSM remote control, then it works already via OSM.org. Hosting a JS web editor (like iD) is something esle.
Ah here. osm-carto is a special cases. That’s not fair to other OSM projects!
11 Likes
We frequently hear criticism like in this thread, that everything was calcified, new ideas rejected, that some form of gatekeeping was taking place, that some un-democratic elites were hostile to newcomers, and so on. Fingers are pointed at those who have concerns; it is insinuated that they might simply be “trolling” or “weaponizing” their concerns in the service of stagnation which for some reason is what they want.
To all this, I want to reply: Saying no is hard. The easiest thing in the world is to reply “great idea, fantastic” when someone shows up with some crazy stuff. Nobody will shout at you for being positive and welcoming. Instead, pointing out misconceptions or problems - voicing concerns - opens you to criticism yourself; not only do you have to write down the issues that you see, you will also have to bear the emotional burden of being one of those who are “hostile to new ideas”, “holding the project back”, etc.etc. (there’s a bucketload of that going on in this thread already).
But where will we be if nobody is willing to take on the emotional labour of saying no? It’s like raising children - your life is much less stressful if you say yes all the time, but you would be doing your kids (and society) a disservice if you gave in to that desire for harmony.
I would ask everyone to consider that before heaping ever more blame and burden on those who still do the important job of saying no where a no is due, instead of taking the easy “fantastic, awesome” route.
20 Likes
I felt this was his idea from the very beginning, where people started being “concerned” about his proposal. Again, I am not a designer, so I have literally no idea what is the best approach for a website redesign. As far as I know, none of the current website maintainers are designers too, so I think it would be nice to hear an idea, from actual designers, how this should be done. The initial roadmap that was considered too “ambitious” was:
- WG Design Creation
- User Surveys
- Create a Design System
- Presentation
- Implementation
Seems a very reasonable path for a non-designer like me. The first step, no OSM-dev joined him (but he got support from people from CWG and many students and PhDs in design). The second step, he did the survey, where he found the actual things that people like and dislike about the website. The third item is this one, where again, people criticize him for being ambitious again. So, how can one keep going like that?
It’s funny, because no one here is saying: “hey, you useless people, get outta here”. It something like “thank you for your service, you’ve done great, but it’s time to think another route, or we will be stuck in time. We actually want to help you, but you have to let us do that”.
Of course it is. But, if no one liked his idea, wouldn’t it be better to say “no, we won’t implement your idea”, and then Gustavo would have moved on? He’s working on that for 4 years, he now got a 10-person team to work with him, for what?
And if you look at the first Github issue, the mockups were well received by the mapper community. So it’s not like it was entirely a bad idea. It was simply not received well only by the maintainers, for reasons that kinda doesn’t make much sense.
I think it’s clear no one is saying that we have to praise all the ideas and accept the bad ones, of course not. But it is very clear (and I’m not the one saying that, we’ve been having this very same discussion for ages) that there is a disconnection between the expectations. In the end, we have:
- maintainers not happy with criticism or that they receive little support
- other volunteers not happy with how they are bad-received when they open an issue or a PR.
- regular non-dev mappers not happy with current OSM state, regarding almost everything.
Do you think that a state where all the stakeholders are unhappy is a good state?
If you think that the current status quo is fine, then it’s okay, there’s literally no point in keeping this discussion. But what really annoys me is that, EVERY SINGLE TIME someone comes with a new idea, we have the same hostile behavior. Then, no one understands why there is little collaboration in some areas or why some people come here saying that they don’t feel welcomed in this community.
Just to make my message lighter, because I’ve hijacked a lot the topic and don’t want to engage here anymore, the path to success in OSM is:
- suggest, officially, a new tag
- open a PR in any core service
- propose something entirely new (and actually make it real)
If you survive this, you can endure anything in your life! 
6 Likes
I agree with everything @matheusgomesms is saying here and in posts above. It’s sane and fair. If you’re new to this forum, go up and read his posts.
I would also like to ask some questions. What is the mechanism for new talent to join the site maintainer team? It seems to me that a very small group of people have been doing it a long time. Why wouldn’t it be a good idea to get some new ideas, new energy and frankly, more people doing this? I get that it’s hard to say “no”, kind of, but even harder is to make room for new and challenging ways of doing things - for the messiness of that. But it’s needed for growth.
I can imagine that the small current team feels defensive because there is a lot to do. Why isn’t the solution to add more people to that team - that way no one has to do ALL of the hard work of saying “no” and maybe more people could say “yes.”
And might it not be a good idea to have someone who is not based in Europe on the web maintainer team? Just for a diversity of perspective on the prioritization of projects for a global map?
I would also like to suggest that there isn’t enough front end \ UI/UX knowledge in the default approach to OSM. And that it is past time to fix this. Many of the critiques of this project show a poor understanding of what it takes to build a design system, as well as perhaps a discounted sense of the importance of the user experience. I wonder if this is contributing to poor assessment of the potential of the project? There should be some humility here about different kinds of technical skills - I’m not seeing it.
Finally, @Gustavo22Soares I am so sorry you are being treated this way. The work and effort and creativity and professionalism that you have put into this project is excellent. You took every valid step to engage the right people and processes and you were not encouraged. Yet, you still kept going and made something really cool. I hate watching people dump their own toxic energy on something new and exciting and interesting. You deserve much better than this. I wish I had more ways to help.
7 Likes
I think part of the response is because it’s a huge amount of documentation (with entire pages lightly modified from the aforementioned Wikimedia project) with a lot of broken links, launched with an LLM forum post which doesn’t say much. When this was posted I made a good faith effort to look for implementation details , or maybe a mockup of the homepage — as far as I can tell they simply don’t exist yet. Maybe @Gustavo22Soares can provide some more insight about this, and what sort of feedback he was actually looking for.
10 Likes
Didn’t one of the team join as a maintainer only a year ago?
Andy Allan’s talk at SOTM EU 2023 seems relevant, including the Q&A afterwards. The last slide says “become a maintainer”, and he suggests that a team of 50 maintainers would be awesome but realistically the goal is about 5.
So it seems people inside and outside the team think it would be good to have more maintainers. But I’m not sure exactly what that implies for the topic of this thread.
14 Likes
Yes.
He was going to give a talk in Poland but COVID presented it. I think his data showed 400-500 merged PRs per year and a lot of technical debt cleared up. I don’t remember details but he did gave a talk to a local ruby group at about the same time.
1 Like
FWIW osm.org site development looks to me as if it’s in a healthier state than ever. There are five regular committers (Tom, Andy, Anton, @hlfan, Emin), projects to make the codebase more accessible for new contributors, a reasonable stream of PRs being merged from other contributors. There is always room for more, but I don’t remember a previous time when there’s ever been this much stuff getting merged.
14 Likes
The post is more to discuss the implementation of the design system, if you’d like, you can check it out on Figma, where we have the components, colors, typography, and grids. So feel free to take a look and maybe reconsider your opinion about our project.
Regarding the documentation, we’re discussing the best way to present the component demos, similar to Codex.
As for the wireframes for the homepage, we’re working on them gradually. We want to hear more from the community about what would be good for the homepage, although we already have some ideas. I believe this isn’t the right moment to discuss that yet.
Right now, we really want to focus on the foundation for the future of our project, which is Atlas, and from there, move on to discussing screens like the homepage.
I’d like to emphasize that we are a group of students and also have obligations in other areas of our lives, and most of this project is done in our spare time. Even so, we are trying to improve based on your feedback!
1 Like
I find this thread fascinating. The culture of OSM, i.e. how the do-ocracy works, is the intersection of technology and people. I’ve been mad about things I didn’t like in OSM and worked to change the project for the better. So, I have a bit of history in trying to fix things I don’t like, whether it’s important things like “we don’t have a map for our national community” or silly things like “it would be fun if we could get a 
reaction on the forum.”
I’m very sorry I wasn’t able to get to Boston early enough to hear Courtney’s presentation. After having clicked through the links, I don’t have the foggiest idea what’s being proposed here. So, I’m not going to comment on the merit or lack of merit of the proposed design system. But, I am going to comment on the people problem.
You see, OSM (the community, the technology stack operated by the OSMF, and the peripherary), are complicated. It takes, in my estimation, years of sustained interest and effort to understand the current state of affairs sufficiently well enough to contribute something back. I mean that from a cultural, historical, and technical lens.
There is a frequent criticism that OSM is stagnant and ossified. I think for the most part, this is not true. What is true, is that you have a coalition of the willing that have built this thing, strapped together with duct tape and bailing wire, recognize its value to the world, and are protective of it in what little spare time they are able to devote to a hobby. They would welcome help, but only once they have confidence that the help comes with a robust understanding of why things are the way they are.
As a result, there is this constant friction. A newcomer arrives on the scene, armed with an incomplete understanding of all of the above, and says “aha! I see an obvious problem, with an obvious solution.” And then the solution misses the mark. It’s a pattern I’ve seen repeated over and over at this point.
From what I’ve seen happen over and over is that the newcomers do not end up sticking around, and the new project gets abandoned. That’s because the newcomer, while smart about technical things, did not do the required work to understand the people side of the project. And therefore, they were not in the right places, spaces, and conversations to build enough social understanding to create the right thing that solves the right problem. They did not understand what came to be and why, and all of the use cases. As a result, the thing looks pretty but is unviable.
I followed some of the links to older discussions with the osm-website maintainer team. I see the friction. I don’t know if it’s language barrier, or culture barrier, or simply differences in philosophy or personality. I see the messy intersection of big, bold ambition versus stable, evolved software.
The stakes are high because the map matters, and it’s used by millions of people every day. You can’t just build new software. You also have to build the team, momentum, and sustainment pipeline to keep the damn thing alive over the long haul. You can’t just pitch some new piece of software over the fence and wash your hands of it. The fact that this thread is a giant heated argument with key folks that have been involved in the project for decades, gives me very low confidence that we are looking at a project with a high likelihood of success.
18 Likes
I think it is not so bad - and years applies to core, high-importance project where someone wishes to change things. There is plenty of projects and tasks where much lesser effort is needed.
5 Likes
Phew – thought it was only me.
10 Likes
OSM has decades of deep, sometimes hidden, despite our first name (Open) almost secretive at times, culture. It can be (often is?) overwhelming for newer, yet perfectly eager-to-learn-and-be-good-OSM-citizens volunteer contributors. There are and can be enormous amounts to know and understand across the entire planet of cultures (one might generalize and say European, American, Asian, African…) ALL that is going on, or even a significant “slice of the elephant.” “Design” (even the intent to design, if the intentions are good) goes to the heart of this.
To be a contributor to OSM at a fundamental level, yes, adding a way tagged with something as simple (and straightforward) as natural=tree_row because there happens to be a tree row there and a dedicated OSM volunteer decided to add it to our data suffices. To be a “deeper” contributor, “growing up through the culture(s) of OSM” is real currency. I have found that being earnest in “giving one’s best, signing my name to my contributions with honor, dignity and even a touch of pride, if well done” really helps. I see when others do that: there are beautiful, elegant versions of these things (code, data, documentation, community-building…) all around our project sparkling like gemstones. People notice earnest, good, genuine effort. Especially when it comes with a “listen while doing my best” attitude. That spirit grows upon itself and self-perpetuates, because we are astute enough to recognize it and reward it with the strength of us agreeing with ourselves, which reinforces it.
Said in my family, “be a good example” (for your brother, or sister, or cousin…) and others follow. This grows. We must be diligent along the way, as (call it institutional or societal in OSM’s case) wisdom is a real thing.
OSM is a big family, but it we’ll never be so big that we can’t grow ourselves by insisting we do things well. What I’ve seen, we keep getting better and better. Partly because “we watch each other.” I’ve seen it: "we’ve got each other’s backs.‘’ The phrase “looking over each other’s shoulders” comes to mind, because that’s what we do here. And we’re better for it.
Disagreements and vetting and “making the sausage” or “describing part of the elephant” (while unaware of much of its greater whole) can be difficult. The evidence shows (and it is good news) that we are up to the task.
Edit: To me, this feels like a Trojan Horse to fall into a hole called figma, and “for what?” still eludes me. Me. Now, I may not be a polymath genius, but I’m not alone in asking “for what?”
Specific follow-up: I consider myself a non-dev mapper and I am happy with current OSM state. Yes, regarding almost everything. I say this because I have directly experienced (for 15+ years) essentially constant improvement. So, this is hyperbole at best and untrue in my experience. I do listen to others, who might say “wow, a snappy design layer would really improve things,” but I do not hear that.
Should you continue (in these very early stages) to vet your Atlas (which, along with NG or next-gen, is NOT the “next” thing), you would need to sell us better, more fully expressed reasons for its proposal. If it’s to fulfill the need of “to design the future of the project,” you can be the best students in the world, but we are going to ask you why we need this new thing (and maybe we do, maybe future design at such a “layer” is important). A use case or two of present-actual or likely-future helps. Impress us.
Know that you propose adding a brand-new layer of “something” to our project, a project we either largely understand, or could further understand if we have further questions. We question why we need this. Provide use cases. And why design (including YOUR design) might be a contender for an additional layer of helpfulness and improvement in OSM. That’s all Atlas is, a contender. It is not “the” future of our project, I don’t know who might have suggested that (you may not). I consider Atlas an aspiration, please spin me correct if I’m wrong. Same for NG, and while NG and Atlas might go from contenders (today, while remaining hazy) to “closer” and maybe “let’s keep going” those are respectfully, nothing more than gleams in the eyes of dozens or more. They are not a consensus (going forward) in the eyes of OSM. We (early) vet them now. Do better educating the wider community why a design layer (yours) wins.
Atlas’ strength will come from a demonstration of how strong are such shoulders which move, even lift the entire planet. Dazzle us with use cases. Using words is OK, using words and pictures might become a presentation. Many of us are saying no, shaking our heads (no) and/or undersold as to “why needed?” You could re-present (after further buff and polish), or not. Personally, I wish you luck and the very best.
4 Likes
If you want, you can check out the components on Figma if you need something more visual.
Ok, I understand. First, you should click here,
and the side panel will open
from there, you can navigate through the pages inside Figma. The pages are divided by each component.
1 Like
Ok, I think we can wrap up this conversation. There are many interesting points, and certainly things we could improve, especially in our communication.
I want to make it clear that I’ve always been open to dialogue, but since the first proposal, the receptiveness of some maintainers hasn’t seemed very open. I understand that a reaction of distrust towards external ideas might feel natural, but it shouldn’t be the attitude of someone working on open source projects, which by definition should welcome contributions, not discourage them.
The way new ideas are received may be exactly what pushes away and demotivates new contributors. That might explain why so many promising projects don’t move forward.
Something that seems to have been lost in this exchange, perhaps due to lack of attention, is that we’re proposing a design system to serve as a foundation for future interface improvements. Think of the design system as a set of LEGO blocks: each piece is a reusable component that enables the construction of more consistent, accessible, and sustainable interfaces.
I want to reaffirm that we’re open to talking and discussing the project itself, not the merit of us being new to the community or whether we have the “authority” to contribute. We believe good ideas should be judged by their quality and impact, not by the origin of the person proposing them.
2 Likes