I like to make another note on OSM-Carto here. Background is that there is another wave of negativity (aiming to find a relatively neutral, yet at least a bit descriptive term here) being expressed by some people from the OSM community on some channels regarding the project.

It is not the first such articulation and it was pretty much to be expected that this would become a recurring pattern. The background i already explained at length back in May 2022. Back around that time i made the decision (and i indicated that in the text) that i would continue trying to do my best to support the idea of OSM-Carto, to be an openly cooperative map design project, governed by consensus of a diverse group of maintainers.

What i do is I provide guidance to contributors how to make changes to the style in a way that complies with the documented goals of the project as i understand them and with the unwritten conventions of the style. I explain the historic context how OSM-Carto came to render things the way it does today, explain how things connect design wise creating a harmonic overall result and provide ideas what possibilities exist to resolve the various technical and design problems the style is faced with. And i listen to arguments that challenge the views i articulate and, when arguments are convincing, re-evaluate these views. At the same time i explicitly avoid standing in the way of consensus forming among the other maintainers even if i disagree with those ideas. And i merge changes when they are suitable for the style in my opinion. What i don’t do is approving changes that i don’t stand behind merely because of pressure from others to have them in the style.

I took this approach despite knowing that the chances of OSM-Carto finding its way back to a sustainable strategic consensus among the maintainers would be very small. The alternative would have been to try essentially staging a coup and to attempt single-handedly reshaping the governance of the project in a way that i would consider more sustainable. Or i could have abandoned the project. This would either have killed the project or it would at least have lead to an end of the diversity in governance. And i was not willing to do either of these things because that would have clearly betrayed the idea of OSM-Carto as described. What i did instead was summarizing some of the lessons learned in terms of governance and social dynamics and some key points that should – from my perspective – be taken into account in case someone would want to bootstrap a new cooperative map design project with a similar paradigm as OSM-Carto. It was unclear if something along these line was going to happen of course (and it still is) or if the OSM-Community is going abandon the idea of consensus based cooperative map design and move back to the more common, more traditional single benevolent dictator paradigm or to something governed by a homogeneous group of like-minded people with common interests. But from today’s perspective i stand firmly by my decision to continue holding up the ideals of OSM-Carto but decidedly not trying to actively shape where OSM community map design is going beyond OSM-Carto while continuing to share my experience and thoughts on the matter with everyone willing to listen – both within OSM-Carto development discussion and on this blog.

The recent wave of negativity towards OSM-Carto is remarkable in the level of resentment that is articulated towards the values of the project, its maintainers and me specifically as the person most outspoken about the project and its problems. I have read quite a bit about and also have seen the effects of people radicalizing themselves in closed groups, reaffirming each other in their preconceptions and simplified friend-foe images. But i had previously never seen this process in a setting that is on public record (mostly – at least one of the most vile comments has been silently removed – not before the author received cheers from his peers though).

The whole thing is also telling in context of the bold claims of the OSMF that the channel in question is moderated with the aim that everyone feels safe and confident to take part. I criticized that idea on ethical grounds in the past but it is visible here that this claim also simply fails to live up to its promise. The level of resentment, bad faith insinuations as well as evidently and ostentatiously false claims (including the title of the topic) is remarkable. Personally i don’t really care – it is not the first time people have articulated this kind of spiteful thoughts about me. But it well demonstrates that the whole top-down moderation idea of the OSMF is an empty promise. And there are plenty of people who – when seeing this kind of conversation happening unchallenged in the OSM community – will think twice before they engage actively in this kind of social context. Note this is not me projecting, other people have articulated that very sentiment to me on quite a few occasions. And the problem here is not the lack of moderators sanctioning people breaking the rules (or weaseling around them as it is also openly done here – mit Ansage as we say in German). The problem is that there is apparently no one left on that channel having the courage to push back and calling out the insults, disrespect and plainly false claims, leading to the mentioned radicalization and reaffirmation of preconceptions in a closed group.

I like to emphasize that the sentiment of people, that when things develop in a bad direction they are trying to identify the reason and who is responsible for it, is understandable and often helpful – but also misguided here as far as assigning blame is concerned. And i think i made it clear back in May 2022 already and i will do so again here: The OSM-Carto maintainers having failed to find back to a consensus direction back in 2018 and the years after – that is our failure and we have to collectively accept responsibility for that. Now you could try to assign individual blame to individual maintainers based on how you assess their efforts to achieve consensus within the group, if you like their ideas and preferences regarding map design work or whether you approve of their style of communication or simply who you can relate to better on a personal level. I would not do that. Keep in mind that the OSM-Carto maintainer team was deliberately put together as a heterogeneous group of people, selected not by like-mindedness and common interests but because of their abilities and the diverse viewpoints and ideas they are able to contribute. This diverse composition of the maintainer team is the very essence of the project that made it unique and was largely responsible for its success. Everyone within this heterogeneous group did what they could within their unique abilities for the success of the project. So we own this collective failure as a group.

What is getting lost – and that is the key point – is that the ultimate problem is not OSM-Carto, it is the lack of anything other than OSM-Carto in the field of openly cooperative map design with an ambition of a balanced global representation. I have been pointing out that this is a problem for many years, practically every time i write about OSM-Carto. I have also pointed out that strategically investing in development of software that facilitates openly cooperative map design on that level is imperative for the OSM community. The most recent plans of the OSMF in the context of map rendering are highly disappointing in that regard. Not a single word, let alone a single cent, is invested there into the question what the needs and requirements of community map design are regarding tools.