There has been an interesting remark by Ilya on Mastodon recently that i want to comment a bit about.

First the part about WeeklyOSM: Practically almost everyone in the OSM community reads it and it is a true institution in its function to disrupt the various filter bubbles in the OSM community and giving people an opportunity to widen their horizon on what goes on in and around OpenStreetMap.

At the same time it is a real role model for community projects in OpenStreetMap in its openness to contributors with diverse backgrounds. It demonstrates how this can be a true win-win-situation with low entrance hurdles for contributors and the quality of the results evidently profiting from a diverse contributor base. And this is combined with a fierce independence of the project.

So why does WeeklyOSM still struggle with recruitment? Ilya cites burn-out and lack of appreciation. The latter aligns with my recent observation on OSM community member typology, where i noted – among other things – that intrinsically motivated volunteers in the OSM community these days feel grossly under-appreciated.

WeeklyOSM editors are almost universally intrinsically motivated volunteers. They contribute to the project because they are attracted by its mission and its social function in the OSM community – and probably in most cases also by the fact that it is not guided by specific economic interests – as it is the case for many other projects within the OSM community that invite volunteers. That same thing also makes WeeklyOSM rather unattractive to contribute to for people who pursue specific economic interests in OpenStreetMap.

Ilya suggests there is a volunteers recruitment ratio between software development and communication work of 5-7 (with both terms being only vaguely defined of course, but lets ignore that for the moment). But when looking at things like that you already implicitly treat it like a pure numbers game and essentially ignore that if there is one thing turning off intrinsically motivated volunteers, it is projects where you are just a replaceable worker to burn through and replace after some time.

In terms of the actual reservoir of talent and intrinsic motivation in the OSM community (that is people who like and are fond of OpenStreetMap to a level that they – in principle – would like to get involved in their free time for that reason) i would estimate the ratio between people with non-technical skills and talent compared to technical people to be like 3:1 in the opposite direction. If that is true and the numbers from Ilya are approximately right that would mean the OSM currently demotivates non-technical volunteers 15-20 times more efficiently than technical volunteers.

What to do about it? Well, the OSM community would need to become more appreciative of non-technical and non-management work. Much more appreciative. And before you get any ideas – pretense won’t help here, i am talking about actual appreciation. I know i have said this many times in the context of intellectual work and map design in the past but it applies equally to non-managerial social tasks – including communication.

Ilya is a good example for that – he develops software but is also a talented communicator about non-technical matters. And despite being fairly extrovert, and therefore at an advantage compared to many others with social and intellectual talents and interests, it is my impression that he receives much more appreciation from the mainstream OSM community for his software development work than for communication (and even that quite sparsely – due to cultural biases and prejudices).

Normal OSM community members tend to appreciate non-technical work – like news review and aggregation as WeeklyOSM does, social and intellectual reflection and commentary, good map design etc. – as much as technical work. But people with power and influence in the OSM community almost universally have a technical, often software development background and it is my observation that an astonishing percentage of them essentially look down on people doing non-technical work. But it is even worse than that – because of the numbers i mentioned above it is a widespread belief that you can fill the undeniable needs in non-technical work cheaply and ad hoc from a near infinite pool of human capital. The problem with that view is that non-technical skills cannot be created ad hoc, in most non-technical fields, training and experience are essential for good work – as is a supportive work environment.

Which brings me to the other side of the problem: In non-technical fields it is often much harder for outsiders to distinguish between skilled and competent and unskilled/incompetent work than in technical fields. If an unskilled software developer writes bad software that is fairly clearly noticeable even by someone without a technical background, because the software sucks and that usually has immediate negative consequences even outside the technical domain. In non-technical fields, it is often much harder for a non-expert to distinguish between truly competent work and work of people who either pretend competence or who are unskilled and unaware of it. This might contribute substantially to the negative opinion many technical people have of non-technical work.

WeeklyOSM as a whole does excellent work in total, even if details (like the way individual links are framed in the text) are frequently somewhat off. But i am not too sure how many of the readers of WeeklyOSM would recognize it if WeeklyOSM was replaced by a less independent project under the influence of concrete economic interests that would more frequently report on matters in line with those interests, while silently dropping stuff that could damage those.

When i write about map design here, how many of the casual readers can actually determine if those posts provide meaningful insights into important developments in cartography or if they describe mindless and pointless playing around with toys that is of no interest for anyone serious?

And while this problem of recognizing skilled and competent work as such is more severe with non-technical work, it is not absent in technical fields. You can see truly mediocre software projects being drowned in money and praised over the moon in public communication because they fill a niche fashionable at the moment, while there are exceptionally skilled and talented developers working with a long term vision on truly innovative technologies that struggle with earning a modest living doing that.

What would be needed is a vivid, critical and independent intellectual discourse in the OSM community on both technical and non-technical matters, because that is the only way to develop true appreciation in the community for people’s contributions. Because giving everyone a pat on the shoulder – no matter how good their work is – is not really appreciation.

In societies at large it is, in particular, academic and cultural institutions that fuel and support the independent intellectual discourse on matters of importance for society. I have some hope that in the long term the OSM community might also develop some level of institutional support for this kind of work. But this is unlikely, as long as this is economically seen as a zero-sum-game (i.e. that any money invested in these things is viewed to be missing somewhere else).