But you haven’t done that. Why not? If this is really such a big deal, why haven’t you done that?

Because my focus is on the analysis. I don’t stand any chance in competing in a lobbying battle against the economic interests behind the status quo of the OSMF and the direction it is heading while – as i have pointed out in the past – i could well hold my ground in an open discourse based on arguments and reasoning even against an army of lobbyists backed by billions of Euros from big tech. Hence that is what i am doing here: presenting arguments and reasoning. If the OSM community and the OSMF members find this convincing and important enough to act on it i would welcome that. But it might actually not be worth the trouble and it might be better to deliberately let the OSMF drift further away from the OSM community and this way creating new spaces for organizing itself in other forms instead of trying to invest a lot of energy to salvage it. This is a discussion for the OSM community to have at large. I can only aim to provide some discussion contributions and to share some of my experience with the OSMF with those from the community who are interested.

I understood your question – but you are misreading my comment here. My answer remains the same: The number of votes an individual candidate gets in this year’s election does not matter – because no matter if just a single voter puts you last on their ballot or if 90 percent of the voters put you on the top – you are going to be elected. And the voters know that. Hence they have very little incentive to spend a substantial amount of time thinking about who to put on their ballot. In other words: The legitimacy problem is qualitative, it is not quantifiable.

I also understand that for you as the outlier among the candidates in this election this is a bad situation. You are not responsible for the whole mess (at least not more than any other OSMF member) – yet you suffer from the consequences.

My recommendation to you individually would be: Consider your ticket to the board as an opportunity to do better than the previous boards have done. If you do things which are truly of long term benefit of the OSM community then no one cares how you got the opportunity to do so. If, however, you pursue your or other peoples’ special interests (and it does not matter if you do so consciously or just as a useful idiot others can easily manipulate) you won’t have the ability to justify that through the vote of the members.

> not having none of the above options in the elections (which i had suggested already in the past by the way).

I think that’s an interesting idea. There’s some specifics one must specify. Many university organisations have a Re-open Nominations option, that could work.

One way to do bring this about, is to propose a Special Resolution for members to vote on. Like every year, there was a reminder that this was an option, but once again, you didn’t propose this. You could write a definition, and collect the required 5% of signatures, and then you ask people to vote on that.
But you haven’t done that. Why not? If this is really such a big deal, why haven’t you done that?

I’m not surely you picked up on the emotion that I have to calculate after your blog post says “My recommendation to… [dissatisfied members] …Cast an empty ballot”.

Let’s hypothetical say 1000 members vote:

If I get 900 votes then I can feel that I at least that many people wanted me in the role, yay I will be energised to serve them well and show it was a good choice.

If I get only 10 votes, that will make me sad. I’ll tell myself they probably read Chris’ post and they think the OSMF board and the election process is no good. Maybe I shouldn’t have run as a candidate, maybe I shouldn’t even spend much time on director duties.

If I get 50 votes, is that better? How about 100? 200? At what point should I feel that I was actually elected?l rather than got the position by default?

Thanks for the comment.

If you’re recommending members to cast an empty ballot if they’re unhappy with the options, how many votes do I need to get for my position to be legitimate? Is there an even low level that should cause me to resign until a new nomination/voting cycle can take place?

As i explained the legitimacy of all the newly elected board members is going to be compromised by every one of them being ensured a seat on the new board independent of how many people voted for them (though i assume if there are truly zero votes for any of the candidates the seat will stay vacant – but that is not going to happen of course).

This is all ultimately the result of not having none of the above options in the elections (which i had suggested already in the past by the way). Members should have the option to vote to keep seats on the board empty. Given the current system of having either 3 or 4 seats up for election every year that would be perfectly compliant with the AoA and legal requirements. And – as said – the board is always free to appoint additional board members if they feel they need additional people on the board.

I explicitly don’t think the election results for the individual candidates in the election are going to have any bearing on the legitimacy of their individual position. The members this year likely will spend much less time and energy in considering the different candidates since their voting decision is not going to matter anyway. So who they put on their ballot and where is going to be much more arbitrary than in past elections.

I think you’re points about transparency, and OSMF becoming uninteresting are very valid. Are there people that might have run as candidates if they knew which board members were intending to run? I think many members don’t even get that far on the consideration, I think OSMF has a publicity problem.

Indeed. But by ostentatiously not declaring their intentions early, the board members furthermore seem to demonstrate what we in German call Wählerverachtung (contempt for voters). Being bad at public communication is one thing – and something to put on the members for not considering sufficiently when electing someone to the board rather than on the individual board member for lacking a skill. But in addition demonstrating either contempt or complete carelessness towards the members is another.

Can we fix that?

If you mean we as the OSM-Community or the OSMF members then yes, we could – by collectively deciding that we want to re-shape the OSMF. This is – to some extent – what happened in 2015. It would be much harder today because you would need to much more substantially push back against interests that are happy with the status quo for one reason or the other.

If you mean we as the (future) OSMF board – that is more doubtful. Don’t get me wrong, you could do a real lot – and it would not even require particular skills like public communication. A lot could be done by simply setting policy and enforcing it. Some ideas can be found in my pre-election post from 2024. But ultimately such an initiative from the board would only work with active support from the OSM community and the OSMF membership. And that might be a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem with the current level of non-communication of the board with the community. That is why i said a restart of the social contract between board and community would be advisable.

Thanks for the comment.

For me the fundamental here is that the role is dull as the OSMF is largely powerless.

I strongly disagree. The OSMF meanwhile has an annual turnover of close to a million. That is not a lot relative to the size of OpenStreetMap, but it is an amount that gives quite a bit of power. Of course without a solid strategy that power is primarily negative (the power to de-motivate volunteers, the power to disturb balance and decrease diversity in the community by giving money to those who are already privileged and already have comparably little difficulty to receive funding from elsewhere).

If you want good people* the (1) make the role more interesting or (2) pay people for their time.

Are you seriously saying that paying people will make them more qualified? As i have pointed out the current selection process is not working. Throwing money at that problem will not make it magically go away. And if the selection process is not working adding a money incentive will primarily increase the number of non-qualified people to run – hence decreasing the chances that qualified people get into the position.

I think you’re points about transparency, and OSMF becoming uninteresting are very valid. Are there people that might have run as candidates if they knew which board members were intending to run? I think many members don’t even get that far on the consideration, I think OSMF has a publicity problem. Those that do think of the OSMF board elections probably know “board members of the OSMF are just people who have volunteered to take on a thankless and time consuming task”. Can we fix that?

It could have been the case that we have less candidates than the number of seats available.

If you want good people* the (1) make the role more interesting or (2) pay people for their time.

*Not saying those standing are not good, but that is a general concern when the pool of candidates shrinks.

Thanks for the comment.

The photos are color infrared images – taken with an infrared converted digital camera with a cutoff wavelength near the end of the visible spectrum (around 650-700nm) so you get some visible light on the red pixels and only infrared on the blue and green pixels, leading to a duotone image. I had established the tradition in past SotM conferences to do some infrared photography and illustrate my blog posts with them.

Regarding the comment you translated – i think there is a bit of a misunderstanding here and the commenter missed that i explicitly pointed out the importance of diversity in maps. I think this is understandable to some extent since there has been a distinct lack of diversity in maps in OSM for a long time and overcoming that is important. Also my image of the Tower of Babel is ambiguous since the legend is both about the loss of a single language and the loss of the ability to communicate with one another.

My main message is that we need shared maps (plural!) for OpenStreetMap to work in the same way we need languages for human culture to develop and grow. The analogy is limited of course, since in OSM we have a single language in a way (in the form of the basic OSM data model). But that is less of a language and more a shared script, that is the basis of all the languages spoken in OpenStreetMap, but not actually a shared language that allows communication of higher level statements on the geography.

Regarding the participation, I absolutely agree the conference is not meant for remote participation. If you’re not there, you’re merely observing. As usual, I was live-tweeting my thoughts and pictures to a Telegram channel, which I hope made people feel less excluded, but still. That was also the reason I was recording those interviews: alas only top 10% of attendees are visible to people outside, and often those are the same people for decades, so I was trying to include others too. And this being a French event, they were focusing to much on locals imo.

Sorry I cannot comment on talks and ideas, I’ve written so much to that Telegram channel I have not a single word more 🙂 Here’s an auto-translated post about your talk:

Christoph surprised us with the topic of his talk — it’s not at all what you’d expect when you see “do we need a map on the main page”.

His point is that a shared map establishes a common “language” through which we, as cartographers, understand each other. Then again, OSM is a map, and we know what this map is specifically (Christoph is the only active maintainer of OSM-Carto). The modern trend of marginalizing cartography and treating a map merely as a data array visualization works for proprietary providers, but not for OpenStreetMap, which is populated by thousands of editors. These editors need a shared understanding of what they are doing, and this common denominator, the “language” of communication, is the map visualization on our website. Therefore, we shouldn’t rush to replace it with customizable, individual vector tiles.

Of course, I fundamentally disagree. The tragedy of the Tower of Babel is well known, but it also happened — and it’s fine, everyone is alive (except for those who built the tower and actually saw it, they all died a long time ago). We speak different languages. Different languages reflect different views of the world and our place in it. They paved the way for true diversity. You can’t just steamroll over it, the way a uniform Russian language was imposed from Brest to Sakhalin. Christoph suggests defining a single language “top-down.” If we let everyone create their own style, set their own accents, and demonstrate their own meaning for tags and topology, it will only enrich our overall understanding of the map. OSM is the only cartographic project that works “bottom-up,” and there’s no reason not to try the same approach for visualization.