An open project nerds open standard communication channels, Like mailing lists, not closed sh!t like fakebook or whatsapp or telegram.
I gave a link to OWG site, there’s an e-mail address you can use.
I also don’t know if you can change their mind, but I don’t believe they appear here and that it’s a popular problem and you will reach them through a revolutionary wave.
- I donate when i know hoe much money i sin the project, and how it should be used, where do i find the info?
- I maybe doing this, is there a “How to” set up a tile server?
So true, its a complicated mess of channels, wiki, comments, blogs, urls
This is just not true, mailing lists are outdated.period. (i have the discussion in my country all the time, only the old people are against the forum, with no reason except “It always was that way”) For a project of this magnitude/size there should be ONE Wiki (which is held up to date), ONE Forum, ONE help site. Now everything is scattered all over the map, and nobody knows where or important information/tools etc get lost because nobody finds them.
I will write them an mail with some points, lets see if i even get an answer. My experience in OSM is, “If you wanna change something, you are wrong here.” I hope the dont behave the same way.
Mailing lists are old fashioned, not outdated. They are a better way of doing things, but the youngsters want to be fashionable, which is good for the commercial operators, as the expense of the privacy and convenience of the people the are trying to reach.
I think you will still find that the people who actually do the work prefer mailing lists, or possibly IRC, to forums.
The main reason forums exist on the internet are:
- to provider advertising revenue to the operators;
- to provide a trackable target for that advertising;
- to lock people into services to help them gather as much information as possible about them, in order to target that advertising, or collect direct fees.
The other big problem with forums is fragmentation, if you are actually supporting something, you end up having to actively monitor multiple forums and may have to have many accounts to do that.
However this is one of these things that comes up many times on mailing lists, and on which few minds are changed by the arguments.
You points are debatable, but this will turn the thread too much Off Topic, i understand your points, but i don’t think the reasons you mentioned are still the main reasons for or against forums.
I wonder how long you guys are mapping. In my early days I constantly looked at the map to see what I did.
Nowadays, I don’t care. I just map and and maybe the things show up on the map and maybe not. I no longer care. It’s in the DB and that’s fine.
You do seem to be expecting an instant view of “stuff you’ve just added”. It’s not that long ago that the maps on osm.org were only updated once a week (on a Tuesday or a Wednesday?). You don’t have a service level agreement with the operators of OSM’s servers; they have no obligation to provide you with updated maps a certain time after you’ve added stuff to the database. The reason that “the problem has not been solved” is that it’s not a simple solution to just throw more money or servers at the problem (see lots discussions on the “operations” github for more details, both about current data centre details and the “long tail” of tile users).
There are lots of questions about what sort of infrastructure the OSMF should run itself (see numerous discussions elsewhere). There are also people running end-user sites using OSM data, often through a third party provider of map data, of which the largest is probably Mapbox). It’s also possible for you - yes you - to create your own map tiles that are always up to date minutes after any edit.
OpenStreetMap has been described as a “do-ocracy” - essentially what matters is people trying to solve problems, not saying that some other people should do something. Posting here to say “Why is this not considered a problem, and fixed?” is not actually helping to solve the problem at all - it just diverts people who might be actually doing something useful into replying.
What I’d suggest, therefore, is that you try and solve your problem yourself. You can set up a server rendering the same sort of tiles that are visible on osm.org’s standard layer by reading https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04-2-lts/ , and you can set up automatic updates by following https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:SomeoneElse/Ubuntu_1604_tileserver_load#Updating_your_database_as_people_edit_OpenStreetMap . A small virtual machine on a PC or laptop will be more than enough to deal with a medium-sized European country (or half of Africa). There will I’m sure be questions that you need to ask on the way, and many will already have been answered over at e.g. help.openstreetmap.org .
And thats the reason to stop improving or what, every time when some body brings this topic up the same stupid and old arguments come up, " Ohhh in the early days we only updated once a week jada jada jada jada" " Ohh its a database and no map" “Do it yourselfe!”(->They key in such porjects is that some can do this and others can do this, not everybody is willing to learn programming only to ad “his” feature to the database, so we split the work, and since we contribute we can ask for stuff, if we get it is different story)
So, with this mindset we would never had some improvement in the world. Maybe its time that OSMF sorts things out.
But thanks for the links i will take a look into those!
One thing that’s worth saying is that almost everything in the OSM world is as it is because some volunteer individual or group decided to sit down and create it. Most started off with someone sayong “I can do that better” and then doing it.
Another is that to solve the original question here you don’t need to “learn programming” - just be able to follow instructions and ask questions if something goes wrong. Most of the things around OSM were created by people who started out just like you and me - they saw a problem, and found a way to fix it.
That’s why I suggested something that would alleviate the original problem for the mapper that posted it. Solving it for everyone is hard - lots of applications want a free lunch in terms of free map tiles, and there are few good options there. Solving it on an individual level is however very possible.
I agree that it’s an important, but high level issue. Fortunately the debate began lately:
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2018-February/thread.html#80161