On 18:28 2014-03-16, Greg Morgan wrote:
And now for something completely different: It's the cartographers that
are limiting the project adoption and burnout rate for contributors.
Here's your next bottle neck to work on.
Then after that: addresses. :-)
I understand how difficult it is to render the world. However, I
consider that the current method of data distribution and the rendering
chain is broken. I don't have a better solution yet but here's a
problem that is right in MapBox's wheel house that can be fixed without
a costly and damaging license change. When Alex says, "OpenStreetMap's
purpose is to democratize who decides what's on the map" that's not true
based on what is actually rendered. It is an oligarchy of cartographers
that determine what is on the map and not the democracy of what the
mappers have placed in the database.
Vector tiles are not the solution if the resulting tiles are the just
more of the same minimalist map tiles. We need a real mapper's map
again. We need tiles that are so butt ugly only a mother would hang the
project tiles on her fridge because that's what little Johnny did in
school today. The type of butt ugly tiles I am talking about are
something like Tiles@Home,
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tiles@Home. The magic of T@H was
that I was rewarded as a young mapper. It was magic when I saw the
first traffic=hump that I added to the database show up on the map.
From there, it was an Easter egg hunt to find traffic calming humps as
I could while I fixed tiger data.
I had the same reaction when swimming pools started appearing on the
Standard map.
The cartographers are creating beautiful maps. I show people MapBox
maps, Stamin Design, or Andy Allen's work. However all these are just
minimalist maps that do not show what the database is capable of and the
type of data that the database contains. Many people have to see it to
believe it. Just as the iD editor has been viewed as an important piece
of the puzzle, I view a mapper's map like Tiles@Home equally if not more
important than the iD editor. Here's an example. I mapped a ta ta bar,
http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1801776750, It doesn't render. Another
mapper put a poi of a nightclub,
http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2354317861. It doesn't render. That
was part of that mapper's first and last contribution. The OSM process
appears broken. In Google maps, however, a mapper using map maker is
rewarded with their efforts. You can go to this same location and at
least see what I call a "Google Donut"
https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Candy+Store/@33.6555233,-112.0307235,20z.
The perception is that map maker works while iD, Potlatch, JOSM,
Mercator are all broken. Moreover, the mapper's map tiles can't be some
side project that goes away like T@H did. The butt ugly tiles need to
be in the second slot on the OSM site and managed by OSM servers. In a
sense, I have off-boarded part of my mapping just like this mapper did.
I no longer map data of this type. Why should I even put a sport tag
with a leisure=pitch when all the the current tile set needs is is pitch
to show a green blob? T@H would reward me with an icon that showed the
actual type of playing field. Being rewarded for mapping efforts
encourages additional growth of the database. Does nearing completion
of the map mean showing highways only as all the current pretty map
tiles show?
For all its rough edges, the osmarender/T&H map was great for showing
people that OSM really does accept all manner of local knowledge.
Anything with a store= tag could show up at the lowest zoom levels, just
like on Google's map. (T&H also had very, very quick turnaround times, a
feature we take for granted these days.)
Over the past few months, the Standard map has seen lots of improvements
-- like offsetting administrative boundary labels! -- and I'm really
grateful to the folks working on that effort. But there really does seem
to be a drive to remove clutter from the map, starting with the fallback
area labels. [1] I think it's a step backward. There are plenty of large
features that aren't parks or golf courses: school grounds, residential
subdivisions (estates), cemeteries, and retail developments no longer
have labels at z14, causing the map to appear nearly unlabeled in
suburban areas. [2]
It may be the case that a cleaner map will be less intimidating to new
users. However, it should be possible to make the map dirtier, more
crowded, if only to give each mapper an outlet for their detailed local
knowledge. It is possible, of course, but we need to do a better job of
communicating that fact.
[1] https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/351
[2] Compare <http://osm.org/go/ZTVUyTgl-> to
<http://map.fosm.org/#map=14/39.3126/-84.318>
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