Sergey Golubev: “The best thing that can be done for OSM now is to take a dump of the planet, delete it and start all over again”
Sergei Golubev is a naturalist, an experienced osmeer, and author of the City of Mines blog. His thoughts on OpenStreetMap are always unexpected, and therefore doubly interesting. He knows how to find an unusual angle and look at the familiar from a different angle. Why OSM needs disasters, why it doesn’t have a community, and also what the future holds for this project - he told all this in an interview.
- How did you find out about the existence of OpenStreetMap?
- In 2007 or 2009, for work, I needed the most primitive substrate for a map, on which would be the main cities, river lines, etc. Then there was no QGIS, everything was done in ArcView GIS 3.2a. This now does not raise questions, where in case of what to take the data, so as not to circle it yourself, and then it was a whole task. So I met with OSM. In addition to the working need, of course, I had a purely human curiosity. When a new project appears, it is always interesting to study it, to see how it works.
- What was the OSM community then? How did you get into it?
- Honestly, I still haven’t joined it, because the OSM community is an imaginary phenomenon, it really does not exist. All that is called the "OSM Community" is only 20-30 people who are active in Telegram and on the forum. This is an insignificant number of the number of people who really maple. After all, most simply open JOSM or iD and do not participate in any discussions. But I met those 30th who are open to communication in 2014, after I registered with OSM. By the way, by that time, GIS-Lab already had a large active community interested in cartography and everything related to it. I have been active at GIS-Lab since 2008-2009.
- Why is the OSM community in Russia so small?
- Firstly, Russia is a big country, therefore it is difficult to unite people among themselves, to make sure that they can meet regularly. In addition, such distances leave an imprint on character - it is more difficult for our people to communicate. Secondly, you need to understand that OSM is a technical project, and it’s quite complicated, so there’s no point in meeting and discussing how someone has patched the houses today. This is clear to everyone. What will people who are at least a bit interested in GIS technology discuss? Server features, Overpass code, kartostil and other troubles. But this does not concern the majority.
All this leads to the fact that the OSM community in Russia is very small. And I do not think that it will increase if the project exists as it exists now.
- And how is the project now? What is wrong with him?
- OSM is now in stagnation. This is a period of imaginary heyday, but in fact - a deep crisis, which will only be aggravated in the future. And I believe that with the departure of Steve Costa, the project has become more technological, but less lively. And I'm talking about the project as a whole, because what is happening in the Russian segment is only a reflection of global dynamics.
- Why was OSM in crisis?
“Steve Coast, as the founder, is crazy.” For a long time he was an informal leader of OSM, rather, even a leader. When the project is run by such a madman, in rare cases it becomes commercially successful. In addition, it is unlikely to ever become high-tech. But such a project will always be alive, will constantly change depending on the whim and fantasy of its leader.
With the departure of Steve Costa, OSM has become numb. Now almost no changes are possible. Accordingly, many mistakes and problems of youth, to which no one had previously paid attention, cannot be painlessly solved. Radical measures are required, but how can they be implemented if everything has become so interdependent?
The simplest example, in his time, Steve Coast suggested not rendering those buildings that have no numbering. So he wanted to solve this problem - the lack of numbering. But from a business point of view, such a cardinal decision is a disaster, because then most of the buildings would have disappeared from the map. But this was exactly what Steve Costa was up to. He hoped that, on the contrary, this sharp step would motivate people to “return” buildings to the map, that is, give them the numbering. In the future, the project would only benefit from such a solution.
At the moment, such "shares" are completely impossible. If now we propose to do something like this, then almost everyone will say that it will kill the project. But the fact of the matter is that from time to time the project needs small controlled disasters.
The best thing that can be done for OSM now is to take a dump of the planet, delete it, and start all over again. Because it’s not difficult to redraw the entire planet, but it’s very difficult to correct what was originally done anyhow. Of course, of course, you need to make more advanced mapping rules, which would at least somehow indicate the ultimate goal - what we want to get in the end.
I understand that this will not happen. But I believe that the OSM project itself will exist in the form in which it exists now, until some conditional OSM-2 appears - fork, where the problem with micromapping, with three-dimensional, with numbering and others will be solved things. If this happens, then this fork, which is likely to be commercial, will simply take over all the osmeri.
- What is the benefit of the OSM community?
- OSM edits have one undeniable benefit - this is a form of relaxation for the person who makes these edits. You can argue with everything else. I believe that now some kind of machine can describe the houses, for example, a neural network. Therefore, those man-hours that are spent on introducing elementary lines cannot be explained by anything other than a special form of relaxation and entertainment for the osmerians themselves. There are some good precedents - the OSM humanitarian team. This is an incredibly beautiful and useful project. Good projects to create maps have been in Russia. Several times maps were created at the request of various organizations: ambulance and others. But in general, such phenomena are a by-product than the main one. In general, the public good is a populist term that is usually used when nothing else can be given as an example.
- Who then benefit from OSM?
- They have been earning money for OSM for a long time. Major projects include Mapbox, Maps.Me, NextGIS. Even 2GIS, which says it plans to abandon OSM, currently uses its data. Not to say that there are many such companies, but given the narrowness of the segment, it’s quite acceptable for themselves. But it is worth paying tribute to the fact that some companies that earn on OSM, then spend part of their income on the development of its infrastructure. Well, and those who like to mapit - they enjoy and enter data into the project. It turns out here is such a symbiosis.
- How, then, does OSM differ significantly from People’s Yandex.Maps?
- I think that they have a lot in common. Moreover, NUC is many times cooler than OSM, especially with regard to working with users.
If you ask this question to the very “OSM Community”, which consists of 20-30 technically savvy people, then they will start talking about open data, open infrastructure, etc. This is all, of course, wonderful, but to those people who directly make changes, they don’t care what kind of data it is: open or closed. When you open the Yandex editor, where everything is simple and convenient, and you open the OSM editor, the same JOSM is crazy for an unprepared person, you see all the differences immediately and without unnecessary conversations.
If you rephrase one famous joke, then “People’s Yandex.Map” is about the following story: you come to the airport, board a huge beautiful plane, incredibly beautiful flight attendants serve drinks, easy chairs - everything is wonderful, but exactly until you are silent, because if you hint that the plane is flying the wrong way, then immediately there will be ambuls and kick you out of the plane. OSM is a maize on which you can fly anywhere, but you need to bring your details from the plane to the take-off area and be able to install them. That is the whole difference.
- Are you planning to move to the NAC?
- Not. For the sake of interest I tried, circled several buildings, but this is solely for the purpose of seeing how the NAC differs from OSM, how it works. But I wouldn’t go over because the edits that I make are made for myself and I plan to use them in the future: download, process, etc. I don’t make any sense to enter this data into Yandex, so I won’t be able to use it .
OSM is good-looking, but the project was clearly stagnant, it all came down to accumulating data in the database. OSM began as an independent project, like Wikipedia, but only on maps, and now OSM is such a project when people want to have better than Google or Yandex. If a person tries to do cooler than someone else, he will never succeed. There are millions of ways for alternative development, but for some reason they always look and want to do it, to repeat the success that someone has already achieved.
- What are the alternative ways of development? Except how to delete everything and start again.
- To delete everything and to begin anew is a radical way. You need to go in the direction where neither Yandex nor Google are able to provide services. I have long been saying that absolutely different people use cards, including those who have vision problems. So why not create a few different map styles, for example, for color blind or visually impaired? Why not create a separate water map? Where there would be rivers, lakes, and everything else. On almost all known electronic maps it is impossible to find a single river until you zoom in. God be with him, with an increase in zoom. No direction of flow! It would seem the simplest! And this is in Russia, where a huge number of people move on water.
“So where exactly does OSM need to go?”
- You do not have to be better than Google or Yandex, you have to be different. Then everything will be fine. Now OSM from an independent project, which had every chance of excellent development, has turned into a database used by commercial companies. And all this awaits the moment when this abscess breaks through or resolves to other projects, or completely flows into another format.
- If the OSM growth problems are clear, why nobody solves them?
- In OSM there is no single totalitarian dictator. This is his strength and weakness at the same time. On the one hand, this does not allow the project to slip into trash through the fault of a crazy leader, on the other hand, it is impossible to implement a little innovation, except for purely technical ones: adding new servers or increasing the capacity of existing ones. Sometimes they also change the card style. These options are still possible, but something radical - immediately stalls in the bud.
Partially, the democratic approaches adopted by OSM are to blame for this - everything needs to be discussed and agreed with all. While there are endless discussions, problems continue to pile up and slow down the development of the project. Why endless :? There will always be someone who says that he does not agree and against.
Democracy is a good thing, but sometimes it must alternate with periods of harsh totalitarian regimes, when a person comes and says that he does not care who and what he thinks will be as he said.
- Are you talking about the traditions of the domestic OSM community or foreign?
- Foreign colleagues have much more that revolves around OSM. I like something that is not related to technology and hardware. These are questions of different cart meetings, humanitarian team.
- Why such a difference?
- At OSM we have people of a technical mentality, and there are people located in the humanities. I think you know how our techies traditionally relate to the humanities? Therefore, probably, we have more interest in pure IT. What is pop, such is parish.
- I can assume that people of the humanitarian mindset are more concerned with philosophical questions: the public good, the development of society, open data, equal opportunities, etc.
- I don’t really believe in all these good aspirations, I also don’t believe that a person is convinced that he has the opportunity to make the world a better place, will do something. He can say to himself that he does this because he wants to change the world, but in fact he does it because he likes it, because he satisfies some of his own complexes, problems or receives his own selfish pleasure.
Often, just people are deceiving themselves and talking about what is not. I do not believe that OSM will save the world. It's good that he is, but do not overestimate him. In addition, OSM has actually made all other open mapping cartridges pointless. The negative role of OSM is usually hushed up.
- Tell us about this role, which is hushed up. What myths have developed around OSM?
- First about myths. The biggest myth is that the base is very full. Now OSM is a bunch of cities that are connected to each other by thread-roads. All other settlements between them are marked by points or two or three streets and that’s all. There is nothing else. OSM is not a complete database. She still has to grow and grow. Data in OSM is extremely torn and, let's say, “dirty”. If you are going to do something with them, then they must be pre-processed and cleaned.
How did OSM hurt? Not even OSM itself, but the infrastructure around it: ease of downloading data, QGIS and Overpass - thanks to this, programmers unexpectedly came to cartography. Cartographers left and visualizers came. Now it is precisely the cards, in the old sense of the word, not. There are visualizations of various data sets. The concept of generalization has been completely forgotten. Now it’s what Mapbox does when not all points from polygons are loaded at different scales and zooms, because of which the maps become ugly. From 16 to 18, zoom companies are still striving to make the card beautiful, and everything else is monstrous. I note that such cards do not appear because the market asks for this, but because few people are familiar with good examples.
“What good examples are you talking about?”
- You can take any card until 1990 and look at the quality of its performance. These are, first of all, signatures and fonts.
- What advice would you give a newbie to OSM?
- Do not map with Google and Yandex, because this is not the buzz. OSM is ingenious in its principles, I really like them, both in the project and in life: firstly, don’t need to steal data, secondly, do some garbage and harm the project, and thirdly, have fun. This is an absolute minimum, which is enough in excess. If you feel that you can abide by these rules, then act. If you don’t enjoy it, you can always safely say: “Sorry, guys, I can’t participate.” I am often asked why I started to map some territory and did not finish it according to OSM rules. I reply that I have ceased to enjoy drawing this particular area, as I get the mood, I will continue, and therefore, excuse me, this is the rule.
- How can you attract people to the RU-OSM not with a technical mentality?
- To the chat room and to the forum? I do not know. It seems to me that people come there when they have a specific question about OSM. As for the appearance of new osmer in the project, for this it is necessary that as many people as possible know about the existence of OSM. Let's be honest, people do not know about him. And all the talk that OSM is so popular and everyone knows about it for a long time ends with the Moscow ring road.
The fact that Yandex or Google has maps, the user will know almost immediately as soon as they use these search engines. How should he learn about the existence of OSM and its benefits?
- What do you say at the end of the conversation?
- Viva la revolucion! If you do not want revolutionary changes, then you need to do at least something that no one else does. Mapit houses - this is bad manners. It is necessary to map something that is not anywhere else on other maps. Then it will be cool. Or walk along the street and map out trees indicating the species - that’s cool. This will definitely not happen on any map, and if you walk along the street and map the house numbers - there is Yandex or 2GIS for this.
- How did you find out about the existence of OpenStreetMap?
- In 2007 or 2009, for work, I needed the most primitive substrate for a map, on which would be the main cities, river lines, etc. Then there was no QGIS, everything was done in ArcView GIS 3.2a. This now does not raise questions, where in case of what to take the data, so as not to circle it yourself, and then it was a whole task. So I met with OSM. In addition to the working need, of course, I had a purely human curiosity. When a new project appears, it is always interesting to study it, to see how it works.
- What was the OSM community then? How did you get into it?
- Honestly, I still haven’t joined it, because the OSM community is an imaginary phenomenon, it really does not exist. All that is called the "OSM Community" is only 20-30 people who are active in Telegram and on the forum. This is an insignificant number of the number of people who really maple. After all, most simply open JOSM or iD and do not participate in any discussions. But I met those 30th who are open to communication in 2014, after I registered with OSM. By the way, by that time, GIS-Lab already had a large active community interested in cartography and everything related to it. I have been active at GIS-Lab since 2008-2009.
- Why is the OSM community in Russia so small?
- Firstly, Russia is a big country, therefore it is difficult to unite people among themselves, to make sure that they can meet regularly. In addition, such distances leave an imprint on character - it is more difficult for our people to communicate. Secondly, you need to understand that OSM is a technical project, and it’s quite complicated, so there’s no point in meeting and discussing how someone has patched the houses today. This is clear to everyone. What will people who are at least a bit interested in GIS technology discuss? Server features, Overpass code, kartostil and other troubles. But this does not concern the majority.
All this leads to the fact that the OSM community in Russia is very small. And I do not think that it will increase if the project exists as it exists now.
- And how is the project now? What is wrong with him?
- OSM is now in stagnation. This is a period of imaginary heyday, but in fact - a deep crisis, which will only be aggravated in the future. And I believe that with the departure of Steve Costa, the project has become more technological, but less lively. And I'm talking about the project as a whole, because what is happening in the Russian segment is only a reflection of global dynamics.
- Why was OSM in crisis?
“Steve Coast, as the founder, is crazy.” For a long time he was an informal leader of OSM, rather, even a leader. When the project is run by such a madman, in rare cases it becomes commercially successful. In addition, it is unlikely to ever become high-tech. But such a project will always be alive, will constantly change depending on the whim and fantasy of its leader.
With the departure of Steve Costa, OSM has become numb. Now almost no changes are possible. Accordingly, many mistakes and problems of youth, to which no one had previously paid attention, cannot be painlessly solved. Radical measures are required, but how can they be implemented if everything has become so interdependent?
The simplest example, in his time, Steve Coast suggested not rendering those buildings that have no numbering. So he wanted to solve this problem - the lack of numbering. But from a business point of view, such a cardinal decision is a disaster, because then most of the buildings would have disappeared from the map. But this was exactly what Steve Costa was up to. He hoped that, on the contrary, this sharp step would motivate people to “return” buildings to the map, that is, give them the numbering. In the future, the project would only benefit from such a solution.
At the moment, such "shares" are completely impossible. If now we propose to do something like this, then almost everyone will say that it will kill the project. But the fact of the matter is that from time to time the project needs small controlled disasters.
The best thing that can be done for OSM now is to take a dump of the planet, delete it, and start all over again. Because it’s not difficult to redraw the entire planet, but it’s very difficult to correct what was originally done anyhow. Of course, of course, you need to make more advanced mapping rules, which would at least somehow indicate the ultimate goal - what we want to get in the end.
I understand that this will not happen. But I believe that the OSM project itself will exist in the form in which it exists now, until some conditional OSM-2 appears - fork, where the problem with micromapping, with three-dimensional, with numbering and others will be solved things. If this happens, then this fork, which is likely to be commercial, will simply take over all the osmeri.
- What is the benefit of the OSM community?
- OSM edits have one undeniable benefit - this is a form of relaxation for the person who makes these edits. You can argue with everything else. I believe that now some kind of machine can describe the houses, for example, a neural network. Therefore, those man-hours that are spent on introducing elementary lines cannot be explained by anything other than a special form of relaxation and entertainment for the osmerians themselves. There are some good precedents - the OSM humanitarian team. This is an incredibly beautiful and useful project. Good projects to create maps have been in Russia. Several times maps were created at the request of various organizations: ambulance and others. But in general, such phenomena are a by-product than the main one. In general, the public good is a populist term that is usually used when nothing else can be given as an example.
- Who then benefit from OSM?
- They have been earning money for OSM for a long time. Major projects include Mapbox, Maps.Me, NextGIS. Even 2GIS, which says it plans to abandon OSM, currently uses its data. Not to say that there are many such companies, but given the narrowness of the segment, it’s quite acceptable for themselves. But it is worth paying tribute to the fact that some companies that earn on OSM, then spend part of their income on the development of its infrastructure. Well, and those who like to mapit - they enjoy and enter data into the project. It turns out here is such a symbiosis.
- How, then, does OSM differ significantly from People’s Yandex.Maps?
- I think that they have a lot in common. Moreover, NUC is many times cooler than OSM, especially with regard to working with users.
If you ask this question to the very “OSM Community”, which consists of 20-30 technically savvy people, then they will start talking about open data, open infrastructure, etc. This is all, of course, wonderful, but to those people who directly make changes, they don’t care what kind of data it is: open or closed. When you open the Yandex editor, where everything is simple and convenient, and you open the OSM editor, the same JOSM is crazy for an unprepared person, you see all the differences immediately and without unnecessary conversations.
If you rephrase one famous joke, then “People’s Yandex.Map” is about the following story: you come to the airport, board a huge beautiful plane, incredibly beautiful flight attendants serve drinks, easy chairs - everything is wonderful, but exactly until you are silent, because if you hint that the plane is flying the wrong way, then immediately there will be ambuls and kick you out of the plane. OSM is a maize on which you can fly anywhere, but you need to bring your details from the plane to the take-off area and be able to install them. That is the whole difference.
- Are you planning to move to the NAC?
- Not. For the sake of interest I tried, circled several buildings, but this is solely for the purpose of seeing how the NAC differs from OSM, how it works. But I wouldn’t go over because the edits that I make are made for myself and I plan to use them in the future: download, process, etc. I don’t make any sense to enter this data into Yandex, so I won’t be able to use it .
OSM is good-looking, but the project was clearly stagnant, it all came down to accumulating data in the database. OSM began as an independent project, like Wikipedia, but only on maps, and now OSM is such a project when people want to have better than Google or Yandex. If a person tries to do cooler than someone else, he will never succeed. There are millions of ways for alternative development, but for some reason they always look and want to do it, to repeat the success that someone has already achieved.
- What are the alternative ways of development? Except how to delete everything and start again.
- To delete everything and to begin anew is a radical way. You need to go in the direction where neither Yandex nor Google are able to provide services. I have long been saying that absolutely different people use cards, including those who have vision problems. So why not create a few different map styles, for example, for color blind or visually impaired? Why not create a separate water map? Where there would be rivers, lakes, and everything else. On almost all known electronic maps it is impossible to find a single river until you zoom in. God be with him, with an increase in zoom. No direction of flow! It would seem the simplest! And this is in Russia, where a huge number of people move on water.
“So where exactly does OSM need to go?”
- You do not have to be better than Google or Yandex, you have to be different. Then everything will be fine. Now OSM from an independent project, which had every chance of excellent development, has turned into a database used by commercial companies. And all this awaits the moment when this abscess breaks through or resolves to other projects, or completely flows into another format.
- If the OSM growth problems are clear, why nobody solves them?
- In OSM there is no single totalitarian dictator. This is his strength and weakness at the same time. On the one hand, this does not allow the project to slip into trash through the fault of a crazy leader, on the other hand, it is impossible to implement a little innovation, except for purely technical ones: adding new servers or increasing the capacity of existing ones. Sometimes they also change the card style. These options are still possible, but something radical - immediately stalls in the bud.
Partially, the democratic approaches adopted by OSM are to blame for this - everything needs to be discussed and agreed with all. While there are endless discussions, problems continue to pile up and slow down the development of the project. Why endless :? There will always be someone who says that he does not agree and against.
Democracy is a good thing, but sometimes it must alternate with periods of harsh totalitarian regimes, when a person comes and says that he does not care who and what he thinks will be as he said.
- Are you talking about the traditions of the domestic OSM community or foreign?
- Foreign colleagues have much more that revolves around OSM. I like something that is not related to technology and hardware. These are questions of different cart meetings, humanitarian team.
- Why such a difference?
- At OSM we have people of a technical mentality, and there are people located in the humanities. I think you know how our techies traditionally relate to the humanities? Therefore, probably, we have more interest in pure IT. What is pop, such is parish.
- I can assume that people of the humanitarian mindset are more concerned with philosophical questions: the public good, the development of society, open data, equal opportunities, etc.
- I don’t really believe in all these good aspirations, I also don’t believe that a person is convinced that he has the opportunity to make the world a better place, will do something. He can say to himself that he does this because he wants to change the world, but in fact he does it because he likes it, because he satisfies some of his own complexes, problems or receives his own selfish pleasure.
Often, just people are deceiving themselves and talking about what is not. I do not believe that OSM will save the world. It's good that he is, but do not overestimate him. In addition, OSM has actually made all other open mapping cartridges pointless. The negative role of OSM is usually hushed up.
- Tell us about this role, which is hushed up. What myths have developed around OSM?
- First about myths. The biggest myth is that the base is very full. Now OSM is a bunch of cities that are connected to each other by thread-roads. All other settlements between them are marked by points or two or three streets and that’s all. There is nothing else. OSM is not a complete database. She still has to grow and grow. Data in OSM is extremely torn and, let's say, “dirty”. If you are going to do something with them, then they must be pre-processed and cleaned.
How did OSM hurt? Not even OSM itself, but the infrastructure around it: ease of downloading data, QGIS and Overpass - thanks to this, programmers unexpectedly came to cartography. Cartographers left and visualizers came. Now it is precisely the cards, in the old sense of the word, not. There are visualizations of various data sets. The concept of generalization has been completely forgotten. Now it’s what Mapbox does when not all points from polygons are loaded at different scales and zooms, because of which the maps become ugly. From 16 to 18, zoom companies are still striving to make the card beautiful, and everything else is monstrous. I note that such cards do not appear because the market asks for this, but because few people are familiar with good examples.
“What good examples are you talking about?”
- You can take any card until 1990 and look at the quality of its performance. These are, first of all, signatures and fonts.
- What advice would you give a newbie to OSM?
- Do not map with Google and Yandex, because this is not the buzz. OSM is ingenious in its principles, I really like them, both in the project and in life: firstly, don’t need to steal data, secondly, do some garbage and harm the project, and thirdly, have fun. This is an absolute minimum, which is enough in excess. If you feel that you can abide by these rules, then act. If you don’t enjoy it, you can always safely say: “Sorry, guys, I can’t participate.” I am often asked why I started to map some territory and did not finish it according to OSM rules. I reply that I have ceased to enjoy drawing this particular area, as I get the mood, I will continue, and therefore, excuse me, this is the rule.
- How can you attract people to the RU-OSM not with a technical mentality?
- To the chat room and to the forum? I do not know. It seems to me that people come there when they have a specific question about OSM. As for the appearance of new osmer in the project, for this it is necessary that as many people as possible know about the existence of OSM. Let's be honest, people do not know about him. And all the talk that OSM is so popular and everyone knows about it for a long time ends with the Moscow ring road.
The fact that Yandex or Google has maps, the user will know almost immediately as soon as they use these search engines. How should he learn about the existence of OSM and its benefits?
- What do you say at the end of the conversation?
- Viva la revolucion! If you do not want revolutionary changes, then you need to do at least something that no one else does. Mapit houses - this is bad manners. It is necessary to map something that is not anywhere else on other maps. Then it will be cool. Or walk along the street and map out trees indicating the species - that’s cool. This will definitely not happen on any map, and if you walk along the street and map the house numbers - there is Yandex or 2GIS for this.