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Comment by Doctor_Fegg | Hacker News Reader

This article is just factually wrong.

It alleges repeatedly that Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc “employ nobody in the OSM community”. They do. Microsoft even employed the founder of OSM, Steve Coast, for a while.

If your criterion is ‘involved in OSM prior to current employment’, I could name a bunch of people currently working for Facebook, Amazon, Snap etc of whom that’s true. (One such person even stood for election to the OSM Foundation board this month.)

But, as others have pointed out, I’d hope we’re more welcoming than that. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re editing OSM you’re part of the community.

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I sent this article to a friend of mine who works for Microsoft and they came back with an interesting anecdote: several groups inside Microsoft, including theirs, have recurring "hack for good" gatherings, especially during the pandemic when regular get-togethers aren't happening. One of the things they do for this is to log into a community team (I'm not sure of the exact term, I don't contribute to OSM) and spend a couple of hours tagging landmarks and streets and edges of farms and various other geographic features while BSing together as a team.

Sounds kind of relaxing to me, and a way to contribute a bulk of hours to OSM that I hadn't thought of.

Can confirm, this is popular on my team. Additionally, this should also direct actual dollars to OSM - volunteering for an organization is matched in cash by Microsoft, to the tune of 20-something an hour.

> volunteering for an organization is matched in cash by Microsoft, to the tune of 20-something an hour.

I've never heard of a policy like this before, but I like it a lot (admittedly I've been mostly in academia). Is this unique to Microsoft or more common?

Google does this at 10/hour as well. Unsure of others. Both Google and Microsoft match cash donations too up to 15k/year - it's a wonderful perk to have after you've basically covered all your living expenses and savings etc. I can eg fund a minor scholarship at half cost, or direct serious money to a cause I care about.

Yeah, I've heard of matching monetary charitable donations before but this is the first time I've heard of matching volunteer time with money.

Thanks!

Apple had full time OSM mappers as well as sponsored weekly mapping meetups where employees could volunteer to help with mapping. I’m not sure if they still do this. The OSM and cartographers I worked with at Apple were all very passionate about helping map remote parts of the world and the benefits mapping brings during disasters.

They still have a team, you can follow their edits here: https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-changesets?comment=adt

When I was on Apple Maps in 2018–19 they still did this! I’m pretty confident they still do.

My experience with the more extreme OSM folks is that as soon as you are working for a large company, you are no longer a member of the community. More generally, there is nothing the big companies could do to make them happy, short of divesting completely from OSM so that they can get their hobby project from 2008 back.

I’m sure you can find any given opinion in a community of 2m registered users with a public mailing list, especially any community which includes a bunch of 17-year old Linux enthusiasts, but it’s not remotely representative of the OSM community nor a particularly useful subset to identify.

I agree they are not representative of the community, but they are a quite vocal minority, to whom anyone working on OSM in a corporate context is well-acquainted.

I offer my observations as a warning to take any anti-corporate sentiment from self-proclaimed OSM community representatives with a grain of salt.

I’d fully agree with the latter. Sometimes (often) a gobshite on a mailing list is just a gobshite on a mailing list. (He says, looking anxiously at his own 2000 list postings over 17 years.)

The lists are sometimes attributed a significance they don’t really have any more - they have a few hundred subscribers max in a massive project. Most of the OSM US community discussion happens on Slack, in Germany it’s a webforum, some countries use Telegram and so on.

I've never talked to anyone like this, not sure where you get it from.

You get people that are suspicious and cautious about big corp sponsorship of OSM, and rightly so, EEE was and still is a thing. But in OSM, contributors are contributors, plain and simple.

I get it from personal experience having once worked on OSM for a big company. Next time you’re at an OSM conference, strike up a conversation with anyone from a big tech company and ask about folks like this, I’m sure they’ll have plenty of stories. Better yet, go to their talk and watch the Q&A session get derailed by some guy who’s mad about the way a bike path was tagged.

When I first wrote "employ nobody in the OSM community" I actually wrote it as "they employ almost nobody in the OSM community", but changed it to be more emotive. Daniel Aleksandersen italicised it to be even more emotive.

For the purposes of this email, I used the term "OSM Community" as meaning actively contributing to OSM personally/prior to employment, as you assumed. You could view that as gate keeping the "OSM Community", and you'd be right. But I do think it's important to be able to differentiate people who are employed, and map exclusively as part of that job vs people who are involved for other reasons. The term "OSM Community" was clearly the wrong one, but I'm glad you parsed it correctly.

I believe the amount of people that you could list who were involved in OSM prior to being employee is repetitively small. From the conversations I've had with some Organised Editing Teams, they don't hire out. Employees of the companies can get transferred to those teams/departments, but they don't have public job postings for people to apply for.

Right, and I'm rather concerned that this be taken as representative of the OSM UK community.

Also, it seems pretty easy to add something in the Organic Maps app (né maps.me), for instance, not that I use that for mapping.

Yeah, that struck me as a bit of an odd repeated phrase. I think they mean that these companies don't have anyone employed specifically to contribute to the project. But that's only one of many ways a company might contribute to a project...

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