Do we need more maintainers?

[EvanCarroll]

Looking at the issues and PR's, it looks like assistance could be used cleaning up the backlog. I'm not 100% sure how much time I can devote to it. But if someone wants to onboard me on the difficulties, and the process I'm happy to take a look at it. I've contributed occasionally.

I just noticed my recent PR has slipped to page 2 and there are 60 open. It's tagged "needs discussion" but I've already accepted the feedback's suggestions. I'm not sure what else I should do? What is the standard for contribution. I think "better than before" is easy to accomplish and done. If we're holding out for a discussion on the PR, who is supposed to start the discussion?

[Cj-Malone]

I think "better than before" is easy to accomplish and done.

Not necessarily, adding bad data here causes bad data in OSM. OSM gets the blame, iD gets the blame, NSI gets the blame. Often no data can be better than bad data.

If we're holding out for a discussion on the PR, who is supposed to start the discussion?

This seems to be a US entry, you are free to talk with the local community. There is a community forum, Slack and possibly mailing lists.

[EvanCarroll]

As it relates to to this question coming from the perspective of a contributor, do I start those conversations? Or does someone else? How does that tag "needs-discussion" on open PRs work? Because I think if you can't tell when a commit needs work, or what the next step for the committer is you either should close it with feedback (in this case -- 'your commit stands out because _____ and we don't want to accept it) or accept it and iterate through the fixes later.

Right now though, there is no uniformity in the tagging for "Pick Your Part" that would seem worse, than the suggestion. I can't see an argument that having 600 entities with no uniformity is better.

[1ec5]

close it with feedback (in this case -- 'your commit stands out because _____ and we don't want to accept it)

That used to be the practice but it got a lot of pushback, so a label is a gentler alternative that avoids leaving the impression that a PR is hopeless. Yours isn’t hopeless! The needs discussion Waiting for other contributors to voice their opinion label is a request for more opinions from participants in this repository (not necessarily maintainers). If no opinions are forthcoming here, your other recourse is to start a discussion in a mappers’ communication channel such as the forum or Slack. That said, three days is not a long time to wait for a PR to land in most projects. We’re still a lot faster than most OSM-related projects by a long stretch.

iterate through the fixes later

Accepting a PR with separate tailwork is an option, but tagging choices aren’t tailwork, because we pretty much continuously deploy, leaving a wake in the OSM database that’s much more difficult to clean up for reasons outside our control.

#10717 (comment) came with two pieces of feedback:

• The wikidata=Q133309706 tag was incorrect to the point of breaking the build. You’ve addressed this issue. 👍
• The operators/ tree is appropriate for when the only thing the scrapyards have in common is that they’re run by the same company. The brand/ tree is more appropriate for Pick Your Part. I left a comment that hopefully clarifies that point. If you need help making the requested changes, just say so; looks like you’ve already given other maintainers permission to commit to your branch directly.

[bhousel]

So my personal thoughts on this.. A few times a year I will go through the list of open issues and just merge everything that isn't spammy. I've learned to just give people whatever they want, even if I think it's a dumb idea.

This project isn't a top priority for me, and I recently lost my job, so adjust your expectations accordingly.

I've written a bunch about my journey from being the iD maintainer, to growing name-suggestion-index in the hopes of improving POI data in OSM, to being kicked off iD against my wishes so the OSMF could take it over, to developing Rapid as a successor to iD, and now seeing Rapid kind of put in limbo after our years of work. I'm not sure what happens next.

Experience has shown that the OSM community just doesn't care that much about these projects or the work done on them. I appreciate volunteers like @Cj-Malone and @Snowysauce stepping up to keep releases happening, but it's possible that just none of this work is as important as we thought it was a few years ago. I'll just make you a maintainer at this point - you'll receive an invite shortly and can chat us up on Slack if you want. "More maintainers" isn't the problem, you will see.

[EvanCarroll]

For what it's worth I also lost my job last week. Wish you the best luck. I'm reskilling on Rust to make that pivot. I'm intending to blog about getting a part for my Civic at a junk yard, and using my skillset to make every step of that process better. The junk yard is my PR here. ;) I will say this, i very much appreciate Rapid. I used it to do my entire neighborhood. I've probably added 20,000 buildings to OSM with it. And the central index for names is a brilliant idea. I love it.

Keep your spirits up.

[peternewman]

growing name-suggestion-index in the hopes of improving POI data in OSM

Experience has shown that the OSM community just doesn't care that much about these projects or the work done on them.

Sorry to hear about your job @bhousel . Personally iD is about the only desktop editor I use, so I'm sure you've had a huge input there over the years, and NSI even more so. A picture is worth a thousand words, and just look at this graph:
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/brand%3Awikidata
compared to this one:
https://github.com/osmlab/name-suggestion-index/graphs/contributors

There are currently almost 2.5 million brand:wikidata tags alone, last edited by 66,000 users. I'm assuming NSI must be comfortably responsible for half if not significantly more of those!

Amusingly I see the top three brands are 7-Eleven, McDonalds and Ozon (some Russian shop apparently), I'm kind of surprised McDonald's isn't in first place!

Certainly personally, when mapping with StreetComplete, if I'm adding a shop with an NSI preset its guaranteed to get a name, whereas a non-branded shop doesn't always end up with one and may just be a restaurant or convenience store depending on how much of a rush I'm in.

[Snowysauce]

Speaking for myself, I've put working on PRs and issues on the back burner at the moment in favor of working on processing the 2000+ new entries that came into the index this week via the NSI Collector update. It was the first such update since August, and I enabled collection on two highly-used categories that previously didn't collect OSM data, the combination of which made such a mass influx inevitable. About 1100 of the new entries are in the categories I enabled collection for, and because I was the one who flipped the collection switch, I feel a bit of responsibility for taking care of those entries.

I don't expect all of the new items to be fully processed before the next release on Sunday, and it's possible that there will still be items to work on by the time of the March 30 release.

In terms of #10717, I genuinely have not had the opportunity to re-look at the PR since my original comment. Once I got the green light to import the newest collector data, that became my top priority because of how long it's been since we've had updated OSM planet data. The timing of the import and the shift of my focus to that coincided with a flood of Egyptian PRs, which is part of why #10717 is on page 2 at the moment.

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As for the original question... maybe? I think @bhousel summed up things very well, and I agree 100% with his take. I was part of a volunteer project from 2011 to 2023 that kind of imploded when everyone else involved walked away. I can't read anyone's mind, of course, but my best guess is that they either lost interest in the work or had life changes that took them in another direction. I'm proud of the work we accomplished, but sad that it's no longer continuing.

My username is partly in memory of a long-deceased pet, and their successor died last June. I had edited OSM in the past, and I turned back to OSM and to the NSI after the latter's death as a way to channel my grief into something productive. So, for me, there was a genuine motivation to do something that occupied my time while also being of use to others.

It's impossible to say how impactful or important the work that I or others do here actually is - that's ultimately up to every individual contributor to determine, because our real-life responsibilities and situations are all different.

[codeinabox]

I am happy to get more involved reviewing issues and PRs. My expertise is with the UK, Australia and to a lesser extent Japan, so feel free to mention me on anything involving those locations.

[Cj-Malone]

It will be interesting to see what happens in the future. Right now NSI is probably really empty for BR or IN, whereas GB is basically done and people are adding things with less than a handful of locations.

Having a bigger community in those countries, and maintainers who can accurately review them would probably make NSI much bigger.