OpenStreetMap is in trouble – a critical take on Bing Map Builder

I studied geography for about eight years in university and something that drove me kinda mad is how cartographic authoring tools were more like CAD software than they were like video games (I once had a short rant over dinner with the President of ESRI Canada about how my GPU is built for rendering geometries and ArcGIS ignores its existence).<p>On the surface, the CAD pedigree makes sense. But… why aren’t more tools like video games? Make it super easy for anyone to start getting involved.<p>I remember all the gatekeeping-like discussion in “Public Participation GIS” seminars: you’ve gotta be an expert to author good data because there’s so many ways to do it wrong. Blah. No.<p>One of my daydreams if I get FU money is to make an incredibly user friendly set of web based analytical GIS tools. Not just the basics like buffering and queries, but the entire spatial toolbox to build data processing pipelines. I want a layperson to be able to ask “where should I buy a house if I care about these four parameters?” (and for it to not be a hidden magic purpose built portal on some realtor website)<p>The immediate retort from my internal pessimist is “the data isn’t available or isn’t consistent“ but I don’t buy that anymore. I remember having to go ask nicely to obtain shapefiles from my city. Decades later it’s all just online. And the community can help catalog data sources, add metadata about transforming them to standard schemas, and sharing data pipelines with the community in some sort of catalog.<p>I really think it’s a UX problem above all else.

Just to be clear: this is an individual user&#x27;s &quot;diary&quot; (blog) hosted at openstreetmap.org, not in any way an official statement from the OpenStreetMap Foundation.<p>And I agree with the author that the design of Bing Map Builder looks problematic. The biggest problem being that it&#x27;s segregating its contributors from the general OSM population in the name of &quot;privacy.&quot;

Microsoft has historically been a fairly good ally to the OpenStreetMap community. We use Bing imagery a lot in our mapping efforts, as well as their buildings dataset, just to name two examples.<p>I hope that Microsoft owns up to this mistake, and pivots back to supporting our community rather than fracturing it. As the article notes, the OSM community is very sensitive about how large corporations communicate with us as they contribute.

When you open <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bing.com&#x2F;mapbuilder&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bing.com&#x2F;mapbuilder&#x2F;</a> for the first time, this text is at the bottom of its splash modal:<p>&gt; <i>Map builder is powered by data from OpenStreetMap—a free, community-driven map of the world. By continuing, you agree to the Microsoft Services Agreement. Edits you make will be visible on maps that use OpenStreetMap data.</i><p>… but it’s presented at a font size of <i>7px</i>. For many people and on many devices, 7px text might as well not even be there. And #767676-on-#ffffff makes it a little worse.<p>(Actually, the second last word, “OpenStreetMap”, is a link-styled button that opens the help&#x2F;info panel described in the article, and due to careless styling and very weird DOM structures, that word “OpenStreetMap” is then bumped to 12px while that panel is open.)<p>I’m honestly not certain I’ve ever encountered such-sized text before, for <i>any</i> purpose, let alone important stuff like this. I probably have, given how 9px was hardly rare fifteen years ago (HN the yes-we-all-know-its-font-sizes-are-way-too-small-and-why-hasn’t-sanity-been-restored-just-yet-so-we-can-all-stop-using-it-at-at-least-120%-zoom even has 7pt, which is 9⅓px), but nothing springs to mind for even 8px.

Maybe to give some more context to the use of &quot;Map builder&quot; as editing Software in OSM, we can look at some statistics from osm changeset. (Disclaimer: I created the statistics and website)<p>Looking at the usage, there was 1 contributor in 2021 (Map Builder User [1]), 1506 contributors in 2022 and 890 contributors in January 2023. In total, 2376 contributors used Map builder. As of January 2023, it&#x27;s the 24th most used tool by total contributor count. [2]<p>Looking at the edit count: Map builder is the 98th most used editing software with 3768 edits in 2021, 69618 in 2022, 38954 in January 2023 and a total of 112340 edits. [3] It has gained in popularity in the last year. I hope these statistics can help with the discussion.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;user&#x2F;Map%20builder%20user" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;user&#x2F;Map%20builder%20user</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;piebro.github.io&#x2F;openstreetmap-statistics&#x2F;#c229" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;piebro.github.io&#x2F;openstreetmap-statistics&#x2F;#c229</a> [3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;piebro.github.io&#x2F;openstreetmap-statistics&#x2F;#eb30" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;piebro.github.io&#x2F;openstreetmap-statistics&#x2F;#eb30</a>

OSM should ban this sort of impersonation&#x2F;layering crap, and implement detection and banning of such accounts.

Well, it seems like the first step would be straightforward: Block these Microsoft accounts from editing. You can&#x27;t have people contributing without accepting the license agreement.<p>I would normally say the next step after that is to talk to someone at Microsoft. But it&#x27;s very, very difficult not to infer malice or at least unwillingness to engage, here: Microsoft previously used a <i>single</i> account for all of these edits: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;user_blocks&#x2F;5701" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;user_blocks&#x2F;5701</a> That account was blocked, with well-described reasons. Now they&#x27;re using per-user accounts, and haven&#x27;t fixed the issues that were raised. That is not very encouraging.

Microsoft is in a difficult position here. Just taking the GDPR, they are presumably the data controller and they are passing on potentially personally identifiable information to OSM without a data processing agreement. They are vulnerable to a right to be forgotten request, which they can then not fulfill. Given Bing&#x27;s global reach, I&#x27;m sure this is not the only issue. I&#x27;d be really careful trying to attribute this issue to malice on Microsoft&#x27;s part.

authors work site:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mapcomplete.osm.be&#x2F;?language=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mapcomplete.osm.be&#x2F;?language=en</a>

Unfortunately, OSM takes clear political stances and does not use internationally recognized borders when they should. That is antithetical to freedom (as in free software) and is why I would never donate to the project.