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Days like today...

Posted by emacsen on 28 April 2014 in English.

Today has been an incredibly frustrating day in OSM for me.

I started off the morning dealing with DWG stuff. There’s so much negativity in some people, but when communicating on behalf of the DWG, one must try to rise above the petty insults and most past it. Then I had to deal with some domestic mapping issues before they rose to the level of DWG intervention.

Then I ran a mapping party, where for the second time in a row, only one other OSM NYC member showed up, despite us getting 6-7 RSVPs. I spent a lot of time prepping for the meeting, finding the right place to have it, finding the right place to meet, etc., and when people don’t show up, it’s very disheartening.

Then I find that NYC has had dozens, maybe hundreds of POIs messed up by an automated edit, by a user who was clearly told to stop his automated edits.

And then I get an email complaining about bot-mode’s TIGER expansion project, a project which I spent months working on.

Then, finally, MapRoulette had a new contributor submit a patch, a very long patch, which clearly took them a long time to write, but I had to reject it because it didn’t fit in with the bug that it was supposed to solve, nor did it fit generally in with our programming style/the way we organize the code in the project. It just would not have fit. I tried my best to give honest, supportive feedback, but I know that rejection always stings, no matter how it’s presented.

Days like today put me in a bit of an OSM funk

Discussion

Comment from Jean-Marc Liotier on 28 April 2014 at 12:06

Don’t let the blues get you ! Breath, walk, cycle, let someone take the lead for a change, map something completely different for a while… Sooner or later you’ll come back refreshed - better than burning out !

Comment from Linhares on 28 April 2014 at 21:21

Cheer up, emacsen!

OSM is a great project despite all of this negativity! Your work benefits many other people, that’s for sure!

Abraços, Linhares

Comment from OpenBrian on 28 April 2014 at 23:39

Hey Did I ever mention the time I hosted a mappy hour and I was the only person that showed up? At least I had a good beer.

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