10 days ago, I wrote an essay about Bing Map Builder and how it could be used to fork the OSM community.
I made a prediction there:
Assume that Bing Map Builder becomes a really decent and good editor and that about a third of the edits happen through Map Builder. Microsoft could then -at some time in the future- decide to let updates from Map Builder flow to Bing Maps first, and only let them flow towards OpenStreetMap at a later time, “to review them for quality”.
It seems that this prediction has become true already (1). In the discussion under my previous entry, people noticed that “no bing accounts appeared anymore” in the new to OSM-listing. Time to re-investigate!
So, what is the behaviour now? I drew a new building, clicked saved and… the building disappeared from my screen. When opening the network console, this network call proved my suspicions. The created data is now sent towards https://bing.com/mapbuilder/changeset/submit and contains the changeset data (and bit of extra information)
Changes made with Bing map builder are now sent to Bing, not to OpenStreetMap anymore.
(Edit 2023-03-01: Allison P pointed out in the comments that the building she drew now appeared into OSM, specifically in this changeset)
I’m curious what caused this and how this will play out further.
What caused this?
One hypothesis is that my essay caused them to take action and to switch over to their private backend to mitigate my critiques.
On the other hand, this might have been planned all along and have been rolled out just as planned.
Or maybe the truth is in the middle. It could have been planned, but rolled out sooner because of my essay.
In either case, I wasn’t contacted by their team - so I don’t know. Maybe I’ll hear how this went one day; maybe not.
Does this solve the issues I complained about?
The upside is that the community does not have to deal with pseudonymous accounts anymore. And the product “Bing Map Builder” now at least does what it says on the box.
The drawback is that this fractures the community further, just like I feared.
And the attribution to OpenStreetMap is still missing. As long as OSM-data is shown in Bing Map Builder, a clear attribution should be shown somewhere.
But the email delivery is fixed though. The first email I received arrived about half an hour after I published my article.
How will this play out further?
I’m wondering how this will evolve further. Will Bing upload the data that their contributors to OpenStreetMap - after a review and conflation? Or are we seeing a de-facto fork between the two datasets? Time will tell.
Some personal experiences about publishing the essay
My essay did make quite a splash and was shared widely. It got me on the frontpage of HackerNews (achievement unlocked) and my Mastodon account gained about 100 followers. The essay got translated and republished in French.
But most importantly, I got many positive reactions, saying that they “enjoyed the read”, found it “an interesting perspective”. Some wanted to take action by “reporting the Bing Map Builder account” (which has been blocked for quite a while), others found I was a bit “alarmist”. However, nearly everyone who commented agreed with my talking points. And I got no (very) negative reactions (e.g. no rude reactions or ad-hominems) - all messages were polite.
I didn’t receive official communication from neither the OSMF-board nor the Bing Map Builder team (yet?) - but a few OSMF-board members reacted via various channels. I trust that they are following up on this - I’m quite sure that the OSMF communicates with the Map Builder Team regularly to follow up the project and that this communication was ongoing before my essay. (For clarity, I had no contact with OSMF-members about the content of both essays as well).
Footnotes
(1) To be precise: the last part or this prediction has become true.