FLOSS Weekly 734, Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Doc Searls (00:00:00):
This is FLOSS Weekly. I'm Doc Searls. This week, Katherine Druckman and I talked to Roman Cizik about organic maps, and this overflows into lots of other mapping topics, open Street, map, open mapping in general. Open source is a very, very active community involved with organic maps offline mapping and using maps offline where you're not being tracked. The whole privacy aspect of it, that's all on the docket and it's coming up. Next.

Speaker 2 (00:00:35):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twitch tweet.

Doc Searls (00:00:44):
This is Floss Weekly, episode 734, recorded Wednesday, May 31st, 2023 organic maps. Hello again, everyone everywhere. I am Doc Surles. This is Floss Weekly, and I'm enjoyed this week by Katherine Druckman, herself from Houston, Texas.

Katherine Druckman (00:01:06):
It is <laugh>. Yes. All of those things are true, especially the last part.

Doc Searls (00:01:11):
<Laugh>, you're not always Katherine Druckman, but you are always from Houston <laugh>. Yes, yes, exactly. From Houston. If not from Houston. So, so have you checked into, into Roman our, our guest? Is it Roman cik or, or organic maps? Well,

Katherine Druckman (00:01:31):
Yeah. You know, I was intrigued when I saw it come across the, you know, the, the topic list, the email thread, right? Because as, as many, anybody who's listened to the two of us speak, we're we're privacy enthusiasts. So I do like the idea of talking about any kind of mapping app that doesn't phone home with one's location. So yeah, I think it, I'm, I'm interested in this conversation. Should be good.

Doc Searls (00:01:53):
Yeah. And I, and in my case, I wanted to phone home, but to my own server. <Laugh> to my own, yeah, exactly. Phone home too, too. I'd like to know where I've been, but even the phone company would tell me that, you know, I mean it's, it's kind of crazy. And on top of that I love off, I love having offline maps. I like just being able to go to places where there are, there is no data coverage and and, and look around. So so I wanna, I wanna hurry up and get into this show so we can talk as much as we can. Our, our, our guest today is Roman Tsisyk, and I am completely unprepared with personal information about your Roman <laugh>. What I know so far is that you're in Turkey and you're from Siberia or Western Siberia. So maybe you can tell us, yeah, we, we certainly don't, we avoid politics here, but geography isn't political. So tell us a little bit about where you're from and, you know, and, and then about what about you, the, the little biography and what got you going on organic maps.

Roman Tsisyk (00:02:57):
Yeah, sure. The first of all, it's my pleasure to be here and thank you for this short introduction. So I was born in Siberia. This is not a blind spot like most people think. This is more like south of Canada. Weather is not such bad and very developed area. You have universities, you have shoes you have cities with million people, population so it was a long time ago. Currently, I stay in Turkey. It is evening time now. So in general, I have about two decades of software engineering experience. And during my care, starting from day one, probably from my school of high school time I have been working with open source. I used open source, I contribute to open source. I created a couple of open source projects, including organic maps. Previously I worked on Toronto Project. This is in memory database distributed in memory database very fast. You can perform 1 million request per second. So all my software engineering care is about opener. I work with opensource all the time, and I never regret it.

Doc Searls (00:04:16):
<Laugh>. So tell us just a little bit quick about the database and what, what it was called again,

Roman Tsisyk (00:04:21):
Tarran two. Teran two Toronto. Yeah. Teran, Teran two, it's like a radius. So it's memory database, but you can also run procedures. You have a language general purpose programming language, so like JavaScript and you can write procedures which executed close to your data. So you have in my database, but data is persistent, so it sounds magical. So data memory. But to assist it at the same time so you can get a really high performance but at the same time, your data is safe. So it was, it's 100% open source product. We have a lot of users all around the world. It's all about all level system programing because database is a really complex topic, how to make things optimized, how to store data and things like that. So organic maps is similar in some sense because you do database in your home. So you don't have a powerful server. You have really tiny mobile device and you need to store data. You need to store map data street information. So you do all such operations. Google Maps does on the server, but you do them on your mobile phone.

Doc Searls (00:05:56):
So I, I'm looking for to Toronto. And how is this spelled exactly? Cuz I'm getting wrong results. And you can put it in our chat, in the chat if you feel like it. And then we'll we'll move along because it sounds

Roman Tsisyk (00:06:11):
Tarran Tar two io or we can check GitHub Tartu. I type in chat. Please check it out.

Doc Searls (00:06:19):
Okay. I'm not, I'm not seeing it, but, we'll, we'll let that go or chop it out. <Laugh> chop our, our pause out later. Cuz this sounds like a big deal. So, te tell us how you got going on, on on organic maps, and I'm especially interested in how it differs. Some, a lot of, there are a lot of map apps out there. Yeah. So, you know, what does this get, you know, what niche does this fall into and how is it different?

Roman Tsisyk (00:06:47):
Yeah. Let's talk about organic maps. So I am co-founder and one of primary contributors on the project, and I can cover all details you want the, first of all, what is organic maps? So, organic Maps is a pre and open source mobile maps and navigation app for Android and aos. So you can find it in on Google Play, apple Store, and other sources. So organic maps provides past detailed offline maps of the entire world based on open state map data. So you can find all basic map features you can expect from other apps. So you can browse the map, you can save places you want to visit, you can create custom wires, you can add some comments. You can, when you trip you can import racks you can import wires. We also have voice assisted navigation for cars or cycling, hiking, walking, basically all essential features of contemporary map application, like in Google Maps or Apple Maps, but offline.

(00:08:01):
So answering your question, what makes Organic Maps special? The first of all organic maps is offline, offline maps app. So a lot of applications on the market can cash data now. So you can when you browse the map, it save some parts, some regions in the cash, and you can use application partially offline. Organic maps is 100% of wine. All features, all features I mentioned. They work completely offline without internet connection. So practically, how, how does it work? The first of all, you download the map of your area or region, you plan to visit, you do this operation one time, so you at home you have good internet, you download map into your device. And after that, for example, if you are going into big one trip into Europe, you can just click, click, click, click download all counties you went to visit. And after that you can disconnect completely, disconnect from the internet, draw away your sim card get on a plane and enjoy your YouTube. So organic maps will work super reliable without any need for downloading data. And you can plan your YouTube, you can use navigation, voice assistant navigation, you have all details in your phone, and no bites sent or received to or from the internet. This is a core idea. Offline maps does, does it make sense?

Katherine Druckman (00:09:45):
Oh, it makes, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, Katherine. Yeah, I know. I was just, I, so when you've, when you, well, I have a couple questions. And one is you said, you know, offline maps and I wondered why, why, why you prioritize that. I have my own thoughts about why, but I wonder why you did. But also I'm looking at your GitHub page and I see it says it's crowdsourced Open street map data and is developed with love by maps with me, maps me founders. And I wonder if you could talk about the connection to those two things.

Roman Tsisyk (00:10:14):
Okay, good questions. Let's start the first with the first question. So this is a reasonable question. Why does of wine matters? So 5G or 4G is everywhere, right? So why do you need opine? Good question. What do you think? Why do they need offline?

Katherine Druckman (00:10:31):
Well, I would think, you know, for a lot of reasons, you know, especially if you're, especially if you're, you know, you know, an outdoors type person, their, your coverage is, is frequently terrible, right? And also you wanna account for people with older phones that don't have, you know, the speed and, and that kind of thing. So there are a lot of reasons I can think of, but the biggest is just connectivity and, and consistency there. If you're traveling, even, even if you have the latest, greatest phone and, and you're used to a really fantastic connection if you're traveling someone who doesn't or, or you just don't wanna pay for the international data plan.

Roman Tsisyk (00:11:02):
Yeah, Rome and, yeah. Okay. You you covered the first reason this reason is obvious. So when you travel, especially up abroad you not always have internet connection. Data enrollment not always works. You can have some problems. Did you know what you, when you travel to some other county, you operate, route your packets via your home county. For example, if you are in TA and you want to search for some walk website, some quota or bar, your data will go to United States and back. So, you know, the limitation of speed right, speed of light. So just wait and see. I think download speeds. It always slow when you use enrollment. It always slow. It's always expensive. And it's to have something, something downloaded in advance because you can use WhatsApp you can can send messages, but this is not about getting a lot of data when you tell. But this is an obvious reason. Let's talk about more complicated story, more important considerations and more important consideration on modern devices is better you drain mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, how often do you charge your phone per day?

Katherine Druckman (00:12:22):
That's an excellent point. I once mine's pretty new, but I've had phones in the past that, you know, early iPhones. Remember the early iPhones where you were like carrying around your charger and looking for a bathroom to charge your phone? Yeah, we've all been there. <Laugh>.

Roman Tsisyk (00:12:39):
Yeah. This is a proper story about Android phones that you can always find when somewhere or near the charger. But this is a case for iPhone as well. So this is not an exception. So mobile, mobile users are always on hunt for charger and iPhone is not an exception here. So the problem with battery and problem with 5G and lt, 4G connections with way a major radius of your battery. Every bite center received from modern 4G 5G connections its up a small percentage of your smartphone battery. You can make an experiment start some streaming up, for example, for listening this podcast or YouTube. And you can see how better is draining. Like, you know, 90%, 89, 80 9%, 80, 88%, 87% every minute discount down timer is sticking because data drains better, especially, especially

Katherine Druckman (00:13:46):
When you have a weak signal. Yeah. And if you have a bad signal, yeah. Especially a weak signal. It's just constantly trying to, and it'll drain your battery like that. Yeah. Yep. Absolutely.

Doc Searls (00:13:55):
If you wanna, yeah, go ahead. Sorry. I was thinking if you wanna drain the battery on your phone really fast, try flying across the country without turning the, the helicopter.

Roman Tsisyk (00:14:05):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. If you forgot to disable data in the plane, yeah. Phone you'll discharge very quickly because signal, you don't have signal, it'll constantly search for signal. And even if you find something, which I don't believe is possible in even discharge phone, phone very quickly.

Doc Searls (00:14:22):
Yeah. It's I've noticed. And, and, and you, you arrive at your destination and your phone has 2% of the battery and it's hot <laugh>. Yeah.

Roman Tsisyk (00:14:31):
So this is, this is why you need <inaudible> because you can, you can turn off mobile data and you don't need to worry. So regarding maps application, so if you use any online, online maps applications you use data to download some fragments, some parts, regions of the map map data. This is one, one point and second point in most phones especially on Android, Android phones you have so-called high precise location or high accurate location, or Google improved location. Apple improved location. So this is when you use some internet services to get better, better location data. And this technology, it works in a way with your mobile phone needs to send information about wifi around, about your cell stations around. So it does it very often, couple times per minute. And it also discharge your phone very quickly.

(00:15:35):
So if you use GP p s, it consumes a battery, but GP p s is space. So you turn on GP ps and you wait for signals from satellite. But this so-called assisted gps or high accurate occasion, it's active. You need to send data to the internet all the time. So you can make this experiment, try to disable mobile data, and you can use your smartphone. Even old one for couple fix, probably maybe one week. Every phone will stay one week. Every model phone will stay for one week if you disable data and if you don't use the screen way often. So data and screen are two primary users of better.

Doc Searls (00:16:20):
So, so I'd like to ask about the the connections and the symbiosis as it were between open street maps and organic maps because I remember I was, I'm a map freak and so I was so enthused about open street maps and I first came out and I contributed to it, and I quickly had my gears strip because I realized the whole world was contributing to it, or many, many other geeks are contributing to it. And now it seems so complete in a lot of ways. I mean, I look at where I live on organic maps where I am here in California, and it has the shape of my house <laugh>, you know, which Yep. Which is, it's, it's, it's remarkably precise. And when I look at the trails, I look, this is, there are mountains behind me here and, and I'm, I'm too old to continue hiking the way I used to, but I could go up these, these routes up the side of the hill. And I suppose you could move out of, out of cell coverage to some of those places. But but I'm, but I'm wondering, I mean about the connection between, cuz I noticed that with, with organic maps, I can contribute, I can share my location. Does that go to open street maps in some way? What? How does that work?

Roman Tsisyk (00:17:35):
Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about the connection. So your location doesn't go to any service. So this is private privacy focus maps. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you don't share your location. So what is open map, first of all? So the example I usually provide, so opposite map is like V P G for maps. So you can contribute, you can draw your house, you can add streets, you have in your neighborhood. So this, this is a shared database where million of people contribute. So organic maps and any other maps applications, they don't create maps on where own. We use open state map as a database. So open state map is a database of maps data and organic maps is a client, an organic map is not only one client. We have any other, a lot of applications on the market.

(00:18:32):
So when you contribute to open sit map, all applications that use open sit map gets new data. And this is significant difference from Google Maps. When you contribute to Google maps, Google gets your data and your contribution and nobody else in opposite map. If you add some point some points of internet in organic maps, so like some shops, markets you will get this data in other applications, maybe not immediately, sometime later, one month later, two weeks later. But you'll get it. So is a shared database maintained by community? So I, I I can tell you what organic or opposite maps made significant progress in the last 10 years. And I remember. But 10 years ago, I went into two weeks, one trip into Nepal, into mountains, mountains and entire area of around aap, one of biggest mountains where it was just a blank spot in open state map, nothing mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. But now, as you already mentioned, you can, you can find your house. You have states you have a lot of information. And open state map improved significantly in many counties. And United States is not an exception. For example, India improved significantly. Europe is already a good quality in most countries. So this is community, community efforts to make the database of entire work with all data. And when you contribute, you get it in all applications.

Doc Searls (00:20:19):
So, so, so understand it. When you went to Anaperna did you help contribute to that blank space? Is that, was that in your mind when you were there? Like, I can help fill this in.

Roman Tsisyk (00:20:30):
I remember, but in AAP Purna, I actually used paper maps, and it was the last time I used paper maps because it was mostly reliable source of information. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> the problem with paper maps, you get your paper map and you stare paper map, you have this mountain and wet mountain. Afterwards you flip, flip it down, and you have completely different picture. And it's really hard to understand where you're, especially in mountains because landscapes similar in hard. You don't have GPS in paper map. I, so my my point was with a lot of people join it open map directly on, or not directly. For example, Microsoft contributes to open map. So when you draw some objects in bin maps, we contribute data to open map. They actually provided satellite images to open Cmap community to map entire world.

(00:21:32):
So corporations contribute. I am aware about some efforts joint efforts from big tech corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, and other big guys. Joined where efforts to create Google, Google Maps alternative in terms of data mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, because application client, this is the one story good quality of maps. This is the other story. It's not possible to map entire work without help of enthusiast. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So OpenStep map, you can see a lot of details. You can see some small roads, walking paths you can see shops, you can see houses because OpenStep map is created by people. So people contribute In Google Maps, it's mostly created by ai, AI technology. So we get ized images and we recognize ized images automatically by using some smart neural network. And we create some houses, states. But, you know, you always know better. You as a local guy, you know your area better. And this is why in open map you can find a lot of details. And this is why open map is good for hiking, good for walking for deep plane. You have details on the map.

Doc Searls (00:22:59):
It's, several things jump into my mind. When, when is excuse me when is it, is, is overlays and 3D views and stuff like that that you get and with, are you, is that, are there, are there things in your roadmap for for organic maps that are, for example, like I'm, I'm in a mountainous area here, so if I was hiking, it would kind of interesting to have a look up the mountain from the side. Is that, is that in the works at all? I mean, I see the, the the contours, you know, for elevation you know, 500 meters, 800 meters, that kind of thing. But is, is there any effort going toward a 3D view or, you know, or breaking out, for example, you know, a cycling map, a transport map you know, different overlays of various kinds, and maybe you already have those and I've missed them, so I don't Yeah,

Roman Tsisyk (00:23:59):
This is a good good, good question. So yes, we have con contour lines. We have elevation profiles, but we don't have good free 3D visualization of peaks and swamps in mountains. This is one of areas where application can be improved. So we have some information in open system map. We have some objects, we have some trails. We have altitude information for trails. But visualization, this is different, different topic. How to get good 3D visualization. This item we haven't started yet working on it. But this is a good thing to, to consider for the future for, especially for hiking in mountains. You want to see this 3D visualization of mountains. Yeah,

Doc Searls (00:24:51):
I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm also wondering with, you know, with Google and with a Microsoft product, what it's, whatever it's called this week is they have satellite views, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, and I, is there, are there any open source satellite view sources? Or is all that stuff proprietary behind walls of one kind or another? I really don't know. I'm just curious.

Roman Tsisyk (00:25:23):
The waiter. So almost all satellite data is properly, you can get some pre license or cheap license for some parts of the world, quality can differ. For example, Microsoft share satellite images from bin maps to open map community. But it doesn't mean that you can use it in your application. So you can use it for mapping. But if you want to use in your application, you need a license, probably. And this is a really hard topic because maps data, you can create you can update open map, <inaudible> images. You probably need to buy some license from somebody, somebody who has tiles, pictures, and other information. It's,

Katherine Druckman (00:26:16):
Or get a plane <laugh>. Yeah, take some pictures. <Laugh>.

Doc Searls (00:26:23):
Well, that's part, go ahead, Katherine. Yeah.

Katherine Druckman (00:26:25):
Oh, I, I'm just, I was just wondering, so I'm, I'm kind of wandering off that topic a little bit, but I'm, I'm looking, I'm, again, I'm looking at your, your GitHub repo and uhhuh <affirmative>. It looks, it looks, I don't, I don't wanna say I'm surprised by how much activity, but there's a lot of activity. <Laugh>.

Doc Searls (00:26:41):
Yeah.

Roman Tsisyk (00:26:41):
Yeah. I wonder how, how, right.

Doc Searls (00:26:43):
Often you're talking to people and there's like, you know, there's a lot of blank spots and yours is like, you

Katherine Druckman (00:26:48):
Yeah. I see. Pretty solid 101 active poll request. It looks like they're going through 'em pretty quickly. You know, you're checks

Roman Tsisyk (00:26:56):
A number, number of issues. We have 1000 1600

Katherine Druckman (00:26:59):
Issues. Yeah,

Roman Tsisyk (00:27:00):
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Katherine Druckman (00:27:02):
Yeah. And you're, you're, yeah. And you're getting through them. And, and so I wondered how how long did you, did it take to get this kind of critical mass in your community?

Roman Tsisyk (00:27:14):
The short story. So this organic maps project it's two and a half years. So, but I need to talk about the entire history of the project because you already mentioned that organic maps is a fork of maps. Le let's talk, let's talk about this. So where was an application called Maps Me created to buy a few guys in Belarus almost 10 years ago. It was a really small team. We created a nice clean application. It was bought by Big Tech Corporation. And we started you know, with advertisement business, we started to introduce ads. We started to introduce tracking some features, a lot, a lot of stuff. We contributed a lot of good features, but we also added a lot of annoying features features. People didn't like the good part of the story.

(00:28:15):
But the cold base, it was open source for some reason, for marketing purpose. So development was mostly behind closed doors. But we published open source code just to demonstrate, okay, see, we have open source project we can give it to open source. We not really bad big tech. We can give you to open source. We are good guys. Maybe some marketing purposes. So we published open source scope, and it was really nice and still is nice application called sme. But what happened one day we decided that this business is not profitable now. And we sold application to some other company, not really well known company. Some group of people you probably don't know and with people, I would say away from cryptocurrency community. And we started ing into cryptocurrency storage. So I can speak away, but I think that where goal was to get user base.

(00:29:26):
So we bought application. You have huge user base, millions of people, and we started to introduce some cryptocurrency wallet some credit cards and other finance services into the application. But maps, maps applications were not developed for pre maybe four years actively. So initially we wanted to completely place the app, like keep the name, but it placed by a different app, completely different app, but has nothing in common. Completely different rendering edge in different ui, different ux different visualization, different style. And itd this movement, this project called organic maps, because we were fans, software maps, and we wanted to preserve Mapk in good shape, and we wanted to develop maps me. So two and a half years ago, we started to fork, you know, what happened in open source. This is the beauty of open source. You can go and fork.

(00:30:34):
If you don't like how project is going, if you don't like execution of the project, you can go and fork. You can create a fork. So of course, you need to think about legal aspects. So about license, about trademarks. So we don't use any trademarks from big test code. We change names and or copyright stuff. So we created the fork. And actually this fork was created by myself and two other guys who, who are initial founders of the initial maps, maps with me project 10 years ago. So we independently in different parts of the world, started with fork in December, 2020. And we launched two forks together to get organic maps project. So organic maps is community driven, so it's developed by community. We don't have any corporation behind the project. So this is all tickets, all request. They see on GitHub, most of them created by people from community, from different counties.

(00:31:43):
Sme, SME continue to develop. So we still have application called sme. We improve application, but I would say we mostly focused on where business, where cryptocurrency business. And I wish remember all the best. We try to improve open source. We care about open source. This is why we are talking here about flows, about open source. And we change the structure of the project. And instead of developing project behind closed doors we organized community work. So people started to contribute very actively. We set up proper go governance to the project. We define rules defined code, style, you know, other things and made project more contributor friendly. And we have what we have currently. We have lot of request, we have lot of issues. And to qualify, we don't have any, you know, investment, any investors, any big, big tech corporation behind us. This is all community driven. So people all around the world contribute to the project. Now, and this is the beauty of open source.

Katherine Druckman (00:33:00):
I'm looking at your contributors file. It's very long. No, I just, I'm looking at the contributors file and the list of names, and it's just, yeah, there are a lot of people behind this project. It's, it's

Roman Tsisyk (00:33:09):
Impressive. It's a short story. Short story. We have two and a half years of organic maps history bank, long story. We have 10 years of you know, maps, meat plus organic maps project. So it wasn't created, you know, in one day. This is a really long story. A lot of people contributed. And if you check last two or three years, we got completely new set of contributors. This is more open project. Now you can contribute, and you don't need to sign any contributor license agreement. Now, no paperwork required. No wire, no wire required. You can, you can just go to GitHub, press a button and contribute. The only one require certificate. So in your comment message, you need to certify what you, this contribution was made on your own, not on behalf of your employer, or not on behalf of some big company.

(00:34:07):
So you made this contribution. You are a little person we can identify. So you have GitHub profile, maybe a little <inaudible> profile. And basically that's it. So anyone can contribute. And the source code is not owned by any company. The source code is owned by contributors now. So even, even I, if I, I decide to change license, it's not possible to do technical because I need to go to every contributor and ask permission, which is not doable. You know, it's not possible to find an agreement in 100 for 100 people. It's not doable.

Doc Searls (00:34:46):
So, so what is the license? I'm, I'm not, I'm looking around for it here. Is it, is it a G P L or m i t or bsd or one of those? I'm just curious.

Roman Tsisyk (00:34:56):
Yeah. Apapa license.

Doc Searls (00:34:57):
Apache license. Ok,

Roman Tsisyk (00:34:58):
Good. A Apache APA license. Yep.

Katherine Druckman (00:35:01):
I'm glad, I'm glad you said, you mentioned a developer experience and governance and stuff. I think that's, it's important to mention that you know, a healthy contr community of contributors doesn't just magically happen. <Laugh>, there are things that you have to actually put work, work you have to put into that, right?

Roman Tsisyk (00:35:17):
Yeah, absolutely. This is a hard work. This is not like you sit and do nothing and get contributions. You know, people who create a poor request and you need to work if you contributor, yeah, you need to help. You need to assist you need to drive things into the right direction. I mean, so this is a lot of work. And we work with our community very actively. And we also work with users. What we do, I think we do well, we communicate with our users, I mean, end users. So we have a lot of people who install the application. I don't even have the exact number because we don't have any telemeter or any trackers. I can only estimate based on data from or App store because we still, you know, we still track installations. But anyway we have thousands users, and we are writing mails to us.

(00:36:14):
We like bucket parts. We ask questions, and we work with our users. So we apply to every email. So our <inaudible> for user response, we usually apply, I dunno, in couple of hours. So your writing mail, okay, my routing doesn't work. I try to make route from use place to web place. Nothing works. So we apply, we try to solve problems. We try to explain to people with data is not ours. Data is from open state map. Actually, this is one biggest challenge because if you don't know about open state map you download app you don't see your house on the map, you remove app, one star in Google Play or app Store better you and you are done. You forgot about it. So if you work with community, we explain, okay, if you don't see your house, you can add your house.

(00:37:12):
You can go to opposite map, you can contribute, you can draw roads, you can add markets gas stations and things like that. So, so this is one source of feedback and, and other sources users don't. Github we have some chats like IY chats. So we listen, our users, we listen to our contributors. We try to maintain healthy ecosystem, healthy environment. We friendly to our contributors. And I think it's important because if you just published your source code, you'll not get 5,000 stars in two years. You'll not get thousands of issues. You need to work with your community every day. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a

Doc Searls (00:38:09):
Really good reminder. Yeah. I, I want to get to, boy, we have a, a bunch of questions backed up here already. And but I wanna let everybody know first that about Club twit. Club twit is a really cool thing that we do here at the Twit Network. Joining Club Twit is a great way to support it. As a member, you get access to ad-free versions of all the shows on twit, as well as other great benefits. Like, there's TWIT Plus, which is a feed that includes footage and discussions that didn't make the final show edit, as well as bonus shows who started, such as Hands-on Mac, hands-on Windows, ask me anythings fireside chats with some of your favorite TWIT guests and co-hosts as Floss Weekly listeners you may be interested in checking out another Club TWIT exclusive show, the U Un the Untitled Linux Show hosted by Jonathan Bennett who's one of our co-hosts here, and does a terrific job, is a really great show. So sign up to Club Twit for just $7 a month. Head over to twit.tv/club twit and join today. And we thank you for your support. So, Katherine, we've been talking in the back about privacy, and I know you wanna run with that one, so,

Katherine Druckman (00:39:21):
Yeah, well, and, and we talked about it, you know, and with regard to, you know not lacking telemetry about, you know, users and not tracking users, and I, I, I'm curious about the, the privacy angle for a lot in a lot of ways. I'm wondering also, you know, how, how much of your contribution could you attribute to people being privacy enthusiasts? That's among, among the questions, but I, I'm just kind of generally I'm wondering, I mean, is that, is that, is that the first priority? Is that, was that why you created it? Or is it, but you know, how, how important is the privacy angle to you as a creator of this project?

Roman Tsisyk (00:40:01):
Okay. so we already discussed offline part of the application and privacy actually connected to this topic. Because if you don't have ads, you don't have tracking, you don't collect personal data, you don't need to send any data to any server. You don't need to download any data. So this offline and privacy, we have a really good much. So why, why do other applications drain the better? Because way download adss from the internet track, or we need to send data about yourself to some server. It's also drains the better. And from privacy perspective for organic maps it works offline. It does not track you, it doesn't show ads. It doesn't drain better. It's open source, by the way, so you can check it. So privacy is important because our, you know, Google Maps is the most well known application in this area. It contains a lot of features. Probably good data, especially in United States. And North America in Asia is not such good. But anyway, but you don't have a choice. If you use Google Maps, you, you, you use the product. Google will sell you as a product Yeah. To do data mining collect your location. So you visit someplace, you probably had such experience. This is someplace in Google Navigator. And two days later you see some advertisements in Google

Katherine Druckman (00:41:42):
Ads Yeah. For that place. Yep.

Roman Tsisyk (00:41:44):
Yeah, because we might show data we have about you. So organic maps, we are not in this business, you know, not in the business of showing, showing advertisements. So we don't need to do it.

Katherine Druckman (00:41:55):
Yeah. I actually wa there was something, there was a story that I wanted to mention in this context, and I, I sent, you know, an the link, so maybe he can pull it up, but a few years ago, it's not just Google Maps, right? A few years ago there was a running app called Strava for runners to track their, their, their runs and their paths and distance and all that

Roman Tsisyk (00:42:16):
Stuff. It, false military. Yeah, it

Katherine Druckman (00:42:18):
Was, it was an, it was a Ben, it was a, it was not a malicious thing. It was, they, they thought it was cool to share heat maps of all the data they'd collected, because it was interesting, like, look, look at this really popular trail around Central Park and New York, or whatever it was. But, but in inadvertently, because I guess, you know, they weren't thinking about the unforeseen consequences of that. It exposed a lot of secret data that various governments around the world might not want released, like the location of their military bases and all of this stuff. So, you know, I, I, I said, I thought it was interesting because again, we think of Google and we think of all the, the big issues that come up like geofence warrants or ad trackers or all of those things. But it's also, there are these other sort of like accidental, oops, situations over that are for smaller players, right? Less, less, less big names like Google.

Roman Tsisyk (00:43:09):
Yeah. I think this privacy focus, it was our, this is our value proposition. This is what we changed in our fork when we started organic maps. And this is why we call organic maps organic, because it doesn't have any bad things. You don't have ads, you don't have track. And this is privacy, privacy focused application. And our initial idea was that offline and privacy much together, it's really good much because you don't need to download data. And this is how we got this early adopters audience of people, because people got tired of tracking, you know, tracking data collection from big tech. So, right. You don't send data, you can, you can easily check it. So you can install any application on your phone or your route, or to check with, we don't send data. If you don't have data, you don't have

Katherine Druckman (00:44:06):
Data. Yeah. Then you can't even accidentally, right? Yeah. If you don't collect it, you can't accidentally expose it. It's safer that way.

Roman Tsisyk (00:44:14):
And my important we don't know places you visit. So you can make out you can use navigation. We don't know what places you visit. We don't track you.

Katherine Druckman (00:44:26):
I love it. I like that.

Roman Tsisyk (00:44:27):
So yeah, people, maybe people can use for bad things, but you know, we, we don't know it. I only know about good things because people are people are provide some feedback in our support email way, share really good stories how we use offline maps powerline maps help people. And one, one big story here, quick about earthquake in Turkey, you probably remember in February it was devastating earthquake. Yeah. Terrible. See a Turkey border, like 50,000 people died because of earthquake border water opposite map community. And <inaudible> open map team did, we started mapping the region because that area wasn't mapped properly. And if you have some crisis in the area, you usually don't have good internet connectivity because mobile data is overloaded. And maybe it doesn't work at all because infrastructure is working. No electricity generators already went outta your butterfly.

(00:45:37):
Maps works very well. You can download in advance, right? If you download it, you can go to affected area. And you have the map. And this is important when you try to rescue people, you want to know, yeah, sure. Where houses state, what roads do you have you need to understand the air and core team, <inaudible>, open state map team very reacted really quickly. And we started to map affect areas. So it took a couple of days to get first iteration of his work done. And people actually used organic maps, and not only organic maps, other open state map based applications in this, in wet area, which was affected by earthquake. And it helped people to rescue people from ruins.

Doc Searls (00:46:34):
I just noticed that the Open Street map community has 10.4 million people in it. Yeah. Impressive. One way or another. It's very impressive. It's you know, and I mean, and ham radio is still a big thing. We've had done a number of shows about that, but the way volunteers show up with that technology and open also with open street map is pretty, is pretty, is pretty important. There's a so this is a interesting, to me, one of the ways that I'm interested in maps. I'm, I'm, I fly a lot in commercial airplanes and I always have window seats, and I always shoot pictures out the window. And I've been told, I know if it's true or not, but I have more photos of geography shot from above in Wikipedia than anybody, and I didn't put any of it there. And I just shoot these things.

(00:47:29):
I put them up online. I license them to require attribution only. And that's just so I know they get used. But I would love them to be contributed to maps in some way. In other words, I'm wondering if we can somehow open source the contribution of aerial photographs to, to maps of some kind. It occurs to me that nobody's shooting straight down from above. You're always shooting at an angle. It's probably hard to get to get the geometries right. But I'd love to see that happen, even if it's you know, you know, you're going to rural Utah to, and to canyons and things where there's not only no cell coverage, but you could use the, you can use you can use organic maps, but you get, well, here's some photos. Is that, are of these places shot from above, right? Is that plausible? Is that something that might be interesting? I'm just curious. This is one of the ways that I could contribute if there, if there was a possibility.

Roman Tsisyk (00:48:33):
Yeah, absolutely. It's possible. And open sleep map has a subproject to improve quality of map data by using photography. I, I, I hear photography from points you mentioned. So this project exists. You can contribute, actually contribute your photos, and people try to join photos together, try to fix geome and try to use this information to improve mapping. So satellite images, this is one source of information your photos from plane. This is another source of information. You can improve utilization of the map by using photos from the plane. This already exists. I can share that in.

Doc Searls (00:49:20):
I just noticed that, and I'm putting in our own private chat. There is a vertical aerial photographs in open street map.org. There's in there Wiki. Yeah, there is something about that. So that's good. And I'll have to read through that. I hadn't, I haven't looked at that in years. A a a, an irrelevant but interesting story is that when I started doing this, I had a little g p s, there was a Bluetooth one, had a little batter, charge it up, and I jammed it in the window of the airplane behind the shade so they wouldn't see it. And it was connected by Bluetooth to to I don't know, some kind of offline map on, on a, on a tablet. And because it only understood roads, it showed me going down little roads at 500 miles an hour, <laugh> because it thought I was on the ground. And it was kind of wild watching this map kind of, kind of jerk itself around.

Roman Tsisyk (00:50:18):
So, so I, I use gps. I use GPS and twins. So on Android phones, it usually works if you have if you sit near a window mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you just need to wait sometime you need to wait maybe 10 minutes to get set satellite signal acquired. But it usually works in plane on iPhone. I don't know why it probably, I saw iPhone one time.

Doc Searls (00:50:43):
I gotta say it's not good.

Roman Tsisyk (00:50:45):
I wanna, it, it usually works. You can open any map application, organic maps or any other application and you can see where you are so you can tag the flight.

Doc Searls (00:50:55):
I, I've noticed with I don't know why on an iPad it would work, work better than an iPhone. And I didn't think an iPad would have a better GP s in it. But I carry a Garmin GPS with me mm-hmm. <Affirmative> pretty much everywhere. And really in the last 15 years or so, that those have become really sensitive. So often you don't even need to be next to the window to get to be able to see, you know, a six or eight satellites enough so they can, you know, triangulate or quad triangulate or angulate, whatever it is your location. But the, but my holding my iPhone up to the window and it gets nothing, even with apps that can show you the satellites or close to nothing, it just isn't very good. And I'm, I'm wondering why I can tell you make it any better.

Roman Tsisyk (00:51:43):
Yeah, I can tell you a secret. So if you use your device very often, your device garment or Android phone, it has satellite database up to date because, you know, satellite are moving in different directions. If you, when you connect to the internet, if you do it once per day, even once per week, you get the latest information about GPS satellites. And if you have this database up to date, you can acquire GPS signal in couple of minutes. If you don't have his database up to date, it can take couple of hours. So GP PS is fully basic. So if you go to open air without any roof and wait I dunno, 40 minutes one hour, you'll get your GP p s signal sooner, waiter. But if you update his database periodically, couple of minutes. So

Doc Searls (00:52:42):
The, the serious, cause I noticed with the garment, like sometimes that I have to restart it in a plane, it, that usually takes about five minutes before it gets all to satellites. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And, and it does seem to know something about the vectors of the different satellites. This one, you know, satellite 14 is going northeast and satellite 56 is going southeast. And it's, it's very interesting to know that your location is actually being calculated by your device is not by the satellites at all. The satellites are just beacons, you know, so knows who the beacons are and and figures it out on your phone or not, or, or on your, on your, on whatever your handheld device is. And I'm, I'm, I'm thinking that there ought to be it all, it all ought to be improving a lot. So I'm wondering where, cuz we've got just a few minutes left here. Where, where, I mean you have so many relationships with people. Where do you see this going in the next year, two years, whatever?

Roman Tsisyk (00:53:45):
So we are ramped up. We participate in Google summer of code second, second year in the role. So we got for contributor for students to work on the project. So it sounds crazy, right? So you work on privacy focused application. But you, you get support from Google actually, why not? So, because this is open source and we are fully liable to participate in the program. So talking about general directions we have a lot of things to do. Like currently this is offline maps and to get offline maps we download open sleep map data and we process open state map data. So we pack open sleep map data in special way to work fast on new devices. And it all takes time. So currently we do updates every two weeks, sometime every three weeks.

(00:54:45):
And one of the features we are working on weekly updates, maybe daily updates. Maybe we can get this level, not now, sometime later because open set map database. It's really complex structure. If you want to be power efficiently, you need to do some preparation, some processing of data. We are working on navigation site improving navigation for siphon hiking. We are working on different layers for hiking. Like you can see different view of the map, different objects depending on your map style. They are working on improving open state map editor because organic maps has very basic open state map editor. So you cannot some objects, but it's not possible to have a road, for example. So we can improve editor to get more contributions from the people. People ask us about offline search, improve offline search, you know, especially search by address.

(00:55:50):
In North America we don't do good job because different style addresses from Europe and Asia. So we are working on improvement, our algorithm so it's like a Google, you know, you type something in your search search box and we need to recognize what is it, is it the city name or street name or name of some object like market or gas station, whatever. So this big job, do all things Google does online, but on new device, talking about open source projects. So you're talking about open source here, right? So talking about open source project, we are trying to get more contributors. This is not necessarily called contribution contributions. So if you can write under road code or the code or C plus yeah, please, please contribute. But we also have other, other areas where people can contribute.

(00:56:52):
For example, translations. We support we support almost 40 languages in the application. And this is a challenge. What you language is, this is a total challenge because, you know, it's different structure, different languages, back testings, just sending reports, help the project. So if you see some problems this, press a button. This we especially made this button visible on the map. So you press the button and send back, back report map styling and map data you can contribute to open sit, map, draw your neighborhood at the objects and if you have the project. So we have thousands of issues on GitHub. We are working on fixing things, people, our users we improving this client. Basically, you know, modern map applications have a lot of features. So we started from tourist audience, mostly tourist audience some weekend trips. But we are moving more to general purpose application. For general purpose application, you need a lot of things. For example, public transport, people ask for public transport. Oh yeah. Every day. Satellite images.

Katherine Druckman (00:58:16):
So mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but sorry, I, I, all of this makes me, reminds me that, okay, so you're not ad supported, right? And you're trying, you're working to get all this great functionality and become general purpose. How many full-time contributors do you have and how are you funding all of this? And we need to be brief and Oh, and sorry. Yeah, I think we're running outta time. We need to be brief because we're pretty much outta time, so, so quickly.

Roman Tsisyk (00:58:39):
Yeah, we have couple, couple people contributed almost full-time. Plus we have four this year. We have four students from Google, summer of cold, other than with people contribute in where Spare time. So weekend after work. So,

Katherine Druckman (00:58:57):
And then how are you, so do you raise, do you raise funds? I, I, I noticed No, we

Roman Tsisyk (00:59:01):
Don't raise funds because if we raise funds we'll need to go with commercial story before ments for, forget about privacy and things like that. So maybe we can get some grants. But I going into startup style story you don't need to make profit, you know, and to make profit advertisement is an obvious solution. And we don't want to repeat the, the story again. Again.

Katherine Druckman (00:59:28):
Okay. So if you, so if I, if you donate, it's in a small scale, people who donate, it's a small scale just to like, sort of tip developers then sort of like the

Roman Tsisyk (00:59:36):
People donate. So donate Current is a prime source of

Katherine Druckman (00:59:40):
Okay

Roman Tsisyk (00:59:40):
Revenue. And but it's a small people satisfied. We donate well, if people are not satisfied, we don't donate, you know, it's not

Katherine Druckman (00:59:48):
<Laugh>.

Roman Tsisyk (00:59:50):
So our goal to make our user escape

Doc Searls (00:59:53):
<Laugh>. That's fantastic. So final two questions cuz we're out of time that we ask everybody. What, what are your favorite text editor in scripting language?

Roman Tsisyk (01:00:08):
My text editor, I uvi very often, almost for 15 years. For more complex development. When I need complex code completion, I use vs. Code currently because it's state of the heart and really fast. So if you, I need to change something quickly, especially whole Layer or c c plus pass, I use V but for complex, especially development, I use vs code. What was the second question? <Laugh>? What was

Doc Searls (01:00:38):
The

Roman Tsisyk (01:00:38):
Second, second question?

Doc Searls (01:00:41):
Oh, is the text scripting language. Scripting. Scripting language.

Roman Tsisyk (01:00:47):
I mostly use Python. I can do shell scaping as well. So I think Python for simple, simple task.

Doc Searls (01:00:54):
Yeah, <laugh>, that's the winning, that's the winning bell. So Roman, thank you so much for, for, for this. This has been a really good show. Very curious to know where it goes in the next, in the next few years. It's, it's one of the shows that's actually close to my heart because I'm, I'm a total map freak. I used to, everywhere I went, my, my my cars and my backpacks or whatever it was, it was stuffed with paper maps for most of my life. And now, now I just have a GPS and a phone or two <laugh>, you know, defending. So it, it's really great. So it'll be staying on top of it and watching where you go with this thing.

Roman Tsisyk (01:01:38):
Thank you for spreading the word about open source. This is how open source community can grow and how we can help each other. And in my opinion, maybe the last statement, my opinion if you are software develop contribu to open source is probably best investment of your time if you are working engineering software, engineering.

Doc Searls (01:02:02):
N no disagreement here. <Laugh>. Yes. It's what we're all about. Thank you so much.

Roman Tsisyk (01:02:08):
Thank you.

Doc Searls (01:02:10):
So Katherine, that was good.

Katherine Druckman (01:02:12):
Yeah, that was great. I, you know, this is a, an interesting project. It's, yeah, I, I wasn't expecting it to be so big. I guess <laugh>, I don't know what I, what I expected going in <laugh>.

Doc Searls (01:02:23):
<Laugh>, yeah. So so anyway, so let's let's get into plugs and then whatever else after that. So what do you wanna plug here quickly?

Katherine Druckman (01:02:37):
Oh yeah, I have plugs. Let's see. I guess it's been a while. I've I'm still doing that podcast. I still work for Intel, which is cool. You know, go Intel. I am still doing a podcast called Open at Intel, and there's a whole new shiny page devoted to it where you can see all the episodes. So that's cool. Yeah, and, and you know, having, having a good time talking about security a lot and yeah, I'd love people to listen and give feedback over there. And I think that's about it.

Doc Searls (01:03:11):
Yeah. And we have our own podcast, the two of us. Oh yes, of

Katherine Druckman (01:03:13):
Course. Yes. Called

Doc Searls (01:03:14):
Reality two point0@realitytwocast.com. Yeah. So next week Ahmed Sobe is gonna be on talking about opensource challenges in developing countries. So that's a big topic and that is coming up next week. And until then, I'm Doc Surles and we'll see you then.

Leo Laporte (01:03:34):
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