Hi,
Nick Black wrote:
> I've always felt that you were completely aligned behind the aims of OSM -
> we can disagree, but at the end of the day we're all here for the same
> reason. Right now, its really hard to find anything positive or
> constructive in your ongoing bombardment of these lists.
The same people that now want to have a telephone conference have been
completely absent from the community decision making process during the
last months. I don't know what they were working on but they surely were
not working with the community. I simply cannot fathom why they would
suddenly - without having made any attempt to connect with the community
that was analysing the license draft, finding the problems, hammmering
out possible solutions - want to have a telephone conference to "help us
connect better".
I'm happy to help but that would require that I first understand the
problem. What exactly does the telephone conference want to achieve? The
issues are on the table, the license working group has so far declined
to comment or take part in the process of identifying the issues and
finding possible fixes. Who exactly needs to "connect better" with whom,
and how will the telephone conference help?
Is it just going to be a nice chat where we all get a warm fuzzy feeling
by hearing each other's voice, or is it planned to later use the
telephone conference as any kind of guidance for the process? The more
complicated issues that we have found, for example the fine details
about the reverse-engineering clause clashing with share-alike licenses,
are very unlikely to be tabled and understood by all in a two-hour
international call with many non-native speakers; a telephone conference
will have a natural bias towards easy subjects. This does not mean that
the complicated issues are any less important, and I fear that people
might use the telephone call as an excuse to brush away the complex bits
("ah, but nobody seemed to be interested in that during the telephone
conference...").
Insofar as the telephone conference is just meant to augment what we
already have achieved - to bring in additional people who are more
comfortable with the spoken rather than the written word, and generally
get a different kind of brainstorming going - I'm all in favour of it.
But the very second that someone starts to suggest that the telephone
conference in some way has the potential to overrule the existing work
("it did not seem important enough for people to raise this in the
telco, so...") then whole thing becomes an unfair attempt at discarding
what I and others have been working for, by implementing a process known
in advance to be biased (towards simple issues and native speakers).
The fact that I care for OSM is why I am involved, not only as a mapper,
but also here, on legal-talk.
Bye
Frederik
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