Dear all, If the wood/forest and path/footway arguments have taught us one thing, it's that the current model doesn't work all the time (100s of emails, disorganised wiki discussions, votes with 20 or so random people). We develop, over years, one set of tags like highway=footway/cycleway/bridleway/etc. and then over time we realise the schema isn't quite right. But we're incapable of discussing it in a structured manner, and we rarely get a useful consensus.
For simple matters like proposing a completely new, minor tag it's fine. Where competing proposals for new features, like house numbers, live side by side we generally find a superior solution gaining traction. Where proposals throw up bigger or more complicated questions about existing tags, used on thousands or even millions of nodes and ways, the whole thing is falling apart. So... I propose that we grow up a little and use something like this process: - Tags are proposed on the wiki, no change to current practice - If the proposal throws into question existing, accepted tags, defer the proposal to small working groups - These working groups study the wider questions and formulate a complete proposal for new tags, deprecation, etc. - At SOTM present and discuss their proposals and vote - If proposals are accepted, a combination of carrot (rendering stylesheets, Potlatch presets, etc.) and sticks (error checking, auto-correcting bots) to implement the accepted proposals So for example Nick Whitelegg and Martin Simon might lead a group to work out how best to tag paths of all kinds. If their proposal was accepted at SOTM 2010, somebody would create a map highlighting all the ways that probably need to be corrected and a massive effort to bring things in line with the new schema would kick off. Does this sound workable? Regards, Tom _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
