Serge Wroclawski-2 wrote: > > I've thought about this myself; would it be better to have separate, > smaller instances of OSM, the way Wikipedia does. > Arguably that is already the case.
Wikipedia has a global foundation responsible for the maintenance of all databases and then local chapters who provide further support and services on top of that. OSM (can) works similar. There is a global database and various local chapters that provide a lot of additional services and help create a global community. Take an example at the German osm chapter. (Other local chapters presumably do similar things, I am just not as familiar with them). The German chapter for example has its own website, which is very different to the osm.org website, owning its own domain name. It has its own dev server, it has its own mailing lists separately maintained from the global (and talk-de) ones, it has its own local conferences, it has its own hack days. It also has its own rendering server, including different tile styles. They are also currently discussing if they want to adopt the new logo, or prefer to stick with the old one which is also perfectly fine. With Potlatch 2 and with JOSM, you can have your own country specific tagging presets, that mostly abstracts away the underlying actual key value pairs. So where there are international equivalents, it will simply be a translation of the name, but for others, it might be its own set of key-value pairs. In many ways, the chapters are incredibly independent already and currently OSMF has no say what so ever in the chapters (as there aren't any formal agreements between any yet). So if you really don't like the way OSMF operates (which is understandable), set up a local chapter to run things better. It is likely to be much easier to get consensus on things on a local level, so having strong independent chapters would strengthen everyone. There is only very few things that really depend on the global OSMF. The running of the core db server, the api and data licensing. Everything else can and already has been done independently. Kai -- View this message in context: http://gis.638310.n2.nabble.com/Breaking-up-is-hard-to-do-was-New-Logo-in-the-Wiki-tp6331583p6331753.html Sent from the General Discussion mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
