Hi, Graham Jones wrote:
In my day job I look after quite a few decision making processes to help our organisation make difficult decisions. I always say that I will have failed if at the end of the day we have to resort to a vote to decide what to do
That's good. But also remember that in your day job, it is very likely that the people who have to live with a decision in half a year will be more or less the same who have made the discussion, give and take a bit. Whereas in OSM, even if you find an excellent consensus today, you will have to find that consensus again, or at least be ready to re-evaluate, in half a year's time since things have changed so much.
This is one area where I can see OSMF providing a valuable contribution - to set down the processes by which the community makes decisions - not necessarily making the decision, but helping to manage the process.
Yes. OSMF is not the body that should make decisions for OSM; but OSMF could try and "facilitate" decision making (or consensus-finding) in the OSM community. Of course, a possible result is that the OSM community is actually happy with what we have now. It has downsides but so has any established decision-making process.
You can imagine different processes for decisions of varying significance to the community (something simple for agreeing how to tag widget XXX,
Be warned that tagging is a field where consensus has usually not been reached, or sought, in discussions and decision-making processes, and we have often hailed that as a strength of OSM.
Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
