Hi, On 13 December 2011 23:03, David Earl <da...@frankieandshadow.com> wrote: [...] > What are the precise, numeric criteria for proceeding? At the moment even by > a vague definition I don't see how one could describe it as a critical mass.
I'm responding to this old thread because now I think whoever made the criteria could have answered the question asked here. But really there's probably no answer because the date was pulled out of thin air. There are old comments in the mailing list archives from LWG members that when and how to measure if enough data is ready, would be decided later by the contributors at that time. I think the reason this hasn't happened is that the LWG and the board work like committees (for some time, perhaps not since the beginning). A committee can easily allow itself to change its mind or not answer questions and it has to be noted that this is none of the committee members' fault. It's just how committees work. Their time is too valuable to be spent answering every single question asked or considering lesser problems (it really is, since they meet once every some time), which frees a committee from having to justify many decisions. It also has the leisure of having a high authority (it's assumed to be an expert group even in a do-cracy) but at the same time not having to stick to everything it says, which is unique. Now a license change is generally a terribly complex thing to execute and I guess there's no other way to do it than through a committee with an assigned mandate, who won't stop once it gains momentum; so we have to live with that. Cheers -- some fortunes I just found: The weaker the data available upon which to base one's conclusion, the greater the precision which should be quoted in order to give the data authenticity. Cruickshank's Law of Committees: If a committee is allowed to discuss a bad idea long enough, it will inevitably decide to implement the idea simply because so much work has already been done on it. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk