On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 12:31 AM, Mike <mike.cuttl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> OSM should follow international law. > There are a great deal of disputes here on this issue I agree, I dont want to even go into them in detail. my question is, do you care about the progress we have made, the community building and the evangalism of osm to the people on the ground who happen to live in this place? We can discuss all day about the legal side of if they have the right to exist, we can discuss all day who was there first. the balkans is full of people who were not there before, at some point all people came to the balkans if you go by some theories, all people originated from africa. So, lets not go into history too much here and stick to the point of making useful maps. I think the most important thing here at the moment is to create an accurate and useful map of the situation on the ground. The best thing is to get local people on the ground to contribute to these maps. We need to try and keep the people who are living in some area and contributing to the maps happy. If the serbs in Gračanicahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gra%C4%8Danica,_Kosovo want to name everything cyrillic, it would not bother me, because that would make them feel comfortable contributing to osm. I think we need to work on getting people to contribute here. > If Kosovo i > Metohija become independent in the future, then OSM should allow it to be > treated as such on maps. > Well last I checked they are independent, if not by your view point, I dont know when you were there last. I flew in last in nov 11 for the conference we organized there, also to promote openstreetmap http://www.flossk.org/en/blog/sfk11 and it was still independent. I have regular conversations with the team there and they did not tell me that they lost it. In fact I did not see any serbian border guards, serbian signs or anything on my visit, all say republic of kosovo. > What happens now is that OSM is abused for > political misinterpretations not just of status of that territory, but on > language, culture and population structure. > Well if we let you get your way, you will render the map useless in that area, you will scare off the people we have attracted so far and then you will be sitting on an out of date copy of your "Kosovo i Metohija" map with no one to use it or appreciate it, except maybe from outside of kosovo. > > For now, Kosovo i Metohija is part of Serbia and OSM should reflect that, > including using historically appropriate names on OSM map. > We are working on that and I have done my best. Also on wikipedia I have tried to include the serbian and albanian names, also the local bosnian and turkish names of things. On the wikipedia we had to fight even for that because in the ideas of the people who are living back in 1988, the other names have no place in "greater serbia". There are elements who do not want to allow for people to use thier local names. Now that is the point here, as an outsider and a researcher I am interested in both sides of the story so I can debunk myths on both sides. And in the balkan region, everyone is full of a very personal and subjective history and viewpoint that does not mesh with the others. > > If Albanian contributors from Kosovo i Metohija are threatening to leave > OSM, then so be it. > they are not threatening, I am warning you that it will be very hard to continue my work in improving the map there and teambuilding if some reckless people continue to renaming everyhing and try and roll back the clock to 1988. > If they are prepared to falsify facts and use OSM to > crate map as they like it to be, and not what is real, then they should not > be allowed to do so anyways. > Lets talk about that on a point by point basis, before we started on this project the map in kosovo was really not even worth mentioning. now even the serbian team is waking up and becoming active, I think that is good. The best thing would be to get the local people all over the balkans to work on their little bit of the map where they live and they feel comfortable. There are little enclaves of an ancient greek colony for example in narte http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=40.49762&lon=19.45587&zoom=17&layers=M, now it would not bother me if the people who lived there would include the local names of things as they are written down or how they call them. > But, it is not matter of Albanian contributors > as there are just few of them. > Lets look at the people who have been working on prishtina for example, prizren. > Map of Kosovo i Metohija is actually drawn > mostly by foreigners like Mike Dupont, who work for their governments (or > NGO's) of for the Albanian government and use OSM to advocate political > aspirations of their governments. > Wait and please stop right there. the NGO that I founded, flossk.org is a totally independant and private thing. I do not work for it, I get no salary. I do not work for any government whatsoever. I dont know where you have gotten your information from. We have been working to promote openstreetmap, wikipedia, linux, firefox, creative commons etc in kosovo. No matter what you think about the people there, I hope you can appreciate this effort. No matter what you might call the country etc, the people there are benefiting from this and osm is benefiting from it as well. Many of the people who are working on the osm map in kosovo are kosovars who we have recruited into flossk to help . Some of them get paid to work on osm by companies who have also contributed alot of data in the past like logistics plus. These are developments that I have personally help get started I talked to companies there and got them on board to use osm. One of the organizations that we are working closely with ( eg prishtinabuses.info) for example is the unicef innovations lab kosovo http://kosovoinnovations.org/w/, and they recently received money from redhat for their efforts. http://opensource.com/business/12/3/billion-thanks-open-source-community-red-hat Other projects have been paid for by unicef, un habitat and other agencies who have hired some mappers, some from the flossk team to help map there. I think you have a strange picture of kosovo and I hope that people like you do not get to decide over the future and happiness of others with such strange information as a basis for decision. lets focus on getting the people on the ground to map more of what is on the ground and stop the fighting over if these people have a right to exist. thanks, mike -- James Michael DuPont Member of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova http://flossk.org
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