I believe there is some misunderstanding of the relationship between OSM
and OSMF.
Am 20.09.2012 16:36, schrieb Christian Rogel:
Le 20 sept. 2012 à 13:22, Lester Caine a écrit :
sly (sylvain letuffe) wrote:
We can get back to the topic of governance and discussion about those laws and
who decide them, and how.
Or just get back to fixing the process in the first place?
SO we have less chance of misinterpreting the 'guidelines'?
Yes, it is all about governance and not only a technical issue, although many
pound for
reducing the debate to it.
OSM is going more and more political (not in the sense of ordinary politics, of
course).
Some decisions elaborated on technical have to be reviewed and weighed by the
only "political" body we have, namely the Board.
There is no way having a Board which says it is always sticking to our
brilliant technical team,
whatever they decide.
While a more top down organisation of OSM a la Wikipedia or other
organisations is imaginable, there has never been a community consensus
that such a step would be desirable (if anything it is exactly the
opposite). So while the OSMF provides the formal structure for the
working groups, most policy decisions are not made or even vetted by
the OSMF board, but are simply decided by the people interested in the
issues at hand and (particularly in the case of the DWG) the people that
do the work. Not to mention the far larger number of policies (tagging
and others) that are not in the remit of any specific working group and
are decided by the OSM community at large.
OSM WG membership is fairly open, but the basic premise is that you join
to help with the work at hand and influence policy by that, not by using
a WG as a political grandstand. It is imaginable that if a WG stepped
very far outside its remit the OSMF board might intervene, but I don't
know of any such situation and the case in hand is clearly not such a
situation either. The import guidelines don't restrict the imported
content outside the legal requirements that it be compatible with our
distribution terms and simply adds a couple of rules on how to achieve
community consensus and how to technically implement the import, the
later are essentially practical measures to make the core DWG job
manageable. If at all, as I've pointed out before, the administrative
and technical requirements are too lax, this is at least what the
experience during the licence change would indicate.
In the long term we may need more formal ways to produce rules and
guidelines for OSM as a whole, however this is not something that will
be easy and will likely be a process of the same order of magnitude as
the licence change.
[Discussion of more and more OGD becoming available ommited]
Yes, the development in the area of Open Data poses a serious challenge
to OSM. I suspect that the attitude of large parts of the community is
that OGD is a good thing, however I'm also fairly sure that there is no
community consensus that OSM should aspire to import everything that is
available just because it is there. In the end we want to produce an
editable, community sourced map of the world, not simply a copy of data
that is available (and remains available) elsewhere.
I'm sure that the OpenData issue will be a very hot topic over the next
months and years, but it really belongs in a separate thread and not in
a discussion over administrative and technical procedures.
Simon
PS: just in case it is not clear, I'm not representing the position of
the OSMF board in this discussion, just that of a mapper that had to
chase down a number of rogue imports over the last months.
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