Hi,
On 20.09.2012 12:29, sly (sylvain letuffe) wrote:
And that's where we disagree. Your are not accepting any distinction about all
different cases in your statement, and it seams you are implicitly denying
the ability of the local community to decide wisely.
What I wanted to say is:
If the negative effects of a bad decision only, or mostly, affect the
local community, then they can be trusted to take these decisions
themselves, because they will learn from their mistakes.
If the negative effects however affect other/different people - perhaps
because they are using the API outside of specifications, or causing
more work for people elsewhere in the project - then they can't.
Of course, this does not mean that one could not have a system where
rules are made centrally but execution of these rules is entrusted to
local communities (and only if that doesn't work, someone else will step
in).
In the coming years we'll hopefully (...) discussion about what the local
chapters can decide by themselves and what not.
Any reasons to wait for years?
I don't think we should *wait* for years, I just believe that it will
take a long, long time to get this worked out properly. There are tons
of things that need to be at least thought about on the way to a
federated OSM project.
There are very simple technical things. For example, assume that there
was a French DWG dealing only with French cases; we don't have the means
to set things up in a way that the French DWG can only block French
users. We don't even have a proper definition of local communities and
who is entitled to whatever privileges we grant local communities - for
example, we recently had an issue in the Crimea which is part of Ukraine
but where local mappers would rather not be governed by decisions made
by the wider Ukrainian community. So, what if a Toulouse mapper comes to
OSMF and complains that OSMF-FR is unfairly suppressing Languedoc
self-determination?
What if local communities decide stuff that is considered harmful to the
project as a whole by someone on the other side of the world? Who would
adjudicate such a conflict? Can the world-wide community be called to a
vote that is binding for France? Can the French community make a binding
rule for Toulouse? How many is a community, anyway? Do they have to be
incorporated? Do they have to be democratic? What if a national
community - as has been the case in the past with some Eastern European
national communities - takes a very liberal attitude towards copyright
("the government web page says private use only but they never
prosecuted anyone...")? Can a national community make a deal with a
sponsor and allow the sponsor to carry the OSM logo?
All this has been discussed for years, on and off, when we talked about
"local chapters". And I expect that it will be another couple of years
until we have a structure that works.
That's exactly the discussion we are having
now about a real case need, we have sent a representative of our community we
trust, I have a proposal for the first rule to be discussed and agreed upon.
Personally, I don't think you can disregard all the questions I
mentioned above and simply make a rule that says a few nice things about
a national community which might or might not be well defined in any
particular case. I think that your suggestion is too much like case law:
There's a rule that leads to a result you don't like, and then you amend
it with a little extra rule specifically for that purpose. (In your
case, you have built a "regional limited import" special rule into the
"separate import account" rule, but what if tomorrow the French
community decides that they would like to be exempt from something else...?)
I think that we need to take quite a few steps back and stop discussing
about "oh god oh god a respected French OSMer was blocked by evil DWG,
where on earth did they get that authority to block him and how can we
take it away from them".
We should be discussing what rules we need at all, where we don't need
any rules, who makes these rules, how local communities come into play
there, and all that. This, I believe, takes a lot of time, and real,
committed, long-time work by a few individuals who really want to move
the project forward, rather than just a quick fix for a particular problem.
(Technically, and in the very-long-run, my cloud-nine astronaut
vapourware vision is of regional communities operating their own
databases and them all to be in some kind of federated system. But
that's not something we can decide by a quick wiki poll tomorrow ;)
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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