Hi, thank you Richard Weait for writing down what we at DWG would say about this. I think you guessed it pretty good.
There are a number of angles in this. First, we welcome new people from around the globe, and especially those who are at home in a national community where we don't yet have any speakers of that language in DWG. DWG is not a self-signup working group (probably the only of that kind in OSM), and we require that people apply to us for DWG membership. We will then usually ask them a few questions to determine whether they are a reasonably experienced member of OSM and if they have understood what the job is about, and then take them on board expecting that they'll look and learn for a while before slowly taking cases by themselves. Just as Richard said, language, timezone, and familiarity with the local situation will often make one DWG member the automatic go-to person, but we don't want to have an exclusive relationship (all country X cases go to person Y, and person Y only takes country X cases). There's also something that hasn't been brought up in this thread, namely that it is not impossible for a DWG member from a certain country to be biased in a certain discussion, maybe because they had previous mailing list fights with a complainant or so. It has indeed happened in the past that a case in country X was not handled by the DWG member from that country, but by another DWG member, just so that there was someone impartial dealing with the situation. We're not in favour of full-blown "local DWGs" for now, but of course it is tremendously useful if there are local groups dealing with local problems, and escalating stuff to DWG only if they can't solve something. Maning, if you want to join DWG then we welcome your application at d...@osmfoundation.org. Bye Frederik for the OSMF DWG -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
