On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 3:52 AM, Dave F <davefoxfa...@btinternet.com> wrote:
> There's an irony in these latest communication channels (loomio?) being > called 'collaborative'. The more that are used within OSM the more > fractured the communication becomes. > > It wouldn't be so bad if any conclusions were broadcast, but increasingly > they're not. > > IRC, due to its exclusiveness does nothing to promote a "community" which > many wish to attain. TL;DR ??????? HaHaHaHaHaHa!!!! No I am not laughing at you or please I am not attacking you. I love history. The problem is that most of this discussion lacks the perspective of protocol wars waged over the years. This is just World War 25. (You and others may not even get that reference. It is from an Airplane Movie.) I am not attacking the board. If this problem is really messed up and as usual, there are more directors than actors for a number of reasons[1], then my recommendation earlier is that the Board needs another elected volunteer member that handles all these channels of communication. That solution was looking at the problem with my business analyst hat on. In the corporate world, this person on the C-Suite level is called the Public Information Officer, PIO. This person guards and coordinates the public image of the corporation up to an including the logo and its placement on letterhead. In the early days of the Internet, a person could use the talk protocol...blah, blah, blah under the webserver port 80.[2] One of these protocols under port 80 was finger. You could use the finger command to see what office hours a person was keeping. Then the bad guys came along. In the Matrix movies somewhere there is a picture of good people using Nmap to break into the bad people's computers. Exactly, Nmap was used to check all these lower than port 80 numbers. Just like your finger print, Nmap could be used to figure out the type of computer as an attack vector. All those protocols and ports had to be turned off. Irc rocked the world based on these other problems. If you are a touch typist, there is no problem. Yeah they taught typing on IBM typewriters back then. Enter mIRC[3]. Some kid imagined a world where we all could communicate. Then there was ICQ and the cool kids on ICQ had a lower number than others. Mush Mush Mush!--Means I don't recall all the details nor does the order of existence of the protocol matter in these descriptions matter. It all happened in the big old Internet. It seemed like there were three companies fighting a war. These companies would constantly touch protocols to break communication and trap customers on platform. Pidgin and the like tried to bridge all these warring protocols. There was such madness that plugins were developed to manage the changes.[4] Mush Mush Mush! Excite[4a] or what not created a protocol with an Icon. I don't recall if this cool new shinny hotness road on the back of the Irc protocol or not. The use of IRC and mIRC raced to bottom feeder levels of today. Irc and mIRC were the new hotness that ruled the worl. There were none of these questions of exclusiveness. You were not promoting topic X without an IRC presence of some kind. Yahoo had other goodness. Mush Mush Mush! Some where in there world of communications Wikis rocked the world. The hate from encyclopedias was incredible. LOL Expert data HaHaHaHa! Note the parallel to authoritative data and OSM data. HaHaHaHa!!!!! Britannica what? Encarta what? Wikipedia smoked 'em all! Mush Mush Mush!!!!! Now the fans of new hotness protocol x, y, and z are at World War 25 with statements like Google X is dead; Facebook fans say that Twitter is dead. Then there is the next new hotness and the fans start a new round including slack. I am jaded enough that I think most of these new hotness tools are a battle for lock in and not real open communication. There are people on this list that are passionate about this. The message that I understand from the anti closed hotness x is based on the brief history of time above. How can we as OSM promoters scream about open data and then smack our friends in the open source world by using a closed protocol? My prior example [5] was trying to show how I saw one of our board members running ragged. I asked permission to do something because it solved a problem for me and possibly others that may use the conference videos. Here is the business problem. Each year when a new US conference is posted. the old conference videos go missing so to speak. I am working on resolving the problem for 2015 with their permission. In addition, I created the 2016 wiki page set.[6] All of a sudden the committee and Martijn have one less thing to worry about. They are my boss. If they want to take the page set in a different direction, then I will assist them. They are the PIO with an important message to publish. Oh! In this case, Martijn drew the short straw. He was the first board member to answer my email. I am a perfect example of herding cats.[1] The request to serve Martijn and the organizing committee started 3/24/2016. I have not provided my latest status report.[7] I am still not done as of 4/2/2016. The hope was sooner. The plan is to regex the video data into just another index(an import anyone?). The existing section will be merged/conflated into the final index. However, until that is done existing wiki users work will be carefully preserved page. The grand scheme of things is to keep an obviously boring pattern from year to year so that a mapper can find the information quickly. Which user is the real OSM US user and channel?[8] I see an elected set of volunteers trying to communicate. I am thinking that they have to dash off to their day job responsibilities or family duties. At times there are three hours difference in the US. I am just counting the lower 48 states. That obviously adds to the demand of the job. I would love to arrange the channel like TekThing or some other channel.[9] US Board are the PIO at this point. They have to guard the message. They would have to provide me or another volunteer a level access that requires a tremendous level of trust. I made an attempt to look at the communication problem using two examples. I am making an example of the regional conference suggestion. All of this is speculation on my part. The idea was that the board may have had a discussion about using regional US SOTMs verses one massive event. I image in their demanding hurried lives, they may have thought they communicated via protocol X that everyone was reading. I think I already know the answer as to why we have a 2016 conference but I have not heard the final "official" verdict. Slack will not solve this communication issue if my fictional account is true. Slack will only add to the problem. In my second example of the Harvard legal thing I made an attempt to look at the issue in a positive way. As before all of this is speculation on my part. There may have been an attempt to explain the issue in a protocol. By the time that the idea made it to this list or communication channels, any attempt to present all the facts on either side was swept away. Slack will not solve this issue. The obvious problem to me is that Slack would add one more channel for the directors to tell the board what to do. The double-sided sword is that we want to be open and support open projects just like OpenStreetMap but in order to reach the current Internet population with the message in the US Mission Statement, a number of media need to broadcast the message including new hotness x. As for me, I could care less. The current state of the closed and semi-closed Internet is just madness. I can serve and support people in so many different ways. Whereas I see this is madness and a waste of time, an 18 year old person would see a great opportunity. It is not that easy as every one says. Then I look back...the current Slack debate sounds just like one of the many talk/irc/mirc/icq/Yahoo blah blah blah debates of the past. Right O! I have a natural distrust of one company trying to lock a project into a non RFC open standard protocol. Does that company have our best interest at heart? The broader question is how do we get the OSM US message out in this fractured world? There is no easy answer. That is where the discussion should focus. As far as I am concerned, the US Board is my boss. The board is the PIO officer that gets to the final say on how the message is crafted. The PIO is what I have to answer to in my day job. I don't think that it is any different here! Come on now! Show Me. Talk is cheap! Show me the code. Please use your preferred new hotness x. Consolidate all the ideas here.[10] Yes! Yes! I use Vim and regex patterns to hack and whack a wiki page into submission. I am sure there are at least two people creating Vim and Emacs plugins for Slack so that the Vim/Emacs editor war can continue on to World War 100. >>>:->>>>> Regards, Greg [1] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/2016-April/016114.html https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/2016-April/016115.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbers [3] http://www.mirc.com/newsold.html [4] https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ThirdPartyPlugins [4a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excite [5] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/2016-April/016107.html [6] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_Of_The_Map_U.S._2016 [7] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_Of_The_Map_U.S._2015/Video_recordings http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_Of_The_Map_U.S._2015 [8] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQpS2iHNVR-_6nAxt87nwCw https://www.youtube.com/user/openstreetmapUS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoV_iNDRBg8 [9] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6sWaC11f4mxnizvOroOvkQ/featured [10] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Foundation/Local_Chapters/United_States/Communications
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