On Tuesday 21 November 2017, Ilya Zverev wrote: > > You can mask the issue by saying "you have to be humble and listen to > others more and understand there is always somebody who know better", > but with that, you kill any trace of motivation to effect change in > OpenStreetMap.
My suggestion to "be a bit humble" was meant to avoid doing exactly that to others what you criticise is being done by "the core group", namely not assessing opinions and positions based on their merit but based on a feeling of superiority and group perception. > Because people who know better will not try new things > — they are worried that things we already have will break. The whole > core services group (people who maintain code and servers) have been > working in the life-support mode for years. Any change should conform > to all the current policies of OSM, which virtually say "no changes". > Any proposal should not contradict any of existing wiki pages, > especially if existing wiki pages contradict each other. I think you are exaggerating a bit here but i also think there is some truth to the perceived structural conservativism based on fear to loose something (something that is dear to you or something you feel responsible for). This is no different from big politics probably (why should it be after all). The key to overcoming this is not to try running up against it (which would just increase the fear and strengthen the conservativism) but to create independent alternatives and demonstrate change is possible and worthwhile. The good thing about OSM is that very little outside the main database and the API is strictly tied to the core systems. Even for the wiki - if a group of people from the OSM community would decide to create an independent tag documentation system that is better structured, more logical and easier to understand that would not automatically become the authority in tagging questions of course but it would have weight as soon as mappers start using it as a guideline. Such endeavours are always a long shot of course and most attempts fail before they gain enough footing. Most successes with that approach have some kind of larger outside backing (iD Editor is a good example i think). But most importantly i firmly believe that embrancing the ideas of newcomers independent of their merit out of misguided friendliness is at least as bad as rejecting them because of fear of change or loss of power and influence. This would be the path to universal mediocrity. Which leads me to what i have already said: The only way to make good decisions is to have open arguments about the merits of the different ideas and where everyone is open to reasoning and ultimately the better argument wins. This is hard but if it works it is worth it. And of course the older people have more responsibility here than the newcomers. > I don't care about failure of my proposals and pull requests. I care > about OSM being an active, maintained, growing, ever-changing > project. I believe I will see that — but I'd prefer it in 5 years, > not in 50. Not sure if you know this - but there is a famous quote by Max Planck i had to think of when reading this: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (see https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck) Of course the turnover in people is much faster in OSM than in science (see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Active_contributors_year.png). -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
