On Wednesday 29 May 2019, Christine Karch wrote: > > reading the discussions about the direction of ID development and how > the community wants the ID at the OSM website I had the idea that > there could perhaps be a panel at SotM. Does anyone want to organize > an ID discussion panel at SotM? Please tell me or us (program > committee in CC) and we can consider it. At the moment it would be > sufficient to have someone (or more) who wants to organize it. All > details could be defined later.
I think this is a good idea but it should be done based on the realization that however such panel is composed and no matter what specific questions it covers it will not be representative for the OSM community as a whole - if for no other reason than because it is being held in English language at a conference with a significant economic barrier of entry. Underneath the specific issues with iD development that are being discussed right now lies a broader problem of ideas of cultural exceptionalism (that is the opinion that certain cultural values and preferences are inherently more significant than others and don't have to defend themselves in an open discourse) are increasingly pursued and advocated in and around the OSM community. You can find this for example in Bryan Housels statements here and on the iD issue tracker engrossing a huge number of people here as "mailing list haters" - an attitude that is mirrored by quite a few other people including OSMF board members who have also made demeaning statements about using maining lists as communication channels. This is to some extent understandable when people are overwhelmed with the diversity in views and positions as well as communication styles of a cross cultural international community like OSM and the difficulties of gauging opinions and developing consensus in such an environment. This is even harder if you are professionally involved in the field and you get pressure from employers or business partners of course. To retreat into a smaller and culturally more homogeneous community where it is much easier to find a consensus and possibly even developing a binary friend/ally vs. enemies image of the OSM community is to some extent a natural reaction. Because these reactions will as explained inevitably happen when people are overwhelmed by the cultural diversity of OSM and the difficulties this creates in practical work what we really need to discuss is how we can cultivate and communicate the specific core ideas and values of the OpenStreetMap project (the idea that people from all over the world freely and without being steered by a central authority collect their local geographic knowledge into a database for the benefit of each other) and help people realize the immense value of this to help bridge the gaps between these cultural bubbles created by people in reaction to the challenges of the project. I think most individuals active in the OSM community as a hobby are aware of the immense value of the cultural diversity of OSM or at least are able to understand it and openly embrance the challenges this comes with. The bigger challenge seems to be the organizational cultures of corporations and organizations around OSM which are often much more centralized and based on an exceptionalist principle. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
