How do you select the people in the working group? You might have dozens of people interested to do some work, so who would choose the "lucky ones", and how would it be done without dropping into some popularity contest? Or would you allow competing working groups working on the same problem? Would the community be able to participate in the discussion, or would it just be presented the solution, on which it then has to vote?
Wouldn't that vote still be carried out by some random people who for the most part wouldn't be knowledgeable on the subject, so if the solution is a bad one, doesn't it risk approval by people who think "it looks nice to have" because they don't know better? Why would just two people in a working group be any better than the current method where just one person writes down a proposal, and manages the proposal by himself, influenced by comments on the discussion page? Can you be certain that those people in the working group are able to study the wider questions? Can you be certain they're knowledgeable enough? Would the working group work openly so we can track the work and could bring their attention to obvious flaws of their solution in the process? Ben Tom Chance wrote: > Dear all, > > If the wood/forest and path/footway arguments have taught us one thing, > it's that the current model doesn't work all the time (100s of emails, > disorganised wiki discussions, votes with 20 or so random people). We > develop, over years, one set of tags like > highway=footway/cycleway/bridleway/etc. and then over time we realise the > schema isn't quite right. But we're incapable of discussing it in a > structured manner, and we rarely get a useful consensus. > > For simple matters like proposing a completely new, minor tag it's fine. > Where competing proposals for new features, like house numbers, live side > by side we generally find a superior solution gaining traction. > > Where proposals throw up bigger or more complicated questions about > existing tags, used on thousands or even millions of nodes and ways, the > whole thing is falling apart. > > So... > > I propose that we grow up a little and use something like this process: > > - Tags are proposed on the wiki, no change to current practice > - If the proposal throws into question existing, accepted tags, defer the > proposal to small working groups > - These working groups study the wider questions and formulate a complete > proposal for new tags, deprecation, etc. > - At SOTM present and discuss their proposals and vote > - If proposals are accepted, a combination of carrot (rendering > stylesheets, Potlatch presets, etc.) and sticks (error checking, > auto-correcting bots) to implement the accepted proposals > > So for example Nick Whitelegg and Martin Simon might lead a group to work > out how best to tag paths of all kinds. If their proposal was accepted at > SOTM 2010, somebody would create a map highlighting all the ways that > probably need to be corrected and a massive effort to bring things in line > with the new schema would kick off. > > Does this sound workable? > > Regards, > Tom > > _______________________________________________ > talk mailing list > talk@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
