All good questions. As you say, the current situation is really far from optimal, it's just a matter of finding the right process for occasions where we need to make a big change like scrapping a bunch of existing tags in favour of a more logical alternative.
On Monday 10 Aug 2009 17:29:50 Ben Laenen wrote: > 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? I personally think that OSM has to follow other open data/source/etc. projects and bed down with some structures to keep the community together. Membership of the Foundation should be the basis for participating in these decisions. Each vote would need at least 60% of members to vote, and proposals would need a majority of say 60% in favour to pass. Perhaps to speed things up these votes could be done online, with particularly contentious issues going to SOTM where face to face discussions are easier to facilitate. In the event that a proposal fails on the wiki, it would be normal for one or two people to volunteer to work up a new proposal in much more detail, to be discussed by a slightly wider group comprised of anyone interested in the topic. These wouldn't happen often - they're only for quite disruptive changes to existing tagging - so it's unlikely that seasoned mappers and relevant experts would miss the process. If there are competing proposals, the best thing is to have them all properly developed so they can then be discussed, rather than the current situation of 100s of emails that address small parts of the picture > 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? Yes, I should think so. Regards, Tom _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
