On Wednesday 22 October 2014, Kate Chapman wrote: > > One issue is we really have no idea what the OSMF membership wants. > We know what some vocal people who write English well want. [...]
This is certainly something that would be much easier if there was more transparency on the work of the OSMF bodies. As already widely mentioned the minutes are the only public documentation and as such extrememely sparse but beyond that they are published without the possibility to comment and ask questions. IMO the only way the OSM community can interpret that is that input on the topics mentioned there by ordinary community members is not wanted. I cannot really form a qualified opinion from the outside of course but to me the whole subject of transparency supports the impression Richard communicated that the OSMF board is inherently broken. At least three current members of the board have expressed the opinion here that transparency is a major issue but yet improvements during the past year on this matter are marginal at best, at least from what is publicly visible. To give a specific example how the current scarcity of public documentation of the work looks like: At the beginning of the year the lack of attribution in uses of OSM data was subject in the board minutes and various decisions were made: http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Board_Meeting_Minutes_2014-01-14 There is no follow-up on this subject in any of the later meetings this year according to the minutes. There is mentioning in the LWG minutes from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uemhXWKwbu3RNjAWcG0R-nEFaN1FHjZl1McFwjXkNSc/pub > The board has asked the LWG to follow up on the issue of insufficient > attribution by larger OSM based service providers. And then in the most recent minutes from the mangement team https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IiWYD3uwt8HJH-J6DKDRQfLtWa-P5-2OSXXyRCLvD-Y/pub there is: > No substantive action on being more aggressive on making sure that > folks attribute us, (board request). This is just an example - there are a lot of other similar case - but this seems particularly useful since it is an issue of potential interest to all OSM mappers and not just OSMF members. Apart from the ambiguities and contradictions in what is written the impression you get here from the outside without having been in any of the meeting is that a topic has been discussed in at least three bodies of the OSMF (board, MT and LWG) with essentially no results beyond the initial statement. Now i don't want to say everybody has been lazy or unproductive, esp. not the LWG who have done some great work on the community guidelines recently but the minutes certainly fail to meet their purpose as comprehensive documentation of the work of the OSMF bodies. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
