Mikel, On 06/06/2014 06:43 PM, Mikel Maron wrote: >> The only thing that I've found that they do respond to consistently is being >> blocked by the DWG. > > That is disturbing to hear. > > User blocks are a tool of last resort, when someone is doing serious > harm to OSM. Like deleting objects randomly.
I have the opinion that this is a personal issue between you and Serge. I don't know what but there must be something in both your pasts that makes you see a red flag whenever Serge posts something. I think you should stop attacking DWG as a whole just because you have an axe to grind with one of its members. Serge is one of our more active members and he does a lot of good work. If your plan is to shoot him down for one reason or another, at least find us a good replacement before you do ;) It is very easy to ruin the motivation of an active individual with a few public outbursts - a similar situation a while ago, without your involvement, has landed OSMF in a situation where they didn't have a functioning CWG for years. Sadly those who are quick to break things often cannot be counted on to help rebuild them. In fact, DWG regularly uses "zero hour" blocks in situations where users do not reply to inquiries from the community, and this shouldn't disturb you at all. OSM is a community effort where we have to work together. There are many people quietly doing their work in OSM and not talking to others which is ok, but as soon as others send them questions about their mapping and they (consistently) don't respond, this is a legitimate reason for DWG to do a "zero hour" block - if only to make sure that the communication channel works at all (the mapper could have misconfigured their email client or not read OSM messages for some other indadvertent reason). If this "disturbs" you then you must have a very different idea about mapping than most other community members. > That just doesn't compare to situations like not giving a changeset > comment DWG has indeed also blocked people for not giving a changeset comment, but only in situations where they have made controversial edits for a long time, and other community members have complained. We then usually ask them to supply changeset comments so that their controversial edits aren't hidden. If they ignore this, then we will block them. Of course, if their edits hadn't been controversial in the first place, nobody would have said anything about missing changeset comments. The convention that we are enforcing here is (and I'm trying to make up words for something that is practiced but not written) "exceptional edits require exceptional diligence" - if you import three houses in your neighbourhood and then automatically edit them without giving a changeset comment, nobody will care, but if you import 10,000 houses or edit a ton of names or so, then people will except that you at least explain yourself. > http://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/465 > http://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/471 You have picked two blocks placed by Serge. As explained above, I believe that you're on a personal crusade here and I will not comment further on these, but I will say so much that at least one of these two cases has been discussed at board and MT level and DWG have full backing for their actions. > So, I'm calling on the Board to take up the issue of setting clear > limits on the the activities of the DWG. Please stop this public grandstanding. It doesn't help anyone. The DWG has a relatively clear mission that is outlined in http://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Data_Working_Group and it hasn't exceeded that mission to my knowledge. DWG regularly seeks the backing of MT and/or board in situations that involve policy setting or important precedents. I think that you're blowing this way out of proportion and since you are normally a reasonable guy, my only explanation is that there's a personal issue between you and Serge. Maybe the two of you can work this out without too much attrition. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
