Hi, the following might be a bit confusing to the casual reader because I'm arguing in favour of Ilya's import even though I'd really prefer us to have less imports, not more. But I think Ilya's proposal is being criticised for the wrong reasons.
On 08.03.2018 17:07, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote: > 2018-03-08 15:03 GMT+01:00 Ilya Zverev <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>>: > > .... Import Guidelines points to make me do tons of extra community > work, like finding communication channels for ~20 countries and > convincing every single mapper on these, in their local languages. > > maybe we can improve the documentation for the primary comunity > comunication channels per country, on a single (hopefully up to date) page? > > I think it is generally a good provision of the guidelines to ask the > local community for comments. I think there's certainly a practical limit to diversity, especially for a small project/organisation like ours. If you don't speak English, then there are areas of OpenStreetMap where it is difficult for you to make your voice heard. You cannot join the OSMF board if you don't speak English; and even for passing a meaningful vote on who should be on the board, you will have to rely on trusted third parties to explain to you what the candidates stand for. You will have difficulty participating in most of the international working groups, in tagging discussions, or international OSM software development. That's a fact and it would require a very large number of volunteers or a very big amount of money to change that. Requesting that everything that could possibly affect the OSM community in a country is also accessible to them when they don't speak English might sound great but it would definitely make most of the project grind to a halt. So even when we talk about desirable diversity goals, we have to remain practical; the goal of "a working OSM" is more important than the goal of "a diverse OSM" and diversity must take the back seat when it would make working in the project impossible. We generally request that imports and automated edits are discussed before they are executed. The main reason for this is that we want to have a chance to discover flaws in the process, the licensing, or clean up misunderstandings. The import guidelines also say that "community buy-in" should be sought. Now if someone ran an import in Panama, then it would be a good idea to discuss this with the Panama community, and out of courtesy do in in Spanish. Ideally, the importer would be from Panama. But I can feel Ilya's exasperation at the suggestion of discussing a world-wide import on every local mailing list / forum / facebook group, in the language appropriate for each. This is not practical, and would kill the import in its tracks if we were to demand that. Five or ten years in the future, when we have established local chapters around the globe, maybe then we'll have a mechanism to submit an import proposal and then have each country say yes or no after consulting with their folks in their language, but we're not there yet. My practical suggestion would be to: * discuss the import here, in English; * make a list of countries most affected by the import (perhaps all with more than 1000 edits - choose a practical threshold) and if they have a talk-xx mailing list, make a posting there ("I am planning to import 1000 fuel stations in your country, discussion over on imports@") * if there's significant opposition overall, scrap the import altogether * else, split up the import by country, and run the import in all countries potentially excluding those where people have objected * if, after the import, voices pop up complaining because they were unaware of the discussion and the import somehow breaks something in their country - simply revert for that particular country Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
