On 11/08/2009, at 11:27 PM, Tom Chance wrote: > The principal reason for suggesting SOTM is that - in my many years of > experience with these matters - it's incredibly hard to sensibly > discuss > complex matters online. With a good facilitator and a well defined > process > of preparation, you can often solve these matters in a 100th of the > time it > would take over IRC or through a mailing list + wiki.
I completely agree, and this works really well for open-source projects. It does mean that the discussion is biased towards those from the region where SotM is being held. That isn't really a problem for most open-source projects, but probably would be for OSM due to the fact that a lot of arguments fall along country/region lines. Take us Australians for example: if some proposal was discussed at SotM this year in Amsterdam, you are unlikely to have many of us present to say how things work in this part of the world. Then when it came time to present the results of the discussion to the general community, you'd get us complaining that we hadn't been involved and that you'd not taken into account how things work here. It's nothing to do with us specifically, but you'd get the same thing from any group who is under-represented at a given SotM. I imagine that SotM is like the other (generally Linux) conferences I've been to, where there is a lot of discussion outside a formal event, so that allowing remote people to participate via IRC and video wouldn't really help. I don't have any solutions to this, but think that doing it at a conference won't really solve a lot of issues. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
