Kirill, Kirill Bestoujev wrote: > You did understand the text of the voting correctly. But once again: > this voting, as ANY OTHER VOTING on osm-wiki HAS NO POWER OF A RULE. > Anyone can map anything in any way he likes. No one in OSM can force > an osmer to stop mapping or to map in an other way. > > So this particular voting can ONLY be treated as a discussion, nothing more.
The term often used in English for such a process is a "poll". The whole thing raises interesting questions for the principle of subsidiarity which we usually apply in OSM. We tend to trust local people the most. We often disapprove of "helicopter mappers" who force their style of mapping onto a community they don't even know. On the whole, this works well. This is independent of the local community having set up an OSMF chapter with decision making structures, but if they have such a chapter locally and act in unison then that would be an even stronger indication to let them do their thing. With Russia we now seem to have a case where it is possible that a majority of the local community decides to work differently from the principles that we have grown to cherish, namely letting everyone map what the hell they want. We now have people who not only want to keep certain things out of the map, but even delete these objects where they have been mapped by others. It is even possible that they form an OSMF chapter supporting these actions. If this happens, then we have a clash of two principles. Either we say that the principle of subsidiarity overrides the "freedom to tag", allowing the Russians to restrict that freedom in their area because it is, after all, their area; or we say that the "freedom to tag" is the overriding principle and we will not tolerate any local community to tell us outsiders how they would like to be mapped. For my part, I'll wait and watch as the spectacle unfolds. Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
