On Jan 9, 2013, at 4:26 AM, Paweł Paprota wrote:
> On 01/09/2013 12:20 PM, Peter Wendorff wrote:
>>
>> Communication professionals IMHO most often sound like marketing.
>
> I did not mean communication professionals but giving more resources to
> the OSMF's Communication Working Group or similar initiatives. Posting a
> tweet or a blog post now and then really is not enough to communicate
> about the project that OSM has become. There needs to be more
> initiatives like switch2osm, campaigns need to be thought out and put
> together. This does not have anything to do with marketing, it's just
> how a project grows.
+1 to this.
OSM is amazing, but operationally it's a big problem that we don't have an
identifiable power structure. We seem happy to rely on happy accidents and the
occasional messiah (Cloudmade, Mapquest, more recently Knight/Mapbox) but it's
not enough. We've mentioned a few successful projects like Apache on this
thread, but outside the world of software there are also unsuccessful efforts
that can serve as warning signs. To get unnecessarily political for a minute,
it's been said of Occupy that failure to make organized demands was a mistake:
"Nor does it require poststructuralism-leading-through-anarchism to
understand how to reverse these developments. You do it by rebuilding a
powerful and competent regulatory state. You do it by rebuilding the labor
movement. You do it with bureaucracy." (http://teczno.com/s/x14)
As far as potential solutions or approaches, one that I can think of is to add
some type of process-based items to the TTT’s, for example: double the number
of sysadmins qualified and trusted to run the servers, appoint a VP Eng.,
increase the number of core application servers to satisfy higher API demand,
and develop a database failover/recovery plan. I don't enough of the gory
details to assert that these are the right ideas, but maybe Tom, Grant, Andy or
Matt can help add vital information.
"Lots of things are like that. They're not complicated. They don't require
brilliant, innovative strategies, they're just hard. They require more work and
more effort and than anyone might reasonably expect. The best managers create
organisational room for that to happen." (http://teczno.com/s/zl9)
-mike.
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sf/ca http://mike.teczno.com/contact.html
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