On 10/12/2018 19:33, Michael Reichert wrote:
> Did you consult the working group being involved in boundary
> disputes (DWG and LWG) before you came to that decision?
I'm not on the board but I can answer one of those - a statement was
issued to the DWG and LWG on Tuesday last week saying that the previous
situation was to remain in effect. Previous to that Martijn had (as
OSMF secretary) contacted us (the DWG) to say that a complaint had been
received, and I replied with the timeline of the decision process (who
complained to us, what we then did, etc.), and then with some more
clarification that Martijn asked for. As I understand it, the 3 DWG
members on the OSMF board recused themselves from the decision-making
process.
As others have said, it will be interesting to read the full explanation
when it is ready. These decisions are never easy - I'm sure that there
was careful consideration before reaching it (as there was before the
DWG reached its decision too).
Looking forwards rather than backwards, we do however have something of
a problem. We have two OSMF policies that directly contradict each
other -
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/w/images/d/d8/DisputedTerritoriesInformation.pdf
and the originally "short term"
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes/DWG_2014-06-05_Special_Crimea
. Others have made the case for verifiability as being at the root of
everything we do, which led to the addition of "de facto" borders to
OSM; I don't need to repeat those arguments. We have however always
tried to allow people to make their own maps that show their view of the
world (DisputedTerritoriesInformation.pdf has said almost exactly that
since 2013). Unfortunately people see some map tiles at
OpenStreetMap.org and think that those are somehow "the only view that
OSM has" despite OSM containing far more data, especially about the
nuances of different sorts of boundaries, than one representation can
possibly show.
I've said many times before that we need to try and make this process as
easy as possible, in particular the "my country has a claimed extent of
X which is verifiable on the ground" case. There's currently discussion
on the tagging list and in the wiki to try and make this happen. And
no, picking someone else's criteria ("The UN", the CIA's "World
Factbook", or anything else) for boundaries isn't going to work - there
are simply too many edge cases. Watch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AivEQmfPpk if you haven't already seen
it for some of the gory detail.
Best Regards,
Andy Townsend (from OSM's Data Working Group)
_______________________________________________
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
