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<TITLE>RE: [OSM-legal-talk] How to achieve a better quality legal debate?</TITLE>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2>Steve,<BR>
<BR>
Great e-mail - I can see you've put some well-needed thought into handling some of the growing pains of our community.<BR>
<BR>
> I propose that legal debate is politely and repeatedly asked to move to<BR>
> the legal-talk list. Not because it isn't generally useful or important,<BR>
> but because it scares the crap out of newbies or even people who've been<BR>
> on the list for a while but can't deal with the traffic.<BR>
<BR>
I think similar sentiments apply equally well to traffic that should be going to dev@ (particularly anything related to SQL). talk@ is becoming increasingly high-volume and difficult to follow, anything we can do to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio is good. The amount of repetition implies people are not reading all that much of what they post. As threads have a habit of meandering, people shouldn't be afraid of pushing them onto more appropriate lists, changing the subject lines, taking discussion off list, or quietly ignoring entire threads.<BR>
<BR>
> I would have sent this to just legal-talk but I think it important that<BR>
> those on talk@ have a think about what they want to see on that list and<BR>
> how the to and fro affects them. I've heard from many people who like<BR>
> talk@ but are bemused or put off by the large thread on village greens /<BR>
> license.<BR>
<BR>
Whilst the village green thread involved a lot of legal language it was essentially a thread about tagging, which I feel would have been out of place on legal-talk@<BR>
<BR>
AFAICS, there are three types of legal discussion:<BR>
<BR>
1) The legality of a given data-source (generally much less contentious)<BR>
2) The licensing situation<BR>
3) Legal definitions of tag values<BR>
<BR>
Personally I'd have thought only the first two belong on legal-talk@...<BR>
<BR>
Tagging is an entirely separate issue, and perhaps one that warrants some serious thought with regards to how we propose, discuss, debate and reach consensus in a way that will scale with the project. I look forward to hearing your views on that in due course.<BR>
<BR>
Rob</FONT>
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