[OHM] Moving Historical Geodata to the Web & Questions about OHM Decision Making Process

[Tim Waters]

Hi folks,

Back in the UK after an interesting conference in the New York Public
Library (NYPL) with a good number of people from North American and British
institutions, libraries, archives and organisations The event was titled
"Moving Historical Geodata to the Web". Lightning talk slides can be viewed
here: http://t.co/j4Quoh3jlq and Merrick from Harvard has some notes here:
http://gis.harvard.edu/services/blog/moving-historical-geodata-web I expect
there will be a few more write ups in the near future, together with a
summary of the outputs of the event from the NYPL.

I was there from Topomancy with the Library featuring Toomancy's Map Warper
and Historical Gazetteer applications. This led me available to personally
present about about OpenHistoricalMap. My three slides are included in the
first link.

I thought it was going to be a great opportunity to be disruptive and
challenging to the participants, tearing down academic ivory towers but
actually I couldn't have been so wrong as everyone was incredibly behind
the project! OHM is not something that is replacing something existing,
it's something new that everyone wants.  Almost everyone saw OHM as being
the logical destination for geodata extracted from historical maps!

Everyone was excited about the project and could see funding opportunities
and other projects which they would like OHM to be involved with.

Some of the questions which I wasn't able to answer properly was "how is it
run?" / "how do decisions get made?" / "How does my organisation get
involved?". I pointed them to my slide and waved my hands and explained
about the "OSM way" and communities and how things run happily in an ad-hoc
way etc. I explained how we have a list on the wiki of what needs to happen.

So I'm wondering how best to answer those questions for outside
organisations and institutions - people who are not familiar with the
ad-hoc consensus driven, informal way we do things.

Do we think that a simple "send a message to the mailing list first"
message would be best at this stage, or maybe, given that participation
levels in the project between us varies over time, there could be a list of
"active members willing to be contacted" on the wiki if an org wants to
start conversations off list first?  If it's off list, at what point should
an off list conversation move to the mailing list?

I'm thinking of a potential case in a year or so when a couple of
institutions or universities want to start using OHM properly and maybe
have a few features or things they want, and a few tens of thousands of
cash to help us all get there.

How would they approach us? How would we talk with them? How would the OHM
community get involved with the idea? I'm not at all thinking of setting up
any type of organisation or formalising anything, and am in favour of doing
the very minimum of what is needed. Perhaps all we need is documenting a
route for communication and a little "here's how we do things" on the wiki?

What do we think?

Cheers,

Chippy / Tim
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