[OSM-legal-talk] License Telephone Debate

[Nick Black]

The purpose of the call on Saturday is to offer an additional channel of
communication around the license - its intended to supplement the mailing
lists and wiki, not to replace or to diminish the value of the work that the
community has done putting together use cases and other documentation.

The idea of the call comes down to this: mailing lists and wikis are great
for debating and discovering some types of information, but they are also
prone to misinterpretation.  In my experience, we can spend a whole load of
time flaming on the list and then we talk in person and everything was
a mis-understanding or any problems are solved pretty quickly.  Having an
open license call was intended to be a step towards opening up a process
that has confused and angered a lot of people and that is often criticised
for being too closed.

What I'd hope would come out of it is a clearer understanding of the process
of the license change and some of the specifics around changing it.  Please
see this as the Foundation doing everything we can to open up and engage
with the community.

As for the language and timing, its a bit of a damned if you do, damned if
you don't.  Its always 2am somewhere and the fact is that the majority of
people involved with OSM are in the EU.  As Andy said, if there's enough
demand we can host calls for other time zones.

The same goes for other languages.  I'd guess that English is the majority
spoken language of the project, with German a close second.  If someone from
the German speaking community would like to volunteer to translate on a
call, we can see about the logistics.  Ultimately though, non-English
speaking communities need better representation within the Foundation - this
is something the Local Chapters working group is actively pursuing.

As always, please let us know any constructive ideas.  So far there have
been no constructive suggestions from people who are criticizing the call,
for a better way to run this on this thread.

Nick
nick at osmfoundation.org






On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 10:58 AM, Simon Ward <simon at bleah.co.uk> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 09:30:33PM +1100, Liz wrote:
> > I don't find a telephone conference acceptable.
> > While Frederick mentions the troubles of language, I don't want to be on
> the
> > phone at 0200 local time. I'd rather be asleep, and my critical faculties
> > probably would be asleep at that time even if I was nominally on the
> > telephone.
>
> Mailing lists are much more international friendly methods of
> communication.  What is it you (SteveC, Nick, etc) excpect to get out of
> the telephone conference that can’t be facilitated on the list?
>
> Simon
> --
> A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
> simple system that works.—John Gall
>
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-- 
-- 
Nick Black
twitter.com/nick_b
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