[Osmf-talk] Losing faith

SteveCoast steve at asklater.com
Tue Jan 15 20:38:01 UTC 2013


Kai

If I may, this is a good discussion with reasonable points but its the wrong discussion.

This is not about whether, today, we should do this or that, or what is the best twitter policy.

This is about how access was restricted with no policy three months ago, it looked like everything would be ok and then we have this silly strategy and bad faith actions.

Steve

On Jan 15, 2013, at 12:31 PM, Kai Krueger <kakrueger at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 01/15/2013 12:13 PM, Steve Coast wrote:
>> 
>> On Jan 15, 2013, at 10:57 AM, Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch> wrote:
>>>  Maybe
>>> that is a mistake, but the correct way to change it is to engage
>>> yourself in the CWG and not to expect the board to fiddle with things it
>>> has clearly delegated to that group.
>> 
>> 
>> Simon
>> 
>> It wasn't clear that it had been delegated. One day the password just changed. Poof. That was it.
>> 
>> I did spend three months trying to get an answer from the CWG, as did others. Gradually moving up the stack from them to the board to here as you know.
>> 
>> The answer that came back is absurd. Emailing a group to consider sending a tweet at their weekly meeting is like asking me to send you a telegram for conversion to email. It misses out on the whole point of twitter.
> 
> I think that depends entirely on what the twitter account @openstreetmap is used for.
> 
> If it is used for
> 
> a) To tweet announcements and statements regarding OSM and OSMF, i.e. basically a 140 character version of the osmf blog. E.g. to comment on developments in mapping that effect OSM in some way.
> 
> b) to reply to other twitter messages or help twitter users better understand OSM that someone else has initiated. E.g. if someone tweets "OSM sucks because it doesn't have routing like XYZ". Then one can reply with a tweet "Have you checked out ABC or DEF which support routing based on OSM". I.e. to use it as a real social interaction.
> 
> If the account is used for b) then emailing the tweet and get it confirmed by the CWG is indeed not a good idea, as it introduces a possibly large latency and looses out on the point of fast tweets.
> 
> If the account is used for a), then the suggested methodology seems entirely reasonably to me.
> 
> OSMF has grown enough by now that it has a certain amount of weight in the industry and in the press. OSMF announcements are taken seriously and often repeated in various news articles and widely read. So it is important that those statements really reflect the views of the OSM community, that they are not inflamatory and that the facts are correct.
> Particularly with respect to things like license violations or whether company XYZ uses OSM data and how and if they are "model OSM citizens", can easily be rather controversial and problematic. Sometimes even without realising that the statement might be problematic at first.
> 
> Although the few members of CWG obviously also might not always hit the correct tone to reflect the views of such a diverse group as OSM, the chance that someone in the CWG will notice if a statement might be controversial is much higher than for an individual person. So it seems reasonable for all of those tweets to be acknowledged and accepted by all members of the CWG to ensure nothing goes out on the official OSMF announcement that one might regret later on.
> 
> As a consequence, I'd hope that also members of the CWG don't just tweet things with out consulting other members of CWG and getting it approved, even though they might technically be able to. In that case Steve, you would go through pretty much the same procedure as any member of the Board or CWG.
> 
> If you agree to adhere to the rules of the board and CWG with respect to how to use the twitter account and what needs broader approval, then as Chairman Emeritus, it doesn't seem unreasonable that you would have password access to the twitter account.
> 
> 
> Given that a) and b) are rather different ways to use a twitter account, do both purposes have to be done by a single account? Could there not be two accounts like e.g. @openstreetmap and @openstreetmaphelp. The later one could be used much more leniently and rapidly but doesn't comment on any big picture things, while the former is used for things that are supposed to represent the views of the entire project as much as is possible in such a diverse project.
> 
> Kai
> 
>> 
>> Lastly, the board can and does get involved all the time with working groups.
>> 
>> Why do we have this way to work with CWG all of a sudden when the other working groups are held to completely different standards?
>> 
>> Steve
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> 




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