[Osmf-talk] Reaching out and diversity (Was: Re: AGM and board elections)

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2014-09-29 11:14 GMT+02:00 Derick Rethans <osm at derickrethans.nl>:

> > I believe Kathleen is mistaken when she points to the childcare
> > "affair" and claims that it is a running gag inside OSM. I haven't met
> > anybody in the community that doesn't consider it an unfortunate
> > collision of wrong expectations, a complicated subject matter with
> > lots of regional differences and our general tendency to bike shed
> > tagging, ending in a big mess. I'm not not discounting gender as one
> > of the contributing ingredients to the mess, but it clearly wasn't the
> > only one.
>
> I'm afraid you're wrong on this one. I've heard it on several occasions
> in the background as a "running gag". Because you haven't heard of it,
> doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
>


The reason for the proposal to be rejected was based on the proposal itself
though, not on the topic. FWIW, there is already a second proposal which
tries to improve things and resolve the issues found in the first one:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/childcare
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/childcare2.0

Frankly, for me, saying that childcare is a topic for women is at least a
very traditional point of view (if not sexism by itself), it is something
that was true for my grandparents and maybe partly for my parents, but
definetely is not part of my own experiences. I agree with Simon that there
is some clash of cultures here. OSM has - unlike many other tech projects -
a very big European influence and few North American influence (because
there have for a long time been and probably still are very few North
American contributors compared to European ones), while many other projects
like Wikipedia or many FOSS projects are often dominated by the American
culture.



> > There is in any case no reason to believe that if a working childcare
> > scheme was available that it wouldn't immediately be adopted by the
> > community. Adopted == used in mapping, not necessarily approved by any
> > mechanism.
>
> That's easy to say. When none of the editors make a certain distinction
> in their presets, then it makes a whole lot harder to actually use those
> tags. Sure, things might be organised differently in different areas,
> but it's the difference in even having available options.



see above, childcare 2.0


JOSM has
> currently 2 presets for facilities where women are objectified. Why are
> stripclubs and brothels even presets when there is a whole section of
> education related presets missing? *This* is what needs to change.
>


agree for brothel (at least in the western context, I have read that there
is sextourism by women going to "poor" countries far from home), but the
term stripclub can refer just as well to businesses with female customers.
For a swinger club I'd expect the same amount of men and women (maybe I am
naive, must admit that I can't count in experiences).

In my opinion we should not let our mapping be censored by political
guidelines. I am not advocating for brothels here, but I think that the map
is simply depicting the world as it is (and the more inclusive our mapper
community is, the more this picture gets complete). The reason for having a
brothel in the database is that it is there in the real world, too. It is
not something that interests only men (as potential clients) to see where
the brothels are, this is also something women and families with young
children might be interested in, something that is useful for social
spatial analysis, etc.

cheers,
Martin
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