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

[Andy Allan]

On 29 September 2014 11:03, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

>    the orginal child-care brouhaha was based either on a
> misunderstanding or an outright mis-represenation of facts.

"Assume good faith", please. It could have been a misunderstanding, or
a mis-communication, or simply true - but an accusation of deliberate
mis-representation requires considerable proof.

> If anyone in this thread truly finds that the lack of certain presets in
> JOSM is a problem, add them instead of writing a blog article or Twitter
> message or conference talk about how everything is just so wrong.

I understand that you are well meaning here - OSM is built on
contributions, and you are trying to encourage contribution rather
than just commentary. Without contributions, we are nothing. But the
answer to these problems can't simply be "supply patches or be quiet",
since that only allows a small group to contribute. Instead we should
encourage a wide range of contributions, by explaining how and where
JOSM is developed, or describing how to create presets on the
preset-wiki system, or showing how to create an issue to ask for other
people to create presets, and so on. You or I can happily grab some
unfamiliar software, poke around with it and bash out a patch a few
hours later, but to demand a patch is not encouraging contribution, it
is actually just acting as a barrier.

Cheers,
Andy