[Osmf-talk] Proposal - OSMF Should Adopt a Code of Conduct
Paul Norman
penorman at mac.com
Mon Dec 4 09:21:33 UTC 2017
On 12/3/2017 3:36 PM, Eugene Alvin Villar wrote:
> The OSM Carto project (which maintains the base OSM tile layer style)
> already has a Community Code of Conduct in place.[1] The pull
> request[2] that introduced this particular CoC has none of the
> skepticism, doubts, and fears that other people on this (OSMF) mailing
> list have put forward regarding having a CoC. It seems to me that the
> maintainers did not think twice that having a CoC is needed or that it
> is unnecessary.
A lot of thought went into the PR which added the CoC, and unfortunately
not all of it is reflected in its text. Some of the leadup to it did
involve discussions of what was appropriate conduct on the issue
tracker. Two problems we were having on the OpenStreetMap Carto issue
tracker with conduct were conciseness and off-topic. When developing the
PR, I looked at 27 existing codes of conduct and filtered out those that
didn't address our issues, then I was left with five. Of those, I
considered Go to have the best for our purposes, and the main
modifications that needed to be done had to do with the difference in
scale between our projects.
After going through this process, I am convinced two things need to be
addressed when adopting a COC: suitability, and community buy-in.
To be suitable for OpenStreetMap Carto, we needed a CoC which covered
off-topicness and conciseness. I mentioned this up above, but this
required a lot of research.
Rules which are not generally accepted by the community will not be
effective. With OpenStreetMap Carto, this involved talking to the major
contributors/maintainers in advance about the idea, then getting
consensus on the communication channels it would cover. It was not a
process driven by a central authority, and I would have rejected a COC
that had been dictated by Andy or myself.
What does this mean for OpenStreetMap? We'd need a COC which covers our
unique methods of communication - notes, changeset discussions, and
changeset comments. We would also need to identify the problems we have.
This could include stuff like being inclusive to different
socio-economic status, level of education, and languages.
This can't be dictated by the OSMF or OSMF board. If it's going to
regulate mappers, it needs to come from the mappers to be viewed as
legitimate. The conversations so far seem focused on the idea of
imposing a COC from on high, rather than building a consensus on a COC
being a good idea and what should go in it. Unless this changes, it is
doomed to fail.
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