[Osmf-talk] Proposal - OSMF Should **NOT** Adopt a Code of Conduct

[Luigi Toscano]

On Monday, 4 December 2017 11:29:15 CET Christoph Hormann wrote:
> On Monday 04 December 2017, Nikos Roussos wrote:
> > But as others have already stated, these examples are comparable by
> > the nature of their communities that have similar characteristics as
> > OSM in terms of cultural diversity.
> 
> And as myself and others have explained plenty OSM has a very distinct
> and unique nature as a project and a distinct culture that is very
> different in many aspects of that of open source software projects.  I
> have contributed to enough open source software projects to notice the
> difference.
> 
> Many mappers would very much dislike it if OSM was like a garden variety
> open source software project in its culture of communication and
> interaction.


I don't know which open source projects you interacted with, but I'm talking 
about open source *communities*, which do not encompass only the development 
part of the project. That's the part which has a lot of overlapping to the OSM 
community, and I was around enough in FLOSS and in OSM as well to notice this.


You need to think about outside your box with enough sensibility to properly 
design, test, and report issues about software which uses RTL languages, or 
different input methods (whose contributors are usually non-latin users).

You need different cultural background to be able to deal with desperate 
Google Summer of Code who tries to join the project and may have different 
expectation about the help to get based on their background (seen personally 
in KDE GSoC).

In general, you need to target what you are saying to the people that you 
target, who are diverse and coming from all the world, and this really require 
local knowledge; I will link here an enlightening story from the history of 
KDE India community:
https://pradeepto.livejournal.com/18619.html

You need to consider the different cultural background of people coming from 
everywhere on IRC, forums, mailing lists and bugtrackers, who are again not 
only, and not mainly developers.

How many of those aspects are not part of the OSM community too, and how many 
aspects of the OSM community are not covered by the above?


-- 
Luigi