[Osmf-talk] microgrants - second draft policy document

[Tim Elrick]

Christoph,

I do appreciate you watching closely what is going on in our little 
cosmos, especially because, I guess, we all feel a bit uneasy with the 
raised interest of big companies in our data and maybe even our 
environment. So, controlling the board and working groups is an 
honourable task.

It looks like you have a workflow set up with tools that work well for 
you. It may not do so for others.

I think we should keep it reasonable otherwise our volunteers will be 
more documenting, tracking and tracing than doing the real work. If you 
have a suspicion or a concrete question, I am sure the involved members 
will happily answer your question. Questioning the whole workflow might 
deflect their energy and time. As long as our rules and regulations do 
not oblige to use these tools, I guess, we should leave it our 
contributors who try to keep OSM going. I also guess, that we all try to 
use free and open source software, however, there are limits and you 
cannot expect everyone getting the same hard- and software stack that 
allows for the workflow you suggested unless OSMF equips all board 
members and members of working groups with such a device and makes it 
mandatory to use it. Of course, I would expect that we do not use closed 
software by competitors, like Google, that even store data on unsafe 
cloud services, but if we wanted to avoid competitors at all you would 
not be able to use many devices as they are all either run on Google's 
Android, Apple's iOS or Microsoft's Windows.

Here's a shout out to all working group and OSMF board members: Keep on 
doing the great work you are doing!

Tim

+++
AGeographer on OSM


On 2020-01-14 05:06, Christoph Hormann wrote:
On Tuesday 14 January 2020, Allan Mustard wrote:
> I don't know of a software product that can parse versions across
> multiple platforms and software products.  If anybody does, please
> let us know.  Especially if it is freeware.

As Roland already mentioned git and other version control systems are
well suitable for this, especially if you work based on text based
formats (Markdown, Mediawiki, LaTex etc.)

There are editors with direct RCS integration but most people prefer to
do this separately - checking out the current state of the file, making
edits and then committing the changes.  If you for some reason need to
do format conversion because your chosen exchange format is not
supported by your editor that would need to be done as well of course.
But unless you are extremely partisan about this ("i only do text
editing in Word") just pick a suitable editor.  Always keep in mind
that we are not talking about fancy DTP work here, this is about simple
text documents - headings, paragraphs, lists, occasionally a small
table.  Using OpenOffice is already complete overkill for that.  I
would do things like that in a plain text editor without WYSIWYG
anyway.

The most strait away method if you are not familiar with version control
systems is of course just editing the document on the wiki - especially
if it is, like here, a document that will ultimately reside on the wiki
anyway.  But i understand this comes with disadvantages (very limited
editing interface, no comfortable offline editing ability).  But it has
the advantage that most people in the OSM community are familiar with
it.

--
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/

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