[Osmf-talk] microgrants - second draft policy document

Tue Jan 14 15:57:38 UTC 2020

> If you want the aim for the program to be language and culture
> agnostic and the idea of following up on the project in substance both
> to be serious having project supervisors who are able to communicate
> with the grant recipients in their native language would probably be
> essential. These do not necessarily have to be part of a formal
> committee of course. But having people who - from the outside and not
> being part of the projects themselves - accompany the progress of the
> projects for their duration would be quite significant.
Christoph, that is asking a lot of volunteers...communicating in native
languages of grant beneficiaries when the native languages are Swahili,
Zapotec, Uzbek, Bahasa Javanese, Kannada, Zulu, or Haitian Creole would
be very difficult to implement.  As an American diplomat who served in
Asia, Latin America, and Europe, I can attest that language barriers are
indeed a problem (within India my native local employees had to hire
interpreters at times because there are so many languages), but I doubt
we can expect the OSM volunteer community to include speakers of nearly
every language on the globe who are also willing to take on
responsibility for grants management. 

That said, perhaps we could consider a "United Nations" approach and
have a subset of languages in which applications would be acceptable,
and for which volunteers might exist to serve as grant managers.  The
choices (this is just top-of-the-head thinking out loud, don't hammer me
for not including your favorite language) might be, for example,
English, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Farsi/Dari/Tajik, Chinese, Japanese,
Hindi/Urdu, Russian, Swahili, French, Hausa, and Malay.  These are
widely spoken languages within particular geographic areas, and in my
experience it is less difficult, for example, for a Telugu speaker to
find someone to translate from Telugu to Hindi than from Telugu to
English. 

And I know that "Google" is a four-letter word in the OSM community, but
I feel compelled to point out that Google Translate does include the
following languages:

Afrikaans
Albanian
Amharic
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Catalan
Cebuano
Chichewa
Chinese
Corsican
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Esperanto
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
Frisian
Galician
Georgian
German
Greek
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Hausa
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kannada
Kazakh
Khmer
Korean
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
Kyrgyz
Lao
Latin
Latvian
Lithuanian
Luxembourgish
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Mongolian
Myanmar (Burmese)
Nepali
Norwegian
Pashto
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Russian
Samoan
Scots Gaelic
Serbian
Sesotho
Shona
Sindhi
Sinhala
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tajik
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Xhosa
Yiddish
Yoruba
Zulu

On 1/14/2020 10:28 AM, Christoph Hormann wrote:
> On Monday 13 January 2020, Joost Schouppe wrote:
>> Please provide feedback before January 28th, so that we can
>> potentially look at this at the next Board meeting Jan 30th.
> To not keep this thread completely dominated by the meta-discussion on
> the form and procedures of document development a few comments on the
> actual draft: * as i said before the overall concept of this draft
> looks quite positive to me. * many of the points of my previous
> comments:
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2019-October/006294.html
> still apply (with the exception of the progress made on the follow-up
> on projects - more on that below) I would encourage the new board
> members to look over these previous comments. * the promise to try
> facilitating translations will not eliminate the problems of language
> and culture bias. Selecting a commitee based on English language
> capability will inevitably introduce a significant bias into its
> composition which would propagate into the selection even with a
> highly supportive translation service being provided to applicants
> (which is often difficult in the first place). * i see a problem with
> the idea of the same people doing the selection of projects being
> involved in follow-up on these projects. Someone who has made the
> decision to select a certain project will often have the tendency to
> justify that decision afterwards. This is in conflict with the aim to
> accompany the projects with critical evaluation for doing what they
> were selected to do within the principles and rules of the program.
> Put more bluntly: Sacking a project for not abiding by the rules would
> require the committee to admit they have made an error in judgement. I
> see there are also reasons for combining the two tasks but the
> described issue can IMO not be ignored. It could also increase the
> tendency to select by cultural commonality (preference of people to
> select projects they personally would want to work with later). *
> connected to the previous point: If you want the aim for the program
> to be language and culture agnostic and the idea of following up on
> the project in substance both to be serious having project supervisors
> who are able to communicate with the grant recipients in their native
> language would probably be essential. These do not necessarily have to
> be part of a formal committee of course. But having people who - from
> the outside and not being part of the projects themselves - accompany
> the progress of the projects for their duration would be quite
> significant. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/
> _______________________________________________ osmf-talk mailing list
> osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/osmf-talk
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