[Osmf-talk] public document writing process (was: microgrants)

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 1/14/20 22:10, Christoph Hormann wrote:
> If the problem is that it "paints only half of the
> picture" then the solution is to provide the full picture.

I think this will require an enormous investment of anyone who wants to
understand what is going on. It is possible that independent third
parties would do this work and report on it but I'm not holding my breath.

> a) it seems you have a wrong understanding of what i wrote.  

What I thought to have understood is that you request that all
communication between members of a team tasked with e.g. writing a
document should be public.

My suggestion was to allow the team some degree of un-monitored
teamwork, and only expect them to go public once they have something
they find presentable, together with a short description of what they did.

> b) i disagree that there is any need for or legitimate interest in
> privacy in the cooperative development of policy documents in an
> organization like the OSMF.  IMO *any* cooperative development of
> formulations of policy text should happen in the open.

I can see advantages and disadvantages to that, and in my mind, the
disadvantages outweigh the advantages. I think that the character traits
required to participate in a fully transparent creative process would
severely limit the pool of people available for the task.

> Frankly in a community like OpenStreetMap where essentially everything
> from mapping over tag documentation to tools and map development
> happens publicly, i am astonished this - in the form i present it,
> limited to policy development only - is even a subject of debate.

It is now. And I don't know if I share your sentiment that "essentially
everything ... happens publicly". I don't keep count but if I were to
take a guess how much time I spend doing things publicly in OSM, and how
much time I spend talking, chatting, and writing with people privately
or in small groups like a pub meet or the hallway track at a conference...

>> * automatic recordings can also present an unwelcome intrusion into
>> the privacy of participants, a privacy and "safe space" that if
>> granted can increase productivity.

> Would you say the cited statement also applies to mapping?  If not why?

Two reasons why not:

1. Mapping is, at least for me, not a creative process in the same sense
as coming up with a good structure for a document or a set of criteria
for a guideline is. Hence there is no silly brainstorming phase or
something that I would like to keep to myself.

2. Every mapper is a single entity in the community. We don't usually
group them and say "you three, please come up with a good mapping of
this residential development". Hence no need for mappers to first do
some work "internally" before presenting their result. To the degree
that we *do* map in teams - for example at a mapping party - the group
privacy exists; people meet up (privately), discuss what they plan to
map and who's going to go where (privately), then go out mapping,
possibly discussing details along the way (privately), and when they
upload the results to OSM you don't even get to see whether one person's
mapping was influenced by what the other person said or not.

>> I think that a pragmatic compromise could be the publication of, with
>> every document or draft, a small "meta" information that explains who
>> participated to which degree in coming up with the document (perhaps
>> telling us who was the "lead", if any, who made "major contributions"
>> and simply not mentioning those who just fixed a comma, or
>> something), and also a small "change log" that would tersely point
>> out the major changes since the last draft, or perhaps on a first
>> draft outline which ideas had been tried and rejected, if any.
> 
> This kind of engineered, press release style transparency is IMO
> counterproductive for efforts for real transparency because:
> 
> * it creates a barrier between the internal world of the organization
> and public communication, everyone in the organization has to mentally
> compartmentalize into internal and external communication and everyone
> outside will inevitably get to feel that they see only the facade of
> what the insiders want or can let them to see.  This is poison to trust
> and confidence between those within the organization and those outside.
> * to those with a faible for a culture of secrecy it produces the
> strongest justification for it because it presents transparency (in
> this engineered form) primarily as a cost factor, additional work and a
> risk factor for conconsistencies in the engineered public reality.

While this may be true, your "simply lay everything open and we'll pick
out the interesting bits" does first create ton of work for those
picking out the interesting bits, and after that, a ton of work for
those who now have to answer nit-picky questions about why exactly they
committed wording X and 3 hours and 42 minutes later changed that to
wording Y etc. -- it's not like you can simply push out your edit
history and then hope that your transparency duties are done with that!

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"