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

[Christoph Hormann]

On Tuesday 14 January 2020, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
> 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.

I am not sure if you are arguing against keeping the edit history of
policy documents or against making this public.  The 'un-monitored' is
not the case any more as soon as you keep a record - it is just a
different circle of people who has access to it.

In my eyes there is a natural line between what is being contemplated in
oral conversation and what is part of written formulation.  The key
here is people taking individual responsibility for their actions.  One
of the basic principles of the OSM community is that it is a
cooperation of *individuals* who take responsibility for their edits
and their other activities while working together and cooperating on
the overall goals *in the open* and for everyone to see and scrutinize.
Now in your model of how the OSMF develops policy that is different,
you want the individuals on the board/WGs to be able to work without
public scrutiny and then present the results of this internal and
secret negotiation process between different interests as the
collective work of the 'team'.  This elimination of individual
responsibility and accountability to the outside is a typical property
of organizations like the OSMF but it clashes fundamentally with the
self image of the OSM community in their everyday work and with the
function of the OSMF members to supervise the work of the board and
WGs.

> > 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.

I would suggest to look at it from the other side - the current
intransparent work culture of large parts of the OSMF attracts mainly a
specific set of people - often people who derive self esteem and a
sense of self importance from being privy to information that is not
available to others or who see a possibility to better further their
personal interests due to this.  During the last board elections this
was fairly well visible.  OTOH people who value the open work culture
elsewhere in the OSMF community, who think of the principle of
individual responsibility and accountability in all community work as a
fundamentally good thing, are quite strongly put off by this very
different style of work.

This is what makes it so hard to change the organizational culture
within an organization like the OSMF - because those within the
organization have usually already been pre-selected to be fine with or
in support of this culture - often without being aware that it
represents only a small subset of the community.

> > 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...

I think you probably realize that the counter-examples you mention are
all cases of physical presence meetings.  Remote cooperation within the
OSM community is traditionally almost exclusively happening in the
open - often simply because anything else would be logistically
challenging.  There are of course more recent trends to separate
discourse into gated communities without a public record - but that is
a problem on its own.

Whenever in a physical meeting people start writing down policy drafts i
tend to get an uneasy feeling exactly because of the transparency
issues related to that.  When the meeting is more or less ad hoc at an
event open to all (think hack weekend or an FOSSGIS saturday) that is
not a big issue but if for example at an OSM pub meeting over the
course of several months an elaborate policy document is developed and
then presented as the collective work of the group to the larger
community i think that is not good style.  Communicating work results
back publicly to the global community in a timely manner is usually a
good idea.  We have meanwhile also quite good means to take notes at a
meeting in electronic form and share them with the wider community in
real time which can even facilitate combined remote and physical
presence cooperation.

> [...]
>
> 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.

That describes more or less the same as what i above explained as the
principle of individual responsibility and accountability in the OSM
community.  And you seem to say that this applies to mapping but should
not apply to policy development within the OSM community.  I would
disagree.

I also don't see the point of policy writing involving creativity while
mapping does not.  Creativity is inherently something developed by an
individual - even if influenced and inspired by others.  Therefore it
should actually be easier to attribute contributions in a process that
involve creativity compared to a process that does not.

But creativity itself is of course a highly culture specific concept
which makes it hairy to argue based on it here.

> 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.

But if a group privately produces an extensive data set and then uploads
this into the OSM database as a collective work of the group we
consider that an import subject to specific rules and scrutiny.  Should
we maybe consider the LWG draft for an attribution guideline a policy
import plan for a policy document produced outside the normal OSM
community procedures and rules?

> 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.

Like in case of Joost i'd challenge you to demonstrate that.  In my
experience this scenario often happens if people with a firm belief in
a culture of secrecy due to outside pressure produce an engineered
transparency and to sabotage that and proof this being pointless they
bury the public in meaningless noise.

But if the actual work processes are made transparent following them is
for the outsider not any more work intensive than for any insider.  And
people can share their work on reading this and summarize different
activities for others to understand more quickly.  The problem of
nit-picky questions arises from partial transparency generating
questions because the published information depends on other not
published information to be understood.

In my experience having full transparency in processes usually tends to
lead to a better understanding and more empathy of the public with the
people involved.  Being able to see the hurdles and problems you are
dealing with makes you more relatable.  And note i am not calling for
this in all fields of OSMF work here - i am calling for it only in the
field of *policy development*.

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