[Tagging] solving iD conflict (was: pointlessly inflamatory title)

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 5/23/19 21:58, Nick Bolten wrote:
> OSM needs an alternative for community tagging discussions outside of
> these mailing lists.

It might; that doesn't invalidate points made on these mailing lists though!

> # My experiences with OSMers in other contexts:
> - Very friendly, all focused on making maps better, highly motivated to
> donate their time to help others via the map.
> - Disagreements are pleasant. Both sides acknowledge the other point of
> view and usually come around to a compromise.
> - There is interest in knowing more: lots of questions back and forth.
> - Objections are qualified and polite.
> - 10s-100s of people giving feedback on a single idea.

Every person on this mailing list participates in many of these kinds of
discussions, in addition to being on the mailing list (just in case you
were thinking there were two different kinds of people, the friendly
people and the mailing list people; this is not the case).

> When I was mentoring a group of students a few years ago, several were
> offended by the condescending and insulting responses they received on
> this mailing list, all because they suggested making a coherent way of
> combining existing tags into a pedestrian schema and doing a
> carefully-vetted import. 

I think you should attempt to apply a little of that "acknowledging the
other point of view" that you lauded above to such situations. Every day
brings new broken imports to OpenStreetMap. All of them are done with
the best intentions. Very many of them are done by people with little
prior experience. Therefore, when a group of students pops up and
suggests to do an import, this already sets some alarm bells ringing
(carefully vetted or not). Your project is to be applauded to even come
here - as you rightly say, the lists are not necessarily easy to
discover and a large percentage of problematic imports have never been
discussed with anyone before they are attempted.

Everyone on this mailing list has likely seen many buggy imports.
Imagine being at a party and someone steps on your shoe. They say sorry,
you say no problem. Five minutes later another person steps on your
shoe. Again, a friendly sorry, a friendly no problem. By the time the
10th person steps on your shoe you might shout out "WHAT THE FUCK IS
WRONG WITH THIS PARTY" even if that person is totally innocent. It's not
right, it's not polite, but it is somewhat understandable.

> I think
> it's probably a good thing that it's so hard to even know that there is
> a mailing list, as users have a negative experience.

That is often repeated and I guess most people can confirm that people
act differently in person than on mailing lists. However, many mailing
lists in OSM are vibrant meeting places for many more than 8 community
members, and spreading negative opinions about mailing lists reinforces
problems instead of solving them - if you go around telling everyone
what a snake pit "the mailing lists" are then people will either not
join them, or join them just waiting to see their expectations confirmed.

In general, our project isn't a top-down strictly managed project with a
controlled decision-making process. This means that many things have to
be discussed over and over, and the community generally doesn't speak
with one voice. But this also gives us some resilience; there's no one
"tag central command" that someone could take over and dictate what we
are to do.

> - Terrible security practices. Passwords sent in plain text over email.
> No encryption. I was almost put off the mailing list entirely when I saw
> this. Completely unacceptable.

Now you're going off on a tangent. Passwords are not required at all to
use the mailing list. Of course, email in general is not a secure medium
since you can easily impersonate others. Then again, if we judge the
merit of contributions by their content and not by who wrote them,
impersonating someone doesn't even give you much of an advantage.

> Gripes aside, I have a suggestion: move these discussions to a real
> forum system, properly organized around regional/topic-specific/tagging
> discussions. It could be a revamped https://forum.openstreetmap.org/ or
> something fancier and slack-like (like riot chat). Have actual
> moderators and code of conduct.

The current forum system works and has moderators and etiquette
guidelines (this depends on each sub-forum, they are not global).
Discoverability isn't much better than mailing lists IMHO. In my country
(Germany), OSMers are neatly split between forum and mailing list, most
using just one or just the other, some using both. Nothing wrong with
that IMHO; smaller groups form better bonds.

Bye
Frederik

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