[Tagging] solving iD conflict

Christoph Hormann osm at imagico.de
Fri May 24 12:48:02 UTC 2019


On Friday 24 May 2019, Kevin Kenny wrote:
> On 5/24/19 6:04 AM, Christoph Hormann wrote:
> > This is evidently something that is becoming more and more
> > important as OSM grows as a project and it becomes increasingly
> > difficult for a single person to be knowledgable about every aspect
> > of it.
>
> In the din of voices here, how does one assess who is most qualified
> to make such decisions?

Through arguments and reasoning and through critical evaluation of 
opinions and decisions.

You should not assume just because people articulate all kinds of 
strange views and opinions on these channels that are evidently flawed 
that the discourse on a whole is pointless.

If you engage in discussions in the OSM community for a longer time you 
will learn which people on what subjects tend to have views and ideas 
that in the long term hold up to critical assessment and usually turn 
out to be correct.  Likewise you also learn which people might have an 
interesting perspective on things but frequently draw the wrong 
conclusions.  This helps a lot - but is of course no replacement for 
critical evaluation of ideas on a case-by-case bases.  Everyone can 
make errors in judgement - even experts in their respective fields.

Also allowing the articulation of highly opinionated and unqualified 
ideas is a necesssity in a community that wants to be open and be able 
to develop and adjust the a changing environment.  Because many 
innnovative ideas start as something that is universally considered to 
be a bad idea (or even offensive or toxic as some like to call it).

> Beware of elevating, 'I disagree with this decision,' to, 'the people
> who made this decision were irresponsible. If they had consulted a
> competent authority, they would not have made it.' In this forum, it
> risks being interpreted as an arrogant belief that you are the only
> truly competent authority, unless you accompany it with a proposal
> for constituting a governing body.

I think you got the wrong impression here that i advocate the creation 
of formal authorities based on some codified system of qualifications.

In my opinion the only practical way to effectively select qualified 
people to making decisions is through competition - in arguments and 
reasoning in the process leading up to the decisions and between 
different decisions and those making them afterwards.  What i criticize 
in case of iD presets and validations is not primarily that iD 
developers make decisions the way they do (which i do but which i also 
consider to be their legitimate decision) but that the OSMF endorses 
this as the default way of editing OSM online via the website giving it 
an unfair advantage over any competing system of presets and 
validation.  That adds on top of the pre-existing advantage of being 
financially backed in a significant way (by paying developers) by 
multiple (and in parts still anonymous) financiers.

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



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