[Tagging] An after-burner meta-discussion

[mail at marcos-martinez.net]

I have seen many interesting approaches so far and I'll address them in
a later mail the first thing I'd like to mention is that as soon we are
trying to set up a truly serious debate the most obvious shortcoming we
have been suffering from is the lack of proper tools to debate. This
dynamics of a mailing list is totally inadequate to handle what we are
up to so thanks Zeke for reminding us about Discourse, we absolutely
need to check this out. In the meantime, and knowing what our
limitations are, we must therefore bee all the more cautious about how
we are keeping this debate productive and solution oriented. 

Also, I hope we all agree that what we are debating here is not only
valid for mere tagging issues but for other broader OSM topics which the
community is interested in, too. 

Let my now try to expose a few basic thoughts. I am aware that they are
extremely basic and probably even too obvious but at times it might be
good to speak them out loud so it is easier for everybody to see how
aligned we are and put the next stepping stones. 

1. Consensus is about people communicating. To establish consensus it
needs at least two people sharing their views. 

- The above implies for me that those who for whatever reason do NOT
enter the debate are not part of the consensus. Being a project with
literally millions of contributors, which I believe we all consider part
of the broader OSM community, and only a tiny fraction of those willing
to engage in debate beyond pure mapping, we need to think about how to
handle this and what it implies when taking decisions. 

- We need to reflect about the conditions 

WHO is allowed join the debate (this should be straight forward:
basically everyone who wishes to) 

WHERE the debate takes place (in our case with participants from all
over the world this is linked to platform, software) for the consensus
to be valid 

WHEN consensus can be defined/redefined (Start and end dates, duration,
etc.) 

HOW debates have to be conducted and the rules that we think are best to
channel it. 

2. Consensus needs to be QUANTIFIABLE in some way. 

- I know there is also this notion that with a good consensus at the end
everybody should agree but honestly, I don't see this happening in the
OSM community, nor do I think it is necessary. Unanimity is desirable
but we need to have proper processes in place for when this is not the
case. 

- Being the above correct, for me this means that whatever type of
quantification we chose (votes, emojis, humming, you name it…) this
needs to be comprehensible, verifiable and transparent. 

3. Consensus (in OSM context) and what comes next 

- We need to establish what EFFECTS it has (or not) after a debate is
over and the outcome is quantified. 

Probably all of the points deserve a thread of its own but for now it
may be enough to not mix arguments across points. 

Marcos
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