[Tagging] An after-burner meta-discussion

[David Marchal]

Regarding the fact that only a small fraction of contributors will ever engage in the debate, I suggest that the contributors should be at least informed that a debate takes/will take place.

I suggest the following:
* the contributors should all be informed of the debates, preferably before they start; when someone wants a debate about an issue, (s)he adds the matter to some sort of list of questions, and this list is sent on a regular (weekly?) basis to all OSM contributors, to allow those who are interested in the issue to participate;
* some days later (or a week?), the debate can take place (Discourse seems for now the better option to me, but the moderation process should be discussed further; as I explained, this greatly eases the debate; the "humming" solution should also be checked/tried, as it sounds very promising);
* consensus is reached when the debate gives a solution to which nobody objects.

This way, consensus, instead of meaning "a bunch of persons who cared enough to bother with subscribing to a ML decided…", would mean "a solution was proposed, which got no objections from any interested OSM contributor". IMO, that would greatly help the acceptance and implementation of the decisions.

Regards.

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------- Original Message -------
<mail at marcos-martinez.net> schrieb am Mittwoch, 16. Februar 2022 um 13:58:

> 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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