[Tagging] An after-burner meta-discussion

[Alan Mackie]

I seem to have fallen into the trap of being overly blunt myself in this
instance and I apologize for any offense given. It is not my place to end a
debate nor do I wish to bring things to any premature close. I'm not in
charge here any more than anyone else.

Some complex topics will inevitably require nuance that cannot fit into a
pithy email, but I think we all too easily fall into the trap of thinking
that because the messages are transmitted quickly our response must be
quick. This is a global project; we are not all awake at the same time. We
are not all available at the same time. We have the chance to whittle a
response down to our core arguments before we send them. This thread has
been going for three days now and I suspect there will be quite a few
subscribers to this list who haven't even had a chance to look at it yet.

I realise that composing a short response can famously take longer than a
long response, but given that these messages are written once and read many
times I hope the proposed small sacrifice of the author's time can be
afforded in the hope of it's benefit to the community as a whole. I also
hope that given our collective aims in this project we can also afford to
be reasonably direct with each other and accept that posts here are not
(usually) intended as slights against each other.


On Thu, 17 Feb 2022 at 08:18, David Marchal via Tagging <
tagging at openstreetmap.org> wrote:

> I understand your call, Alan, Sebastian; long discussions or discussions
> about details may try the patience of anyone, and volunteers more than
> others. We don't map to get embedded in hair-splitting.
>
> That being said, I'm under the impression that such long debates happen
> precisely because the subject is not easy/trivial, and the more
> difficult/complex the problem is, the more long the debates will probably
> be, and the more attention and benevolence it will need to be solved
> without turning to catfight. We can nevertheless try to send shorter
> messages, of course, but I'm afraid it gets less and less easy as the
> question becomes complexer and the ramification numerous.
>
> Worse, shorter messages may lead them to become/be perceived as uselessly
> rough and blunt; longer messages allow one to sugarcoat his/her arguments,
> to clearly state that they're not meant to be derogatory/offensive. In this
> regard, longer messages allow to put oil in the wheels of OSM, and that's
> especially helpfull in long debates which easily flare tempers.
>
> Or is there a possibility I didn't see?
>
> Regards.
>
>
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