[OSM-talk-fr] Abuse of authority: account blocks related to French cadastre imports

[Jean-Marc Liotier]

On 18/09/2012 10:16, Pieren wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 9:48 AM, Christian Quest
> <cquest at openstreetmap.fr> wrote:
>> This is a major governance problem for me, some guidelines are updated
>> by someone on a wiki page, something that was a recommendation becomes
>> mandatory (on Nov. 15 2011 by Richard Fairhurst) and then some contributor get blocked based on this wiki page edit that comes from nowhere.
> Sorry Christian to tell you that but this discussion should not happen
> on the data at osmfoundation.org list. As the foundation defines itself,
> it doesn't intervene on the contributions or data themselves. The DWG
> has no legitimacy to decide what is good or bad to import into OSM. As
> they say "they just follow the guidelines" decided by the community.
And that's the whole point - the guidelines must be the result of a 
transparent community-owned process. That community extends to the 
worldwide OSM project which rightfully insists on data quality but, as 
far as mapping French localities goes we shall assert the role of the 
the local mappers in self-regulation.

There is a local consensus for separating wheat from chaff - careful 
integration of data from stupid raw imports. To impress the need for 
manual processing of the data, there is even talk about banning the use 
of the word "import". That said, not everyone is careful and abuses do 
happen - to our great annoyance... But there is enough of an organized 
community in France to regulate itself to the benefit of the whole OSM 
project who will benefit from local judgement about what is legitimate 
use of external data and what is negligent abuse.

If the DWG or any other member of the OSM project believes that the 
French community is not sufficiently diligent in self-regulating, then 
we are willing to discuss process improvements. But arbitrary decisions 
that ignore the endless debates, that have been going on for years about 
how the cadastre is best used, are an affront to those who have been 
involved in it for all that time and will only lead to unproductive 
conflict - let's work together instead !