[Talk-us] New List: osm-professional

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Serge Wroclawski wrote:
> Several people specifically asked me for a fully moderated list.

Then please ask these people to go look for a project that does not do 
crowdsourcing. You cannot fix an engine without getting oil on your 
hands, and you cannot reap the benefits of a crowdsourcing project 
without dealing with human beings.

> At the same time, knowing this request and the reason for it, I
> understood their concerns and wanted to let them know that this list,
> unlike talk at openstreetmaup, would be monitored for behavior

The decisive factor for me is: Will a message I write get through 
without you reading it before the others do, or will it not. Whether the 
community kick me out *afterwards* because I have written something that 
they don't like, that's another matter. But being pre-filtered (what you 
seem to call "fully moderated") is not acceptable, and I would even go 
so far as to say this is so much un-OSM that such a list should not be 
officially sanctioned by being hosted on OSM servers. Let people have 
their nice and cleansed community at Yahoo groups or on their own 
private mail servers but not at OSM.

> 1) We don't say anything. We say "This is a new list" and then there
> are arbitrary decisions about moderation, or kicking people off.  I
> don't think this is a friendly way to run a community.

It is highly unlikely that an osm-professional list would even attract 
people you would want to kick. You haven't even started and already you 
are making rules about whom you want to kick out. Is this how you would 
define "a friendly way to run a community"? (Are you sure that the 
community needs to be "run"?)

> 3) We don't do any moderation.  Well, we have a list like this already
> and it's been a problem for us,

Stop. - Are you saying that osm-professional is intended as a copy of 
osm-talk just moderated? In that case, please rename it 
osm-talk-moderated and go ahead as planned.

I was under the impression that you wanted to create a list aimed 
specifically at professional OSM users - which is not a list we already 
have.

> Nothing I do is going to satisfy everyone's requirements, but this
> list isn't about the existing OSM community as much as a new group of
> folks who want to be gently introduced to the project.  Working with
> these people is valuable and the they've told me they need a safe
> forum. 

Well these people surely haven't talked to me, or offered their opinion 
in any forum that I have been reading. Maybe we're just having a naming 
problem really. I thought that being a professional OSM service provider 
I should naturally be on that list. If you would select a name that 
makes it more clear that this is an entry-level safe forum for US 
newcomers rather than a mailing list for professional OSM users, that 
would then not give the impression of being the place where all the OSM 
professionals ought to be and I could safely ignore it ;-)

Bye
Frederik