[Talk-us] Planning an Import in Prince George's County, Maryland

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

> Clifford Snow <clifford at snowandsnow.us> wrote:
> If you haven't already joined our US Slack community, please sign up at https://osmus-slack.herokuapp.com/. The community can help you with build your import plan.

Having met Clifford two summers ago, I admired, marveled at (and congratulated him upon!) his awesome community organization skills.  I have "done OSM" with him via talk-us, face-to-face (we briefly spoke at SOTM-US Seattle), email and wiki to better our map — all using these terrific relatively freely-available methods of communication — and none of them requiring that I accept a License Agreement.  To be clear:  I have great respect for both Clifford and the open-platform communication methods by which we (and many others) "do OSM" together.

At least once, Clifford invited me to join Slack as well.  However, after reading Slack's Terms of Service Agreement (a contract of adhesion, really), I could not and do not abide with the ways which Slack (and other proprietary, not-open-source/open-data communication platforms) divide our community into "those who Slack" and "those who don't."  Even as Clifford has acknowledged this issue in these posts, I feel compelled to speak up about this again whenever I see this invitation to Slack again and again.

I don't wish to throw rocks at the good process and results which happen because some of us collaborate on Slack.  I do wish to urge OSM volunteers to seriously (re-?)consider that there are well-established, perfectly useful communication methods (email, wiki, talk-us, face-to-face, meetups/Mapping Parties...) which do not require "shiny apps laden with hidden, commercial code" that ask us to cloak our communication into the private realm of a for-profit company.  As an open-source/open-data project, I remain puzzled why OSM volunteers do this.

Perhaps what I'm suggesting (again?  I seem to recall it has been brought up before) is that if OSM uses a "live-collaboration communication app" that we either develop our own or choose some open-source version of one without onerous License Terms that MANY (not just me) find offensive.

Is that possible?

Thanks for reading.  I mean this in the best interests of OSM longer-term.

SteveA
California
OSM Volunteer since 2009