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

[EthnicFood IsGreat]

> Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2018 10:28:10 -0700
> From: OSM Volunteer stevea <steveaOSM at softworkers.com>
> To: talk-us <talk-us at openstreetmap.org>
> Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Planning an Import in Prince George's County,
> 	Maryland
>
>> 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
>
>

+1

Mark