[OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] How to achieve a better quality legal debate?
Robert Hart
Robert.Hart at BuroHappold.com
Tue Feb 27 01:18:05 GMT 2007
Steve,
Great e-mail - I can see you've put some well-needed thought into handling some of the growing pains of our community.
> I propose that legal debate is politely and repeatedly asked to move to
> the legal-talk list. Not because it isn't generally useful or important,
> but because it scares the crap out of newbies or even people who've been
> on the list for a while but can't deal with the traffic.
I think similar sentiments apply equally well to traffic that should be going to dev@ (particularly anything related to SQL). talk@ is becoming increasingly high-volume and difficult to follow, anything we can do to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio is good. The amount of repetition implies people are not reading all that much of what they post. As threads have a habit of meandering, people shouldn't be afraid of pushing them onto more appropriate lists, changing the subject lines, taking discussion off list, or quietly ignoring entire threads.
> I would have sent this to just legal-talk but I think it important that
> those on talk@ have a think about what they want to see on that list and
> how the to and fro affects them. I've heard from many people who like
> talk@ but are bemused or put off by the large thread on village greens /
> license.
Whilst the village green thread involved a lot of legal language it was essentially a thread about tagging, which I feel would have been out of place on legal-talk@
AFAICS, there are three types of legal discussion:
1) The legality of a given data-source (generally much less contentious)
2) The licensing situation
3) Legal definitions of tag values
Personally I'd have thought only the first two belong on legal-talk at ...
Tagging is an entirely separate issue, and perhaps one that warrants some serious thought with regards to how we propose, discuss, debate and reach consensus in a way that will scale with the project. I look forward to hearing your views on that in due course.
Rob
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