[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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