[OSM-talk] Move tagging RfCs/voting to extra list?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> Well, if nobody wants to write digests, then IMHO it's just not a good  
> idea to move to a seperate mailing list.

Well in that case I'd say let's just bin the whole voting process and
live happily ever after ;-)

> However, simply "banning" this stuff from talk ASAP just because you and  
> some others might not be interested in - without thinking how it could  
> seamlessly work in the future?

I think it is not a secret that I am mostly ignoring the voting. My
rationale behind this is: If people decide stuff that makes sense to
me, then I'll use it anyway; if they decide stuff that does not make
sense to me, then I won't, and will tag things differently. I might
offer an idea now and again, but on the whole I don't feel that I have
to fight for reason because if something unreasonable gets decided I
will ignore it and be happy. This is great, because in a stricter
environment I might have to spend half of my time shooting down
nonsensical proposals or fighting for those which are good.

I think it is good that people discuss future tagging of things but in
my eyes the easy things ("what shop=xxx key to use for horticulture
shops") should just be decided by the first person to encounter them,
without much fuss, and the more complex things like a complete
proposal for tagging bodies of water can never be done justice in a
vote. So, personally, I don't see a lot of merit in the voting process
per se. The voting process as a reason for people to think about stuff
and to clean up proposals and ideas, yes; but as a decision maker, no.

This leads to my view that the whole "formal" part - "opening" and
"closing" discussions or voting periods, counting of votes, announcing
results and so on, is really ... It's hard to find the right words
without offending those who spend time with that, but I feel it is
somewhat unnecessary, it is not the core issue.

I tend to stay quiet about this because I feel that OSM is a project
with a very wide range of activities for everyone, and if there are
some who actually like these formal things, who like executing the 
voting process and so on, then so be it, I don't want to tell them 
not to do it, unless they interfere too much with my own freedom.

But recently I think that compared to the relative un-importance the
voting process has in OSM, the list is really overburdened with voting
stuff. I would like to ask those interested in voting and formal
discussions to either show some restraint or just create a list of 
their own, much like we've done in the past when e.g. tiles at home
discussion on the main lists was too much for a topic that few were
interested in. Voting is not a central issue for OSM.

Bye
Frederik

--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frederik at remote.org ## N49°00.09' E008°23.33'