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

[Robin Paulson]

On 29/01/2008, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> > Well, if nobody wants to write digests, then IMHO it's just not a good
> > idea to move to a seperate mailing list.

well, if other people keep up with the rfc open, tag vote open, etc.
categories i put together last week, it should be pretty easy to
produce digests. we just copy whatever's there into an e-mail. i'll
have a look at expanding them, see if the process can be reduced to a
few clicks.

> 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

good, we don't want to lose people who do that

> to fight for reason because if something unreasonable gets decided I
> will ignore it and be happy. This is great, because in a stricter

> 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,

well, it's not always that obvious. or people may think it's obvious,
but it's not. so we consult the wisdom of crowds

> 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

i don't know a better way. the more people get involved the better.

> 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.

don't worry, i won't be. no, really. we're all aiming for the same thing here

i happen to think it's useful, partly because most proposals turn up
things that otherwise would stay unsaid - i learn a hell of a lot
reading people's discussions. even the ones that are complete bollocks

at the very least, i think we're tagging objects a lot more
descriptively/usefully than anyone else making a map, be that navteq,
os, government departments or whoever, and that's a direct consequence
of the way we discuss tags. as it matures, it's going to be
phenomenally powerful and that only happens when people discuss the
progression

> 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

well, i don't do it because i like it - i'm not that pedantic. i do it
because i see a need for those tags.

> 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

well, there are 200+ types of objects that people want to tag, with no
idea on how to tag them, so they ask for advice from the group, and we
need to sift through those to the tags that have merit. one at a time.
they are important enough for people to want them, meaning we can't
delete them, so we work on them gradually, over time

> 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.

well, that's how we create the tags you and everyone else use, so i'm
not sure how unimportant it is, even if it's not central