[OSM-talk] Tag proposal/approval system is too heavyweight

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

>> I'm all for
>> discussion. I just suggest leaving out the final stage of voting
>> because it has no relevance anyway. I understand if people see a
>> certain merit in a "closed discussion", if people want to "tick off"
>> issues and move on, but that doesn't work for us, at least not in  
>> this
>> early stage.

> Any argument why this won't work for us?

We're young, dynamic, evolving. Make a decision today, carried by 5  
or 10 votes, and only a month from now the user base will have  
doubled, with potentially lots of people from new backgrounds that  
were not considered in the decision, new and equally valid viewpoints  
and so on. You simply cannot tell these people that "a decision has  
been made". Reason dictates that we *must* keep these issues open to  
adapt to the growing and changing community.

One of the key things about OSM that we iterate over and over again  
is that we didn't have a fixed ontology from the start, because it  
would have (a) cost too much time to create and (b) turned out to be  
insufficient at the earliest opportunity. The "evolutionary" way we  
tag the world is one of the key distinguishing factors between OSM  
and anything else, one of the big pillars of our success. The project  
would be digging its own grave if it were trying to eliminate exactly  
this evolutionary aspect by making decisions based on what 10 people,  
today, view as important, and consider the topic closed.

> NOT making any decision will leave us only in endless and annoying  
> discussions without any benefit for everyone.

Decisions have to be made every day. But they can be re-decided  
tomorrow if the need arises. As long as nobody thinks that something  
that has been voted upon by 20 out of 20,000 project members is  
somehow above being re-decided tomorrow, that's ok I guess.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"