[OSM-talk] A process for rethinking map features

[James Livingston]

On 11/08/2009, at 11:27 PM, Tom Chance wrote:
> The principal reason for suggesting SOTM is that - in my many years of
> experience with these matters - it's incredibly hard to sensibly  
> discuss
> complex matters online. With a good facilitator and a well defined  
> process
> of preparation, you can often solve these matters in a 100th of the  
> time it
> would take over IRC or through a mailing list + wiki.

I completely agree, and this works really well for open-source projects.

It does mean that the discussion is biased towards those from the  
region where SotM is being held. That isn't really a problem for most  
open-source projects, but probably would be for OSM due to the fact  
that a lot of arguments fall along country/region lines.


Take us Australians for example: if some proposal was discussed at  
SotM this year in Amsterdam, you are unlikely to have many of us  
present to say how things work in this part of the world. Then when it  
came time to present the results of the discussion to the general  
community, you'd get us complaining that we hadn't been involved and  
that you'd not taken into account how things work here.

It's nothing to do with us specifically, but you'd get the same thing  
from any group who is under-represented at a given SotM.


I imagine that SotM is like the other (generally Linux) conferences  
I've been to, where there is a lot of discussion outside a formal  
event, so that allowing remote people to participate via IRC and video  
wouldn't really help. I don't have any solutions to this, but think  
that doing it at a conference won't really solve a lot of issues.