[OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] Are we strict enough with imports ?

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Thu Feb 11 13:19:38 GMT 2010


Hi,

Jean-Guilhem Cailton wrote:
> Ok, but please do not forget that in crisis situations (e.g. Haiti), 
> there could be people dying while the "deliberation" would be taking 
> place...

This is something to be discussed later, I guess, but my take is that we 
should separate "crisis stuff" from the rest of OSM, to the point of 
having separate databases. We'd still use the normal OSM tools but there 
would be a special API server for a crisis region. There, people could 
do whatever they please (even more so than in "normal OSM") without 
interference from others. After the crisis has subsided, temporary 
structures removed and so on, work could then start on moving selected 
items from the "crisis map" over into the normal OSM map.

If this is not done, I sense a potential for conflicts of all kind. As 
apparent in the dramatic wording you chose above ("there could be people 
dying..."), a humanitarian crisis anywhere could put strain on the 
project as a whole: "What, you want to take the database offline for a 
weekend to perform the move to API 0.8 that you have planned for half a 
year? But there could be people dying!" - "What, the database didn't 
work for a whole night and the admin was in the pub? But there could 
have been people dying!" - "What, you want to do a world-wide day of 
post box mapping? But this is going to slow down the API and there could 
be people dying!", and so on.

Being able to provide value in humanitarian crises is a side-effect of a 
healthy OSM - not a core purpose of OSM.

Bye
Frederik




More information about the talk mailing list