[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
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