[OSM-talk] Defining critical mass...

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason avarab at gmail.com
Wed Jul 14 10:59:15 BST 2010


On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 09:08, Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com> wrote:

> But there's no intention to create an inner circle or, by
> corrollary, exclude other people. What could we (you/me/LWG) do to
> make this more inclusive?
> [...]
> See also http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Working_Group_Minutes if
> you are interested in seeing what's been involved in the LWG so far.

There's a lot of data being lost when you publish minutes. Entire
discussions are being squeezed into a bullet point or two. It would
help if those meetings were also published as podcasts.

That doesn't just go for the LWG, it seems that a lot of the people
involved in the OSMF prefer to do things via conference calls. The
calls aren't recorded and published (that I've seen), so the only
people who can be directly involved in them and get the full data (and
not just summaries) are those that:

  * Speak English at the level of being able to participate in a
    conference call.

  * Are roughly in the CET timezone. Those conference calls are in the
    middle of the night in some parts of the globe.

  * Can commit enough time to the project to do a synchronous
    conference call weekly.

That's a pretty small group compared to e.g. what you could get with a
closed but publically archived mailing list.

I get that a conference call can be easier than writing E-Mail, but
this model of communication for the OSMF is restricting a lot of user
participation in what is otherwise an international and multilingular
project.




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