[OSM-talk] Pitiful proceedings - as usual

[David Groom]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "NopMap" <ekkehart at gmx.de>
To: <talk at openstreetmap.org>
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2011 8:09 AM
Subject: [OSM-talk] Pitiful proceedings - as usual


>
>
> Hi!
>
> First of all: I am in favour of the licence change itself, I have agreed a
> long time ago and I was actually looking forward to phase 4 bringing 
> forward
> some decisions.
>
> Nevertheless, the enabling of phase 4 (which likely may have happened
> yesterday or so) strikes me as another pitiful example of how not to do 
> such
> things.
>
> Considering that lack of information has been the chief reason for
> disagreement with the proceedings for some two years now, one might have
> naively assumed that someone in the OSMF might have listend or learned and
> that important steps might have been accompanied by some sort of official
> announcement.
>
> Instead, is guesswork and rumours all over again. The most definite 
> insider
> information to have was "yes, on IRC was someone with a test account who
> claims he can't edit anymore".
>
> I don't know how you feel, but for me it is very hard to remain supportive
> of the matter in the face of such consequent incompetence handling it.
>

My personal opinion is that it would have been very hard for anyone who is 
interested in this to have missed what was going to happen at Stage 4, and 
when Stage 4 was going to occur.  But that is on the basis that I subscribe 
to a number of the mailing lists.

However I recognise that it would be wrong to assume that all contributors 
are subscribed to any of the mailing lists, or read the wiki .

I would have thought that it was not a demanding job, though I'll admit I do 
not have the capacity to do it, for all the mainstream editing software to 
have a MOTD feature, and for official announcements which were deemed 
important enough to be posted to the mailing lists to be also flagged up as 
a MOTD.

I also realise that I'm assuming that everyone can read English, since the 
feature becomes less simple to code and implement when you start to consider 
that ideally the MOTD should be delivered in the users language of choice.

Now I can see some people arguing that they would not wish to be distracted 
by such messages, so if necessary you could build in the option not to 
display MOTD's if the user had ticked a check box., but if they ticked this 
they could hardly complain at a later stage that they had not been informed 
of critical announcements.

Apologies if this feature exists in all of the mainstream editing software.

Regards

David


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>                    Nop
>
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