[OSM-talk] Import guidelines & OSMF/DWG governance

[Simon Poole]

Am 18.09.2012 18:04, schrieb Christian Quest:
> We've drifted from a question about governance to a talk about 
> usefulness of some kind of data in OSM which is something completely 
> relative and personal.

As I pointed out, "usefulness" of the data is outside the scope of this 
discussion.
>
> As far as I know, DWG doesn't exist to deal with usefulness of data 
> nor quality of contributions, but copyright infringement, vandalism 
> and disputes.
The DWG exists to deal with data of questionable nature, which per 
definition includes any mass addition of data. IMHO this includes 
guaranteeing that data is added in such a fashion that it can be 
reasonable removed if found to be not suitable (which could be for a 
large number of reasons).

>
> Still no answer to my main original questions:
> - who decided the import guidelines ?
> - who decided to make the dedicated account mandatory ?

As  pointed out previously, the more explicit wording was just a 
clarification of what a reasonable interpretation of the previous text 
would have resulted in.

Wrt the general question of the import guidelines, IMHO this is simply a 
consequence of the underlying goal of producing a freely usable map of 
the world. This requires that we have control over and can vet data from 
third party sources.

Naturally there are a number of secondary concerns that are important, 
like not destroying existing personal contributions, having a local 
community that actually wants the data and so on, but in the end 
assuring that the OSM dataset can be distributed with terms solely 
determined by the OSM community must be the overriding concern . The 
only other tenable position that supports the primary goal of OSM would 
be to not allow imports at all.

Simon