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

Simon Poole simon at poole.ch
Thu Sep 20 17:59:52 BST 2012


I believe there is some misunderstanding of the relationship between OSM 
and OSMF.

Am 20.09.2012 16:36, schrieb Christian Rogel:
> Le 20 sept. 2012 à 13:22, Lester Caine a écrit :
>
>> sly (sylvain letuffe) wrote:
>>> We can get back to the topic of governance and discussion about those laws and
>>> who decide them, and how.
>> Or just get back to fixing the process in the first place?
>> SO we have less chance of misinterpreting the 'guidelines'?
> Yes, it is all about governance and not only a technical issue, although many pound for
> reducing the debate to it.
>
> OSM is going more and more political (not in the sense of ordinary politics, of course).
>
> Some decisions elaborated on technical have to be reviewed and weighed by the
> only "political" body we have, namely the Board.
>
> There is no way having a Board which says it is always sticking to our brilliant technical team,
> whatever they decide.
While a more top down organisation of OSM a la Wikipedia or other 
organisations is imaginable, there has never been a community consensus 
that such a step would be desirable (if anything it is exactly the 
opposite). So while the OSMF provides the formal structure for the 
working groups, most policy decisions are not made or even vetted  by 
the OSMF board, but are simply decided by the people interested in the 
issues at hand and (particularly in the case of the DWG) the people that 
do the work. Not to mention the far larger number of policies (tagging 
and others) that are not in the remit of any specific working group and 
are decided by the OSM community at large.

OSM WG membership is fairly open, but the basic premise is that you join 
to help with the work at hand and influence policy by that, not by using 
a WG as a political grandstand. It is imaginable that if a WG stepped 
very far outside its remit the OSMF board might intervene, but I don't 
know of any such situation and the case in hand is clearly not such a 
situation either. The import guidelines don't restrict the imported 
content outside the legal requirements that it be compatible with our 
distribution terms and simply adds a couple of rules on how to achieve 
community consensus and how to technically implement the import, the 
later are essentially practical  measures to make the core DWG job 
manageable. If at all, as I've pointed out before, the administrative 
and technical requirements are too lax, this is at least what the 
experience during the licence change would indicate.

In the long term we may need more formal ways to produce rules and 
guidelines for OSM as a whole, however this is not something that will 
be easy and will likely be a process of the same order of magnitude as 
the licence change.

[Discussion of more and more OGD becoming available ommited]

Yes, the development in the area of Open Data poses a serious challenge 
to OSM. I suspect that the attitude of large parts of the community is 
that OGD is a good thing, however I'm also fairly sure that there is no 
community consensus that OSM should aspire to import everything that is 
available just because it is there. In the end we want to produce an 
editable, community sourced map of the world, not simply a copy of data 
that is available (and remains available) elsewhere.

I'm sure that the OpenData issue will be a very hot topic over the next 
months and years, but it really belongs in a separate thread and not in 
a discussion over administrative and technical procedures.

Simon

PS: just in case it is not clear, I'm not representing the position of 
the OSMF board in this discussion, just that of a mapper that had to 
chase down a number of rogue imports over the last months.




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