[OSM-talk] OSMF makes a political decision where should be a technical solution?

[Andy Townsend]

On 23/11/2018 15:34, Yuri Astrakhan wrote:
>
> I suspect the "default" is what the community took the main issue 
> with.  DWG essentially declaring that there must be a single truth for 
> non-overlapping country borders is what seems to have caused all 
> this.  Simply saying that every country can define their own would 
> have averted this whole thing.

Yuri, I suspect that literally every statement that the DWG has made 
throughout this process has said exactly the opposite of what you've 
just suggested that we said.

I've certainly gone on record as saying (some time before these 
discussions) that there are places where overlapping admin levels might 
make sense, and contributed a few examples.

Similarly the first section of "in summary" in 
DisputedTerritoriesInformation.pdf contains 
"You are free to make maps from our data leaving out or 
putting in what you need for harmony with your general usage, culture and legal system.
We encourage you to do this directly or to support one of our many worldwide local
OpenStreetMap communities that share your issue", and in most of the 
messages I've sent I've explicitly offered to help people do just that.

It's not the first example of "someone from DWG tries to help someone 
with a problem with a DWG decision" - 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SomeoneElse/diary/42069 was an 
attempt to document an approach to rendering names in a particular 
language based on geographical location and 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SomeoneElse/diary/38613 was designed 
to help someone who was converting all the tracks to roads in a 
particular area "so that they showed on his Garmin".

I've also regularly linked to PlaneMad's 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/PlaneMad/diary/38176 which is 
particularly relevant here, especially the "'Fixing' the boundaries of 
India" part.

Best Regards,

Andy