Monday 6 May 2013

So do the OSMF working groups work?

I do wonder if the process of working groups really works. I have asked the Licence Working Group to make a simple action to prevent a falsehood being repeated. They did nothing and did not even respond to my emails.

I have now asked the Data Working Group to revert undiscussed mass edits. Again, no action and not even an acknowledgement email. If we are serious about stopping undiscussed mass-edits, the only real way forward is to revert them as quickly as possible to force people to follow the guidelines. If an ordinary mapper, like me does the revert that risks an edit war, especially if the ordinary mapper has already engaged with the mass-editor to no effect as in my case. The longer it takes to revert a mass-edit the harder the revert becomes because of other small-scale edits.

If the working groups are not going to take action or at least acknowledge a request or contact, then they should resign and close down the group so everyone knows that the only process open to an ordinary mapper is down to him.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know of any overstaffed working groups. And even within the group of volunteers who have stepped forward, many are overstretched and are double-jobbing (even triple-, quadruple-jobbing) between different WGs, trying to keep them all going.

Asking us all to resign won't fix the problem, and shutting down struggling working groups won't magically make their purpose and the need for them go away either. If it was that easy, I'm sure we'd all quit tomorrow.

What we need is for sensible people to volunteer to help, and for those unwilling to help, for them to show some support from the sidelines. Any and all help is appreciated.

dieterdreist said...

I agree that there seems to be some structural problems, e.g. the apple license case, where one year ago it was declared that this issue was to be dealt with priority, initially even by the board, but since then very few information in regard was published. The last time Apple was significantly mentioned in LWG minutes was in January: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zYrYm_y3D6-vnUi2va0BtEfHo76qOUuUU9vT2X6mvv0/pub
where you can find this sentence: "it still seems very uncertain as to whether they are in compliance with our licensing terms, (most likely CC-BY-SA if they are using our older data)"

How can it be uncertain whether Apple is in compliance with our license terms, as long as they don't even refer to the license? Both, cc-by-sa and ODbL clearly request that you refer to the license. After more than a year Apple could not even be convinced to fulfill this basic requirement, and no action was taken?

Peter said...

It's shame, let it be the responsiveness of the working groups or the above mentioned apple case.