The title of this post is making a connection to my previous post titled Group communication is hard. Like in that post i am discussing a current matter of conversation in the OSM community.

There is a discussion happening at the moment in the English speaking parts of the OSM community that is well suited as an example for two topics that have been dear to me for a long time – that is documentation of tagging practice and cross cultural communication.

How to propose

The current discussion is not directly about tagging but about the suggestion of a change to the formal procedure for tagging proposals.

Tagging proposals have existed in the OSM community for a long time. They have been slightly modified in the procedure over time but largely remain the same. And the recent suggestion is essentially another idea how to further adjust these procedures.

The OSM community has very diverging views of what tagging proposals actually mean. My own view is that they are a means for people who want to develop new tagging concepts to gather critical feedback on those ideas in a structured form, helping them to refine their ideas. The proposal vote in that understanding is merely a way for the proposer to get an idea if that endeavor was successful, i.e. if the process helped them to improve their concepts to the level that there is consensus among those who have shown an interest in the proposal to approve it. This view is shared more or less by quite a few long term OSM community members, but it is – by far – not the only interpretation. There are many in the OSM community who give the proposal process much more weight, for example

• some consider approved proposals to be essentially binding in some form, like for mappers, in the sense that free form tagging is only acceptable if it does not contradict any approved tagging proposals, or for software or map style developers, in the sense that they have to interpret tags from an approved proposal in the sense they are defined in it.
• some consider an approved proposal as a mandate to change tagging en bulk. It is general consensus in the community that automated bulk changes must follow the documented procedure for such (which is independent of the proposal process). But bulk changes by mappers in their area of mapping without renewed surveying are still quite common.

I don’t want to go into further details on this matter – the key for my discussion here is that there is clearly a very wide spectrum of understandings in the OSM community of what tagging proposals mean. My impression is that this has led in the discussion on the mentioned suggestion to change the procedure of the proposal process to a largely dysfunctional communication because the participants come in with divergent premises on the fundamental nature (in the sense of social meaning) of the proposal process. If you don’t resolve such differences before engaging in a discussion about the suggestion at hand in most cases you won’t have a meaningful discussion providing additional insights because you will be constantly talking past each other.

To be clear: There is no correct answer to the question what the proposal process currently means. The participants of the mentioned discussion – like the members of the world wide mapper community – have no common understanding of this. And these different views cannot be split into right and wrong views because the proposal process actually has different meanings in different parts of the community.

My main point – and i realize this is a bit tricky to communicate, because it is kind of a meta-argument on a meta-proposal – is that the same problem tends to frequently apply to tagging discussions. If you start a tagging discussion (about how tags ought to be used) without the participants having a common understanding about what the status quo is (in terms of how the tags de facto are used so far – which is often not accurately documented on the wiki) the discussion is often dysfunctional. And so is the understanding of any reason provided for an oppose in a proposal vote.

In other words: The proposal under discussion seems to be based on the premise that an oppose vote with a meaningful reason provided by the voter is objectively more helpful to the proposer than a plain oppose vote without reason and therefore it is legitimate (in an utilitarian sense) to require from people who want to have an influence on the vote outcome to provide such a reason while not requiring the same from those who approve. But since the proposer and the voters (both those who oppose and those who approve) in general do not have a common understanding of the context of the proposal any interpretation of votes beyond the pure sentiment approve/oppose likely amounts to a highly dysfunctional communication.

Bottom line: In my experience to meaningfully interpret the vote of a proposal beyond the mere statistical counting of sentiments (for which the reason provided is unnecessary) you need to have some idea of the understanding of the voter of the nature of the status quo (meaning: you would need to require more elaborate communication from both the oppose voters and the approve voters beyond a brief reason).

Conclusions

From these considerations i can also derive an advice to anyone making tagging proposals: The most meaningful reaction in a proposal vote to consider are the oppose votes that do not make sense to you. Because those are providing a hint that there might be substantial parts of the OSM community that have an understanding of the context of your proposal so fundamentally different from yours that they do not only disagree with your proposal, but they do so for reasons that you are currently unable to understand.

My conclusion for this post is – and here i am connecting again to the two topics mentioned in the beginning is that:

• a shared understanding of the status quo in tagging, i.e. a common understanding on how tags are used so far, is an essential precondition of practically any meaningful nontrivial discussion on how to improve said tagging. And the OSM community currently has no meaningful platform or social mechanisms to produce and maintain such a shared understanding on a larger scale. I made a sketch on how such a system could look like some time ago, but with very little reaction.
• having meaningful conversation on matters of significance for the whole OSM community (including, but not limited to, tagging questions) is harder than many think because of the diverse and diverging views people have on these matters. It is prudent to always consider that if you don’t understand the reasoning of someone else that this might be because you lack the ability to understand their perspective on the matter rather than a flawed reasoning or irrationality on their side. To check on that it often helps to take a step back and verify if you start with common premises on the topic.