[Board] Please review: Open Letter asking to avoid format fragmentation in LiDAR standards

[Jorge Sanz]

2015-04-22 23:22 GMT+02:00 Cameron Shorter <cameron.shorter at gmail.com>:
>...
>
> Jorge,
> You provide valuable feedback about we can do things better next time.
> The discussion on this Open Letter switched from the geoforall list, to a
> private discussion, to the board list (as a summary before the board
> meeting), to the standards list, to osgeo discuss, back to the board list.
> And there has been a significant amount of discussion, making it hard to
> keep up.
> I can see in retrospect that a progress email to the board list occasionally
> probably would have helped?
> I'm sure we can do better next time.
>

Exactly, I'm on all those lists but it was really hard to follow all
the threads and discussions. It's great having people discussing of
course, but we should try to focus on just one list for one topic and
encourge people to use only that list to follow all the threads that
are public.

Having a summary from what's going on would have helped because we had
the letter (and all the full story below, true) but nothing else to
discuss on the meeting, and no one else there to ask about it.

> A bit more background on timing:
> The simple facts are that in media, timing is everything. If you want your
> story to get out to as many people as possible (which I think is key to the
> success of the Open Letter), then you need a breaking story, and for the
> story to be well written and well researched. You need to give your media
> contacts time to write a good story for you, and feed them all the
> background. But if the story is starting to break (which was happening once
> we were discussing on osgeo-discuss and community members were telling their
> friendly journalists), then there is strong pressure to publish. (Our media
> contact re-iterated this to us and asked permission to publish ASAP. So
> Martin and I agreed to let the story go out.)
>

I see. I don't like to do this sort of discussion privately (at least
most of it) but discussing on public mailing lists dismisses the
possibilty of making a breaking story because well, it's all public.

Maybe it would work discussing this on a less crowded list like
standards, being strong against crossposting and having the board on
the loop to have a more formal support quicker. Then only when the
letter is not a draft anymore take it to Discuss, announce and all.
That doesn't prevents to have it on the news but at least is more
clear to anyone that the letter is a draft being discussed and refined
by the interested and that it will be released with the formal support
of the foundation.

Anyway besides all this, I want to thank you all your effort Cameron,
any criticism here tries only to be constructive and for the good.
We're all together on this.

Best regards

-- 
Jorge Sanz
http://www.osgeo.org
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Jorge_Sanz
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