[Developers] Freebase and the Politics of Groups

[Robert Cook]

Paul, you have a good point.  I've been remiss because I'm juggling  
too many things.  Kirrily, too, has been waiting on a couple of  
changes.  This is what Rich was getting at about the access control  
problem -- restricting control causes bottlenecks.

You are definitely (over)qualified in the Aviation domain both  
technically and in expertise. The problem is that we've not yet  
documented critical data patterns that we know are necessary for  
consistency and for different domains to knit together.  This is why  
we've been slow in opening them up.

Perhaps a different approach is necessary even before everything is  
in place.  I will make you a domain admin.  When you make these  
changes, you could post notifications to the discussion for the  
domain so that others can respond.  If there is no response, you  
could take it that the change is fine and that you can populate it in  
earnest with your data.

One thing to bear in mind is that if a schema change doesn't work,  
then data you enter might be unusable, so it's best to make a change,  
put in some test data and ask for feedback before writing a lot of  
data or depending on the schema for an outside application.  We do  
something very similar in house.

This would ensure action as the default, rather than inaction.  Does  
this sound reasonable to you?

R

On Sep 16, 2007, at 2:53 PM, Paul Tomblin wrote:

> Quoting Robert Cook (robert at metaweb.com):
>> change much less frequently than other data.  The limiter for schemas
>> isn't the bottleneck of people with permissions, but, rather, people
>> who are experienced enough with data modeling to make the right
>> choices.  Our hope is to find 100 of these people over time, who
>> should be able to handle a large flow of schema changes.
>
> Well, I'm a civil engineer turned computer programmer, I worked for
> Geographic Information Systems company for 6 years, I've spent two  
> summers
> as a construction layout surveyor, I'm a former national Orienteering
> champion in my age category, I've been a pilot for 12 years, and  
> I've been
> maintaining a database of aviation waypoints for 6 or 7 years.  All of
> which makes me think that I'm qualified to speak on issues related to
> data modelling of geographic locations and aviation.  But when I  
> suggest
> schema changes to the aviation stuff, I tend to not get any answer for
> weeks at a time (my last contribution to the discussion which included
> some questions and some suggestions was on September 1st and has  
> not been
> responded to).  So how do I become one of those 100 people?
>
> -- 
> Paul Tomblin <ptomblin at xcski.com> http://blog.xcski.com/
> Graffiti has merely machine-gunned the surviving handwriting ability
> clinging to the upturned lifeboats of the good ship 'Cursive'.
>               -- Saundo, on Palm Pilots
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