<div dir="ltr"><div>> Do you have metrics on how many people are subscribed to the lists or
are you just going off of how many different people typically respond on
a given thread? I am not sure that a "very small group of users have
full oversight", only that a small group of users speak up. I suspect
that a lot of us just read the postings and seldom respond.</div><div><br></div><div>Hi Mike,<br></div><div><br></div><div>I was curious about the metrics on this myself, so I spent the afternoon doing a bit of web scraping to compare the activity on the Imports mailing list to the Discourse forum for posts that use the `import` tag.</div><div><br></div><div>At a conservative estimate, Discourse has about 2x the user participation compared to the mailing list since the beginning of the year. (And that's even with the wiki guidelines requirement to participate here).<br></div><div><br></div><div><a href="https://wcedmisten.fyi/post/comparing-communication-on-osm-imports-channels/#results">https://wcedmisten.fyi/post/comparing-communication-on-osm-imports-channels/#results</a></div><div><br></div><div>It's much harder to measure who has read the content, vs. written it. Even if we had the subscriber numbers (which is only available to the mailing list admin), it still doesn't tell us who is actually reading the emails,</div><div>or how many of those email addresses are even active.</div><div>DIscourse has a more specific "view counter", but emails don't provide that information at all (which is probably better from a privacy perspective, but it makes answering your question harder).</div><div><br></div><div>As a proxy, I think measuring the activity of users who actively participate is the best we can do for getting an apples to apples comparison between the two channels.</div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div><br></div><div>William<br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Jun 19, 2023 at 8:17 PM Mike Thompson <<a href="mailto:miketho16@gmail.com">miketho16@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Jun 19, 2023 at 1:14 AM James Crawford via Imports <<a href="mailto:imports@openstreetmap.org" target="_blank">imports@openstreetmap.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div>
<p>b) Mailing lists may be difficult for some users to understand,
given that it's an archaic technology that less and less new
community members are familiar with.<br></p></div></blockquote><div>How specifically are mailing lists difficult to "understand"? It is pretty simple, if you want to say something, make sure you reply to the list, and type your response. That is it. Nothing complicated.</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div><p></p>
<p>c) Mailing lists aren't as representative of the international
community. I've found that the mailing lists become a very small
group of users that frequent the lists, and then that very small
group of users have full oversight of affairs, which detracts from
the ideals of an open project.</p></div></blockquote><div>Do you have metrics on how many people are subscribed to the lists or are you just going off of how many different people typically respond on a given thread? I am not sure that a "very small group of users have full oversight", only that a small group of users speak up. I suspect that a lot of us just read the postings and seldom respond. A bigger issue with regards to imports is that I suspect that many imports are taking place without following the established guidelines. </div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>
<p>d) Information can be presented and queried easier on the
community forum. Discourse has tools available to provide
information about the list, and it's so much easier to search and
view history than the archives.<br></p></div></blockquote><div>This seems like a reasonable argument in favor of the forum.</div><div><br></div><div>Mike</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><br>
</blockquote></div></div>
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