<div dir="ltr"><div>On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 6:03 PM brad haack <<a href="mailto:bradhaack@fastmail.com">bradhaack@fastmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<p>I'm in the anti Slack camp. I don't use Slack for anything
else. I don't want to use it for this either when we have better
options. We have mailing lists, the wiki, and the forum. I
never got the memo that Slack was the main discussion app.
<br>
Based on this thread there is obviously no consensus right now to
use Slack as the prime discussion media.</p></div></blockquote><div>Slack is meant for real time communication like IRC or Telegram. It's not in the same class of communication as mailing lists, wiki, or forum. It's easier to have real time, casual conversation on Slack or IRC, for example.<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>Email is easy, I'm not sure why the resistance to that. With a
decent email app it's easy to view as threaded. No, you don't
have to get notification for every email. No, you shouldn't reply
individually (reply to list). You don't have to read everything,
it's easy to ignore/delete what's isn't relevant to you. The
forum (<a href="http://forum.openstreetmap.org" target="_blank">forum.openstreetmap.org</a>) would be easy, but the US thread
doesn't get used much. The wiki is clumsy and probably should be
relegated to voting and the final document.</p></div></blockquote><div>Email is not a great communication platform for many people to have useful conversations. It's easy to write lengthy posts that slide off topic. It's easy to expand or shift the topic in an email you're writing while someone else is writing a response, making it easy for people to talk past one another and not make any progress on a consensus. These things combine to make email mailing lists a pretty negative/unfriendly communications channel for lots of people.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Also, mailing lists are technically difficult for some people to understand. Some email clients format emails weirdly, making it hard to follow what's going on. Some people top-post, some people quote-post, some people bottom-post.</div><div><br></div><div>As list moderator, it's very difficult to maintain community norms on a mailing list. I can't move posts over to another topic to encourage people to stay on topic. If I want a cooling off period I have to moderate the whole list. To block spam, I have to moderate all new posters.</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>I think all of the different discussion media are
counterproductive and only serve to make chaos. I think there
needs to be a poll or a vote for the prime discussion forum and
the active members should abide by that and encourage the use of
that forum. I'll join Slack if that's what the consensus is. I
hope the Slackers move on if that's what the consensus is.
Obviously we can't stop the discussion on other sites, but focus
the serious stuff in one place.
<br>
<br>
I'm open to options, but the current chaos is absurd. </p></div></blockquote><div>Where would you hold such a poll and vote? What would be the outcome? The greatest part about OpenStreetMap is that it's community is decentralized. Different parts of the OSM community go where they feel comfortable. The best we can do as stewards of these communities is build environments where as many people feel comfortable as possible and encourage people to go to those places to communicate.</div><div><br></div><div>One thing to note is that OSMF is considering replacing the existing forum, Q&A website, and maybe eventually the mailing lists with an instance of Discourse at <a href="https://community.openstreetmap.org/">https://community.openstreetmap.org/</a>. I encourage folks interested in this topic to check it out and leave feedback.</div></div></div>