[Imports] Migrating Imports RFC to Community Forum

[William Edmisten]

> 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.

Hi Mike,

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.

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).

https://wcedmisten.fyi/post/comparing-communication-on-osm-imports-channels/#results

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,
or how many of those email addresses are even active.
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).

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.

Best,

William

On Mon, Jun 19, 2023 at 8:17 PM Mike Thompson <miketho16 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Jun 19, 2023 at 1:14 AM James Crawford via Imports <
> imports at openstreetmap.org> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>>
> 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.
>
>
>> 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.
>>
> This seems like a reasonable argument in favor of the forum.
>
> Mike
>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
> Imports mailing list
> Imports at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
>
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