[Local-chapters] community building + local chapters?

[Christoph Hormann]

On Wednesday 22 August 2018, joost schouppe wrote:
>
> It was the reactions here
> https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/229 that made me
> think more people considered themselves part of the local-chapters
> group, or seemed to know more about what the LCWG should, could or
> could not do. But since no one has come forward to dispute your
> previous mail, I think we can consider it done: the LCWG is now also
> the "community working group".

Since OpenStreetMap traditionally attracts a lot of people who do not 
consider themselves to belong to any kind of organized community i 
would suggest to not engross these by implying your effort includes or 
speaks for the whole OSM community or that community in OSM always 
means some kind of centralized organization.

Not drawing a line between officially registered local chapters and more 
informal organizations makes a lot of sense but it is still about 
organized activities which only covers parts of the OSM community.

I would also like to point out that one important reason for local 
chapters and informal local organizations working together is to create 
a counterweight and corrective to the centralized OSMF and its working 
groups.  Forming a working group does not necessarily preclude this but 
the mentioned function is something that ultimately requires 
cooperation also outside the constraints of a working group.

> During the talks leading up to this, a lot of ideas and priorities
> came up. I have a decent overview of those. I propose that I create
> an issue for every one of those at
> https://github.com/osmfoundation/lcwg .

Frankly i am fairly strongly against using github for general discussion 
on topics that should be open for the whole community.  I think it 
would be best to keep general discussion on ideas and cooperations on 
the mailing list (or on a forum channel if that is preferred) and use 
the wiki for documentation needs and only use external platforms when 
there are substantial needs for that (although i would - as said 
before - prefer it if we work towards having a project management and 
issue tracking platform within OSM for this kind of thing).

I would very much welcome people starting discussing specific ideas and 
problems here because i have currently rather limited knowledge what 
other local chapters would like to pursue in cooperation.  Some points 
were brought up in Milano, in particular recruitment of people to 
participate in local chapter work and the desire to exchange ideas 
about methods to support this.

> [...] I would suggest we schedule a time that we're all at the
> Matrix/Riot/IRC/Telegram channel, but in my experience voice meetings
> seem to be more productive (though a bit more complicated to get
> involved in).

Similar argument here - i would try to avoid proprietary commercial 
platforms (and for an official OSMF WG this would also be demanded by 
the FOSS policy).

In general real time synchronous conversation (both text and voice) 
disadvantages people with limited English abilities so doing as much as 
possible in asynchroneous conversation is advisable in multilingual 
groups.

For synchroneous meetings Mumble has the advantage of allowing both 
voice and text communication and it is already used by the OSMF (board 
and some WGs).

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/