[Tagging] Rules (was: Feature proposal - Approved - deprecate embassy=embassy)

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/02/2022 00:39, Graeme Fitzpatrick wrote:
>
> I know there are other communication channels: Slack, you mentioned 
> Telegraph, I've seen mention of Discord & also Discourse (which is 
> apparently going to become the official channel?) & which was going to 
> be live "next week" - in October last year ...

As I understand it, the Discourse rollout was waiting some issues to be 
resolved, which may have happened last week: 
https://blog.discourse.org/2022/01/discourse-2-8-released (I presume 
there's now a pile of integration work to do).

There are a few Slack instances - see 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM_centric_Slack_workspaces 
.  I'm only really familiar with the OSM US one.  Some international 
stuff is talked about there, and there's also USA-local stuff too (like 
a feed of new mappers in USA and Canada).

Similarly, there are lots of Telegram groups. 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/List_of_OSM_centric_Telegram_accounts 
has some but others are unlisted there to try and dodge the spambots.

Discord is similar - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Discord has a 
list.  I'm only familiar with the "OpenStreetMap World" server; there 
are lots more.

There's also https://forum.openstreetmap.org/ , 
https://forum.openstreetmap.fr/ etc. (some language communities do most 
of their talking there), IRC (still not dead yet) and various Facebook 
etc. groups.

Some channels are bridged, so (if I remember correctly) anything said on 
the Swedish IRC channel #osm.se also pops up on Telegram @osmSE .  Many 
places are bridged to Matrix so that clients such as Element can be used 
across a wide range of forums.

>
> Do you have any idea of their usage? Is the Tagging list, despite its 
> lack of use, still actually the best option for reaching the most people?

There are definitely quite a few tagging discussions on "OpenStreetMap 
World" Discord and OSM US' Slack, and on some of the other mailing lists 
that I'm familiar with (talk-au and talk-gb for example).  Also - at the 
risk of stating the bleeding obvious - most OSM mappers don't speak or 
write English as a first language, so most OSM discussion is in other 
languages.  How to bring everyone into the conversation regardless of 
their native language is a real challenge.  However - although I 
probably see more intra-OSM conversations than many people, it's still a 
tiny proportion of what's out there.  For example, Brazil alone has a 
couple of dozen Telegram channels - I can't say how much tagging chat 
takes place on any of those!

There's a whole other discussion to be had about whether it's a good 
idea to have key OSM discussions on a channel that isn't under OSM's 
(or  an OSM chapter's) control.  If one of the commercial chat providers 
goes bankrupt and there is a "Total Inability To Support Usual 
Performance" then we've basically lost that history, which wouldn't 
happen if it was on an OSMF server.

Best Regards,

Andy

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