[Talk-lt] Pasiūlymas dėl OSM Lietuva socialino tinklo (ne Facebook)

[Simonas Kazlauskas]

On Thu, 29 Dec 2022 at 15:18, Rihards <rihards at nakts.net> wrote:
> Excuse my interruption in English, but I noticed you have a discussion on
> a topic we have in the Latvian community right now as well :)
>
> We wanted to have something opensource, publicly accessible, and a
> community member suggested Zulip.

I can vouch for Zulip as somebody who has been using it extensively for both
OSS work as well as at work. It has some snags compared to commercial solutions, 
such as the mobile app being not as great as e.g. Slack’s, but in my personal 
experience I have never been as happy using a modern chat tool as I am with 
Zulip.

> It is 100% open source (not open core!), and there are hosted offerings.
> We decided to try the free hosted option. When/if our community grows, we
> will consider either moving to self-hosted, or seeking sponsorship (the
> parent company offers full plans for free to opensource projects, and
> possibly communities).

FWIW zulip.com’s hosted standard plan is free for open source projects, which 
OSM would qualify I suspect. Worthwhile to reach out and see if they’d be 
willing to upgrade you all. See <https://zulip.com/for/open-source/>.

> It's similar to Discord, but it's not "information black hole", which is
> what I've heard people describe Discord as :)
> It's like IRC on steroids - there can be streams and topics (we made topic
> titles mandatory in our instance), images etc.
> In our instance, posting :301: will replace it with the road sign
> according to the road traffic law of Latvia, Overpass queries will be
> automatically linked to Overpass Turbo, we have OSM and Github links in our
> profiles and probably many more features.
>
> You can connect at https://osmlatvija.zulipchat.com (this does require
> local/Github/Gitlab/Google account), or browse the public archive at
> https://osmlatvija.github.io/zulip-archive/ .
> In the future, if we get to the self-hosted/sponsored option, public
> streams will make it even more appealing.
>
> Please feel free to join the (still small but growing) Latvian community
> there, and there's a separate "Zulip" stream, in case you have some
> questions about that tool.

I think for Zulip to truly demonstrate its capabilities and be effective, it 
would need to be set up as a project/world-wide or at least a continental 
instance rather each country’s community maintaining their own for themselves. 
There are a couple reasons to do this, but most important one is that in Zulip 
the closest equivalent to a mailing list is a _stream_ rather than an 
_instance_[^1].

With an instance common to all OSM communities, collaborators would only ever 
need to think about one URL and maintain just a single account, even if they 
were mapping Atlantica and wanted to chat with the Lunarians :) With such a 
setup onboarding new communities would be straightforward and whenever 
discussions are found to not fit into a particular community’s stream (e.g. for 
cross-cutting projects) a new project-specific stream could be created (much 
more easily compared to a new instance) too.

Unfortunately, I have very little clout with the OSM project to truly drive a 
something as major as this, but maybe this message is going to be all that’s 
necessary is to convince somebody who has great powers with the OSM project as a 
whole to set something like this up ;)

[^1]: This is another reason why Zulip might be a great option for the OSM 
communities – it has some resemblance to 

HNY,
S.

P.S. Zulip now supports a public viewing functionality out of the box. Look for 
a checkbox to enable that in the settings and you won’t need to maintain the 
GitHub pages archive.

P.S.S. I might be able to get you some contacts to a person at Zulip. Feel free 
to contact me if interested, but no strong promises.