[Talk-us] OSM US Trails Working Group

[stevea]

Minh Nguyen <minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us> wrote:

> I don't understand how one could arrive at this characterization of the community on OSMUS Slack as being somehow inorganic (artificial? inauthentic?) without having joined the workspace to see for oneself.

An excellent point.  I don't characterize any Slack sub-community as "inorganic," I characterize it / them as a sub-community, although isolated by being in a walled garden of proprietary nature.  This effectively shuts out wider community, whether that is intentional or not (I suspect not).

> Personally, over several years, I've put as much effort into inviting mappers to join the talk-us or talk-us-sfbay mailing lists as I have OSMUS Slack or Code for San José Slack, usually in the same breath. Virtually everyone who responded joined Slack but didn't subscribe to a mailing list. I respect their decision, even if it may be suboptimal by some standard.

I'll (again) express my opinion that it IS suboptimal (not "may be") since those who don't join Slack (for whatever reason) are shut out by the walled garden of its proprietary nature.

> Ideally, a community member wouldn't have to choose between a proprietary system and two open but bewildering systems (mailing list and wiki) when attempting to document for posterity how their fellow local mappers have collectively decided to tag something.

I wouldn't characterize mail-lists OR wiki as "bewildering," though I respect Minh's words if / as he has experienced others as using such a characterization.  Both mail-lists and wiki seem pretty "low bar of entry," but that is to me; I find both of these "easy and comfortable."  It may be that newer forms of online collaboration (what we might call "Slack or Slack-like," though there are many others for "team collaboration" or "project tracking," also proprietary, like Jira or Trello) are what many other people find "easy and comfortable," I'm not sure.  Right about now, it sounds like a survey could be helpful.  I would ask "What is it about Slack that you find so compelling and / or useful as you collaborate in OSM using it?"  If OSM can "mimic" this (with Discourse and / or other tools or custom software, perhaps "bolted onto" Discourse), great, we've effectively solved something with that.

> I look forward to Discourse becoming a solid alternative. Who knows, "Decisions go on Discourse" could be the new catchphrase on Slack before long.

I'll go a step further and suggest that (perhaps someday with community consensus) OSM's future might include "Dialog AND Decisions go on Discourse."  If Discourse remains web-based (as a start, custom OS apps for, say, Android and iOS could be in our future; there is a React Native application already for both platforms...), it is just as "democratic and available" as our map itself.  I don't know if the future IS Discourse, but it does hold itself out as "mailing list, discussion forum, long-form chat room, and more!"  That's a good start (though we already have mailing list capability, here, to wit), but its forum capabilities (Groups, various trust levels...) look very promising.  It is nicely multilingual (OSM distinctly wants that), it is GNU GPL (open source) and recently received eight-figure venture capital funding for its Construction Kit.

> In the meantime, those who do sign up for Slack will find a community that's earnestly debating and seeking a workable consensus on off-limits trails, among other things. It's a community of OSM mappers first and foremost, just like the subscribers to this list.

And while I respect that, unfortunately, I remain isolated from it, as I don't think a proprietary, walled garden platform is consistent with an open data project.  These are somewhat typical, though not intractable issues (problems? opportunities?) for a project as large as OSM.  With time, good dialog and likely some technical planning and deployment, we can (and should) address them.

SteveA