[Talk-us] Forums/email lists for OSM Discussions

[Ian Dees]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 6:03 PM brad haack <bradhaack at fastmail.com> wrote:

> I'm in the anti Slack camp.  I don't use Slack for anything else.  I don't
> want to use it for this either when we have better options.   We have
> mailing lists, the wiki, and the forum.    I never got the memo that Slack
> was the main discussion app.
> Based on this thread there is obviously no consensus right now to use
> Slack as the prime discussion media.
>
Slack is meant for real time communication like IRC or Telegram. It's not
in the same class of communication as mailing lists, wiki, or forum. It's
easier to have real time, casual conversation on Slack or IRC, for example.

> Email is easy, I'm not sure why the resistance to that.  With a decent
> email app it's easy to view as threaded.  No, you don't have to get
> notification for every email.  No, you shouldn't reply individually (reply
> to list).   You don't have to read everything, it's easy to ignore/delete
> what's isn't relevant to you.  The forum (forum.openstreetmap.org) would
> be easy, but the US thread doesn't get used much.   The wiki is clumsy and
> probably should be relegated to voting and the final document.
>
Email is not a great communication platform for many people to have useful
conversations. It's easy to write lengthy posts that slide off topic. It's
easy to expand or shift the topic in an email you're writing while someone
else is writing a response, making it easy for people to talk past one
another and not make any progress on a consensus. These things combine to
make email mailing lists a pretty negative/unfriendly communications
channel for lots of people.

Also, mailing lists are technically difficult for some people to
understand. Some email clients format emails weirdly, making it hard to
follow what's going on. Some people top-post, some people quote-post, some
people bottom-post.

As list moderator, it's very difficult to maintain community norms on a
mailing list. I can't move posts over to another topic to encourage people
to stay on topic. If I want a cooling off period I have to moderate the
whole list. To block spam, I have to moderate all new posters.

> I think all of the different discussion media are counterproductive and
> only serve to make chaos.   I think there needs to be a poll or a vote for
> the prime discussion forum and the active members should abide by that and
> encourage the use of that forum.  I'll join Slack if that's what the
> consensus is.  I hope the Slackers move on if that's what the consensus is.
> Obviously we can't stop the discussion on other sites, but focus the
> serious stuff in one place.
>
> I'm open to options, but the current chaos is absurd.
>
Where would you hold such a poll and vote? What would be the outcome? The
greatest part about OpenStreetMap is that it's community is decentralized.
Different parts of the OSM community go where they feel comfortable. The
best we can do as stewards of these communities is build environments where
as many people feel comfortable as possible and encourage people to go to
those places to communicate.

One thing to note is that OSMF is considering replacing the existing forum,
Q&A website, and maybe eventually the mailing lists with an instance of
Discourse at https://community.openstreetmap.org/. I encourage folks
interested in this topic to check it out and leave feedback.
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