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

[Evin Fairchild]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2021, 4:30 PM Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

Totally agree with what you're saying, and I've experienced many of the
things you're saying myself. I've been on this mailing list for probably
like 9(?) years and when I first joined OSM in 2010, even back then I
thought it was odd that mailing lists were used as a communication platform
for the OSM community. It seemed utterly archaic to me. After all, forums
are much better for this type of discussion and those were a thing in 2004
when OSM started out!

A forum was added a few years after I joined, which was a welcome addition
but even I haven't really used it at all. I bet it would have gotten more
use if it had replaced the mailing lists at the time it was introduced.


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.
>

This seems really interesting. Would love to see Discourse replace the
mailing lists!

Personally, I like Slack, but I do understand some people's reluctance to
use it due to it not being an open source platform. However it's great to
be able to have a really good chat platform. The thing I like most about it
is that there's a way to have discussion threads so that of someone asks a
question, the replies are all in one place.

And besides, chat platforms like Slack, Discord, IRC, etc have their
advantages over email and forums in that it feels more like a natural back
and forth conversation rather than just a bunch of monologues. People don't
generally talk in super long monologues in most face to face conversations.
There's usually lots of back and forth in most casual conversations,
especially when a group of people are trying to come to an agreement on
something, which is what most of the discussions on this mailing list are
about.

So in short, I would personally support replacing this mailing list with
Discourse. And I really like Slack and intend to continue using it as many
others have done.

-Evin

>
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